Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness

by Robert S. Carroll

The family doctor saw more than tongue and liver and thin blood and bodily weakness. He realized the helplessness of Hortense in finding her stronger self in the home atmosphere, and advised a year in Europe—to get away from her sorrow, he said, to get away from her mother's wearying discussion of details, he knew. For nearly a year she was treated in Germany at different cures without benefit. It was always the "noise" that kept her from sleeping. It was the "noise" which she had learned to hate and to revile. To get away from noise became her fixed determination. And to this end a small mountain- cottage was secured, secluded from the haunts and industries of man, in the remoteness of the Tyrolean Alps. Here with her nurse and a servant she remained three years. For the first months she seemed happier, and took some interest in the inspiring views and rich flora of her surroundings. But the night did not bring the silence she willed. She sensed the heavy breathing of her nurse, the movements of the servant as she turned in her bed, and sometimes even snored, she knew it! She would spend hours of strained, sleepless attention, alert to detect another instance of the heartless repetition of this incriminating sound. She must be alone. She feared nothing so much as the hated sounds of human activity. So a one-room shack was built a hundred yards away from her companions, in the deeper solitude of the forest. Here she slept alone, month after month. But the winters, even in the Tyrolean foot-hills, are severe at times, and the deadly monotony of this useless life, and the improvement which she "knew" would come with the perfection of her sleeping arrangements, combined to decide her to return home, though still an enemy to the unbearable sounds of the night. Twenty-eight years she had lived with no true interest in life; neither home, attractions in New York or in Europe, nor treatment offered by competent and kind specialists had influenced her one thought away from her willingness to be ill. The nurse, who had buried herself so long with this poor girl in Europe, was quite appalled at Mrs. Orr's inconsideration of her daughter's "sensitive, nervous state." Nurse and mother soon had words; nurse and daughter left promptly for the East, where two hours from New York they spent another year in semi-isolation together.

A New York broker owned the place adjoining the invalid's cottage. Walter Douglas, then but twenty-six, was his private secretary. Walter and Hortense met in the quiet, woodland paths. It is difficult to know just what the mutual attractions were. She had received many advantages which had not been his, still life was certainly a lonely thing for her. He was her first real interest since she had left Washington, and love reawakened and blew into life the embers she thought were gray-cold. It was never to be the flaming love-fire of ten years before, but it was bright enough to decide her to marry, which she did without writing any letter of confidence to her unsuspecting mother.

Mr. Orr had left the property in his wife's control, and she had been unquestionably most generous in supplying her daughter with funds. When she received the brief note telling of the little wedding and inviting her to meet them in Washington, on their simple wedding-trip, she found herself for the first time in her life—speechless! There were no words to express this "outrage." The disability was short- lived, but her letter to the bridal couple was shorter. They had taken things into their own hands; they had ignored her who had every right to be at least advised, and they could take care of themselves. Hardly had this letter been mailed when she consulted her attorney as to ways and means to annul this "crazy marriage."

The young couple had more pride than dollars, and bravely started house-keeping in a small flat. Few had been more inadequately trained for household duties than this self-pampered woman who pluckily at first, then grimly, went to the limit of her poorly developed strength in an effort to make homelike their few, plain rooms, and to prepare their unattractive meals. Still it all might have worked out had the noises of the street not attained an ascendancy. In less than four months the youthful husband, through a sense of duty, wrote the mother details of his bride's "precarious condition." Mrs. Orr promptly sent money, and the mother in her soon brought her to them in person. Within a few days she recognized the helpless husband's honesty and patience, and took them both to Memphis, providing a furnished flat and a good servant. The incompetent wife's short experience in household responsibilities, for which she was so utterly unprepared, made sickness a most welcome haven of refuge, and for months she did nothing but war with the noises of the quiet suburb. Then their baby came, but with it slight evidence of young mother love. She seemed almost indifferent to her little one. At rare times, only, would she respond to her first-born and to her husband. The doctor said there was no reason why she did not regain strength, that she could if she would, that it was not a question of physical frailty but it was decidedly a case of willing to have the easiest way. "Something has to be done," he said at last, and he strongly advised that she be sent to a hospital where she would be the object of benevolent despotism. She constantly complained of her oversensitive hearing, and had certainly developed all the arts of the invalid. She made no objection to the proposed plan. She did not know what was in store for her, outside of the mentioned "rest-cure." Full authority was given the institution officials to use any possible helpful means to stimulate her recovery. In all this the family physician counseled wisely and with discernment. At the hospital Hortense Douglas was told that she was to remain until she was well, that it was not a question of duration of treatment, but of her condition, which would determine the date of her return to her home, husband, and little one. The relationship between her years of illness and her unhappy disappointment, between her antagonism to night sounds and her intolerant impatience with her mother, was carefully explained. The ideal of making friends with these same noises which were but the voices of human progress, happiness, industry and personal rights, was held before her. Following the first clash of her will with the hospital authorities, she claimed that she was losing her mind, and was told that she would be carefully watched and would be treated at once as irresponsible when she proved to be so. Step by step she was forced to health, she was compelled to live rationally. Scientific feeding produced rapid improvement in her nutrition, she gained strength by the use of foods which she had never liked, had never taken and could "not take." In every way she improved in spite of herself. She often said she could not stand the treatment. But cooperation relentlessly proved more pleasant than rebellion. At the end of five months she was sleeping night after night the deep sleep honestly earned by thorough physical weariness, a sleep which nervous tire and worrying apprehension can never know. She could get no satisfaction as to when she would be allowed to return home.

