Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness

by Robert S. Carroll

"Why, child, what could have happened to make a young, happy girl of sixteen wish to die? Was there something really serious that you haven't told?"

"Oh, Doctor, didn't papa tell you? No, I know he wouldn't. He probably don't know—he can't know what it cost me. Oh! must I tell you? Don't make me, Doctor! Oh, my poor head! Doctor, it will burst, please do something for it. Oh, my poor mamma! She loved me so much and she understood me, too." And tears came and sobs, and for a time neither spoke.

"Tell me of your mother," the doctor said.

Then the story, the unhappy story, whined out in that self-pitying voice which ever bespeaks the loss of pride—that characteristic of wholesome normal womanhood. Her parents had probably never been happy together. The spring she was in the Seminary, ill, her mother left home. There was a separation. That fall her father re-married, as did the mother later, who lived in her new home but a few months, dying that same winter. From the first, Wanda had hated her stepmother. "I despise her. I can never trust Father again. I can never trust any one and I loathe home, and I want to die. Please, Doctor, don't make me live. I have nothing to live for!"

Here was the woman's sickness—the handiwork of an indulgent mother who had never taught her daughter the sterling ideals of unselfish living. This mother had gone. A better trained woman had entered the home, but her every effort to develop character in the stepdaughter was resented. Illness, that favorite retreat of thousands, became this undeveloped woman's refuge. Year after year, sickness proved her defense for all assaults of importuning duty. Sickness, weakly accepted at first, later grew, and as an octopus, entwined its incapacitating tentacles about and slowly strangled a life into worthlessness.

"Your daughter will have to leave Alton for nine months. Six of these she will spend on a Western ranch; for three months she will work in the city slums. Miss Leighton will be her nurse and companion. Life was deliberately planned to develop wills. Miss Fairchild has lost the ability to will until, at thirty-four, she is absolutely lacking in the power to willingly will the effort which is essential to rational, healthy living. She is but a whimpering weakling, a coward who for years has run from misfortune. Your daughter must be turned from discomfort to duty, from pain to productive effort; her margin of resistance must be pushed beyond the suggestive power of the average headache, periodic discomfort, or desire for ease; she must learn to transform a thousand draining dislikes into a thousand constructive likes. Finally, we hope to teach her the hidden challenge which is brought us all by the inevitable. To-day she is more sensitive than a normal three-months-old baby. She must be judiciously hardened into womanhood."

We cannot say that the troubled father gathered hope from this, to him, unique exposition of the invalid's case, but sufficient confidence came to induce him to promise his loyal support to the "experiment" for the planned period of nine months. The patient rebelled. She had come "to be Dr. Franklin's patient." She couldn't "stand the trip." She wouldn't "go a step."

Yes, it seemed cruel. Three days and nights they were on the sleeper; forty miles they drove over increasingly poor roads to the big ranch in the Montana foot-hills where everybody else seemed so well, so coarsely well, she thought. After the first week the aspirin and the veronal gave out and there was no "earthly chance" of getting more. Then when she refused to exercise, she got nothing to eat but a glass of warm milk with a slice of miserably coarse bread crumbed in, and the mountain air did make her hungry; and when she was ugly, she was left alone, absolutely alone in that dreary room, and even Lee, the Chinese cook, wouldn't look in the window when she begged him for something else to eat. How she did love Rosie those "weary days of abuse"! Miss Leighton was always polite, though she would not stay with her a minute when she got "fussy," but would be gone for an hour, visiting and laughing and carrying on with the men-folks in the big- room. She had seemed so kind before they left the East and she was kind now, at times when she had her own way, but she was being paid to nurse a sick girl, and she had no right to leave her alone for hours simply because she whined or refused to do her bidding on the instant. There was a young doctor there who could have helped her if he would, but he had no more heart than the rest, and when the nurse called him in to make an examination, he was as noncommittal as a sphinx and gave her no speck of satisfaction, only telling her to do what the nurse said. Bitter letters she sent home, but somehow they all were answered by Dr. Franklin, who wrote her little notes in reply which made her angry—then ashamed. Verbal outbreaks there were, and physical ones, too, a few times, which the nurse calmly and humiliatingly credited to her exercise-account and brought her more to eat, saying that scrapping was as healthful as work in making strength. But somehow, she couldn't hate Miss Leighton long, as behind all her "cruelty" Wanda realized that a thoughtful friendship was ever waiting. One day they took a drive; when four miles from the ranch-house something happened, and they were asked to get out. They stood looking off over the ever-climbing hills to those remote, granite castles of the far Rockies.

The team started, and as they turned, the driver waved his apparent regrets. They walked back—four miles. Wanda had not performed such a feat in nearly twenty years. She walked off her resentment, in truth she was a bit proud, and the nurse certainly did bring her a fine supper, the first square meal she had been given in Montana. This was the turning point.

Walking, riding, working, camping in the open, sleeping in smoke and drafts after long hikes, carrying her own blanket and pack—all became matters-of-course. From 96 to l30—nearly thirty-five fine pounds—she put on. She even learned bare-back riding, and wove a rug from wool she had sheared, cleaned, dyed and spun. Long since, she had realized that Miss Leighton had only been carrying out Dr. Franklin's orders. That fall they came East to Baltimore. She worked with Miss Leighton in the tenement districts. She saw Dr. Franklin weekly. He now explained the principles underlying her ruthless, physical restoration. She learned to recognize her years of deficient will- living. The doctor revealed to her, as well, her great debt to her home, explained to her now cleared mind the poverty of the love she had borne, and wakened her to the stepmother's true excellence of character. Her opened eyes saw the great tragedy of defective living as reflected in the lives of want and evil in those to whom she was daily ministering. Her life had been blest in comparison.