Our Nervous Friends - Robert S. Carroll (pdf ebook reader txt) 📗

husband read much, exercised little, and the only reason for gentle protest from the wife was his excessive smoking.

 

A little daughter came, but as though Fate would say, “I am Master,”

she lived but a few days. The shock was cruel, and the father seemed to suffer the more intensely. Mrs. Weston took her sorrow in a fine way; she seemed to realize that she, of the two, must turn away the threat of morbidness. But the touch of Fate was not to be denied.

Still, three years later, it would seem that nothing but thankfulness and abounding joy should have filled the Weston home—a son came. They named him Harold. The father’s solicitude for the little fellow’s life was as pathetic as it was abnormal. The bank was now unvisited for months by its first vice-president. As the boy grew the father gave him more and more of himself. He was his companion in play, and personally taught him, seriously taking up study after study, until at sixteen Harold was well prepared for college—scholastically prepared, we should amend—for unconsciously the father had kept him from the normal comradeship with boys of his age. Much of excellent theory the youth had, some wisdom beyond his years, but no knowledge of denials, no spirit of give and take, no thought of the other fellow—his rights and wrongs. In spite of their long walks and rides on gaited Kentucky thoroughbreds, Harold was not physically robust, so it was decided to send him to a southern college, and he went to Vanderbilt. During his second year the father had a long siege of typhoid, and recovery was pitiably imperfect. His mentality did not return with his body strength—he remained a harmless, weak-minded man. Much care was exercised to keep the details from Harold, though both families were unwilling to have the broken man sent to an institution, and for four years professional nurses attended him at home. In spite of the mother’s best efforts to distract and neutralize, the son could but feel the unnaturalness of the home atmosphere and profoundly miss the devotion of his father. Still from what little he did see of the invalid, it was a relief when, four years later, an accident took him away.

 

Harold Weston’s college life held true to his training. Quietly friendly, he mixed poorly; mentally well-equipped, he was an excellent student—brilliant in some classes, good in all. Athletics and fraternities, feeds and “femmies” dissipated none of his energies, nor added aught to the fulness of his living. He continued his college work until he had received both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. The spring he was twenty-three, he returned home for the summer, an attractive young man. A classmate had interested him in tennis, for which he showed some natural aptitude. The year’s work had taxed him lightly. The skein of yarn gave promise of a perfect fabric.

 

Mother and son had a happy summer. She saw to it that the home was alive with young folks, and one week-end party followed another.

Harold had decided to study law, and nothing indicated that he would meet any obstacles during his course at Law School. All believed he was sufficiently strong to take this at Yale. There were brilliant minds in his classes—he was accustomed to lead. He dropped his tennis, he studied hard. In his second year he began losing weight after the holidays, and found difficulty in getting to sleep; his appetite became irregular, and his smoking, which had been moderate for some years, became a dependence. His nervous system was pretty well “shot up”—it had never been case-hardened. A weight of apprehension had become constantly present, and he let its burden depress him miserably. One of his professors, noting his appearance, talked with him earnestly, and with lay acumen decided his digestion was “out of fix” and told him of a “fine New York doctor.” The stomach specialist worthily stood high in his profession. The examination was painstaking and exhaustive; the diagnosis seemed ominous to the morbid patient; the whole process was a revelation to him of organs and functions and laws of eating and drinking unheard in his years of study. “Chronic intestinal indigestion with food decomposition and auto-intoxication, augmented by nicotine,” the doctor said. There had been a distinct lessening of efficiency in his law-school work. Study for the first time in his life required wearying effort. He did not feel himself, he was facing his first test, he was meeting his first strain. For the first time the skein was being mussed.

 

Harold Weston began reading, indiscriminately, literature on food and digestion and diets. The doctor had given him a strict regimen. He began to note minutely the foods he ordered and to question the wholesomeness of their quality and preparation. Caution and over emphasis on details of food and habits of eating rapidly developed.

Later not only the food in the dish, but most unhappily the foods he had swallowed were scrutinized by every alertness of sensation and imagination, and most damagingly did he become a victim of the unwholesome symptom-studying habit. Within two months his discerning physician recognized that the self-interest which had started in the physical damage of rapid eating of rich foods was developing into an obsession more detrimental than the original physical disorder, and thought it wise for him to discontinue study and return home to rest for the summer. The thread was tangled.