She had no money in her possession, but she slipped away one morning, pawned her watch for railway-fare, and arrived home announcing that she was well.

Wealth, medical experts, years in Europe, society, the pleasures of seasons in New York, a husband's love, motherhood had failed to find health for this wilful woman. Not until her illness was made more uncomfortable than the legitimate duties of health, not until she recognized it was normal living at home or life in that "awful hospital," did she will to be well—and well she was.

CHAPTER XIV

UNTANGLING THE SNARL

You have probably passed the mansion. It stands, prominent, on the avenue leading from Buffalo to Niagara Falls. Three generations have added to its beauty and appointments. A generation ago it stood, imposing, and if fault could be found, it was its self-consciousness of architectural excellence. Every continent had contributed to its furnishings, and some of its servants, too, were trained importations. In the middle eighties, this noble pile was the home of an invalid, a twelve-year-old boy, a housekeeping aunt, and nurses, valets, maids, butlers, cooks, and coachmen. The invalid master of the house was forty-eight. As he leaned on the mantel looking out across the lawn, you felt the presence of a massive, powerful physique, but as he slowly turned to greet you, you fairly caught your breath from the intensity of the shock. The cheeks were hollow; the lips were ever parted to make more easy the simple act of breathing, the pallor of the face was more than that of mere weakness—there was a yellowish hue of both skin and eye-whites. The shrunken claw-like hands that offered greeting, the shrunken thighs, the increased girth of body which had so deceived your first glance, all bespoke mortal illness to even the untrained eye—advanced cirrhosis of the liver, to the professional scrutiny. And he was to be the fourth, in a line of financially successful Kents, to die untimely from mere eating and drinking. You would not have stayed long with this sick man. Only a large love or a large salary could have made the atmosphere of his presence endurable, for he was the essence of impatience, the quintessence of wilfulness. The sumptuousness of his surroundings, the punctilious devotion of his servants, the deferential respect shown him in high financial circles, books, people, memories, all failed ever to soften that drawn, hard face, for he was a miserably wretched, unhappy sufferer. Now and then his eyes would light up when Francis, his son and heir, was brought in. But Francis had a governess and an aunt who were respectively paid and commanded to keep him entertained and contented, and to see that he did not long disturb the invalid. That last year was one of most disorderly invalidism—not disorder of a boisterous, riotous kind, but an unmitigated rebellion to doctors' orders and advice, to the suggestions of friends, to the urgings and pleadings of nurses and "Aunt Emma." There were no voluble explosions; the impatience was not of the noisy kind—he had too much character for that, but the stream of thought was turgid and sulphurous. Jan, the valet, never argued, urged, suggested—by no little foreign shrug of his shoulders did he even hint that the master's way was not entirely right—and politic, faithful Jan stood next to Francis in his good graces; in fact, he was more acceptable as a companion. The only reason the sick man gave for his indifference to professional advice was that he was the third generation to go this way—and this way he went. A giant he was in the forest of men, felled in his prime.

Francis did not know his mother. She had been beautiful, a gentle, lovable daughter of generations of social refinement. Her father and grandfather had lived "pretty high." In truth, had the doctors dared, "alcoholic," as an adjective, would have appeared in both their death certificates; and the worm must have been in the bud, for she died suddenly at twenty-five, following a short, apparently inadequate illness. Thus, three-year-old Francis was left to a busy father's care, a maiden aunt's theoretical incompetence, and to the ministrations of a series of governesses who remained so long as they pleased their youthful lord. The undisciplined father's idea of good times, for both himself and his son, was based upon having what you want right now, and why not?—with unlimited gold, with its seemingly unlimited buying power. Dear Auntie, poor thing! knew no force higher than "Now, Francis, I wouldn't," or "Please don't," or on very extreme occasions, "I shall certainly tell your father"—as utterly ineffective in introducing one slightest gleam of the desirability and potency of unselfishness into this boy's mind, as was the gracious servility of the servants.