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!"
To-day, hers is a life of peace. Emotional instability and wretchedness have been displaced by habitual right feeling. Stabilizing her emotions has not impoverished, but enriched her nature. She has mastered the art of enjoying, for self-interests have expanded into love for service. To-day she is a capable, efficient, cheerful, wholesome, self-forgetting woman, filled with a faith in an able, worthy self—a God-given faith.