 

The home-coming was not happy. From the first meal, the specialist’s warnings were in conflict with the home diet, and resentments were not withheld from the good old dishes which had for a generation bedecked the home table. The delicacy instinctive to the family and to his earlier life was cast aside, and the subjects of food and its digestion, of food-poisoning and its consequences, made unpleasant every meal. Innocently and seriously the mother pointed to her good health and to rugged ancestors who had lived long and hale, unconsciously superior to food and drink. He brooked none of her suggestions, and finally when she honestly could not see it all his way, in the heat of his intensity he accused her of being to blame for all his trouble: she had fed him wrong from the first; she had fed his father wrong; the New York doctor had told him that certain mental diseases could be caused by food-poisoning, and his father would not have been a mental wreck, nor his own career cut short, had she only known what wives and mothers of this generation should know, and set a table which was not a laboratory of poison. These ideas, once accepted, never left him. They formed a theme which, after finding expression, recurred with ominously increasing frequency. A year before, Harold Weston was a kindly fellow, almost retiring, but with a peculiar lighting of his face in response which endeared him to feminine hearts. On a variety of subjects he was well-informed, his professors bespoke for him a high and honorable standing in the judiciary, but, from the mass of this fine mind’s possibilities, a second wretched choice was now made. “Father’s typhoid affected his mind, his brain must have been defective; my heredity is imperfect; my first illness damages my class work. I can never go on in my profession, there is no future for me but suffering.” From this wrecking thought it was an easy step to condemnation of his father for his fatherhood, which, with his near-enmity toward his mother for her “criminal ignorance” in rearing him, introduced a sordidly demoralizing element into his mind which forever viciously tinctured memories and relations which should have been his sacred helpers. The normal mind can select well its world—miserably his mind lived with these dregs of his own choice. The power of normal selection will, in the best mind, be gradually lost through habitual surrender to the morbid.

 

For the next year he lived unhappily in a home which he made unhappy.

Naturally thoughtful, he daily took long walks, brooding over his wrongs—walks which brought him little benefit physically, as he considered himself unable to put into them sufficient effort to wring perspiration from his brow or toxins from his muscles. False interpretation of his own symptoms increased with the abnormal closeness of his scrutiny of them. His superficial knowledge he accepted as final. Ignorant of the limitations of heredity, will and judgment became subservient to pessimism, and the days marked a gradual, deepening depression. The skein was asnarl.

 

A relative physician responded to the mother’s call of distress and spent a week in the home, then took Harold under his personal care to a series of specialists—but not stomach specialists. Serious treatment was carried out at home with a young physician as companion.

Two institutions offered the best help of their elaborate equipments and perfected methods. Three years of badly discounted usefulness passed. Long since had any call of responsibility ceased to elicit response. Toward the end of this time he seemed better, and was spending the summer at a health-resort, living a relatively normal life. Fate then seemed to smile—dainty fingers appeared from the nowhere, which promised gently, patiently, surely to loosen each tangled snarl.

 

Eva Worth was another only child of affluence. She, too, was recuperating, spending the summer at the same resort as Harold.

“Overwork at college,” it was said. Petite of person, pleasing in manner, sweetly spoiled, with sympathies quickly born but usually displaced by fresher interests, she was bright and responsive in mind, and her attraction to Harold Weston gave promise of being the touch needed to complete his restoration. Providence only knows the possibilities latent in a union of these poor children of wealth. For him there was an unquestioned awakening. The somber clouds of his moods seemed destined to be transformed into delicate pastels by the promises of love. It was more than an infatuation for them both, and an understanding which was virtually an engagement left them happy even in their parting. But happiness was not a word for Harold Weston’s conjuring. Throughout the weeks of his association with this fair girl, the first woman for whom he had ever cared, the thought had repeatedly come that he owed her a full and explicit explanation of his illness and of his “defective heredity.” At home where the brooding habit had grown strong and fixed, this idea became so insistent, within two weeks, that he relieved the tension of its demands by a long letter of details, which even to the sympathetic ear of love were more than disquieting. The letter ended with a question of her willingness to indicate a final decision in her response. The appeal of his fine eyes was not there to help—other eyes were nearer.

Eva Worth was but twenty-two. Home training, the reading of much fine literature, a college education, her own poor little heart, all failed to bespeak for her wisdom in this crisis. An impulsive, almost resentful refusal was sent. Second thoughts held more wisdom, for woman’s pity was now wisdom, so another day saw another letter, one with a few saving words of hope. The first reply was handed to Harold after luncheon. Quietly he left the house, apparently for one of his afternoon walks. By morning he had not returned and a general alarm went out. Some days later two boys, fishing in the river from an old log, saw a cap in an eddy. No more has been seen or heard of Harold Weston. A hasty hand, a hasty touch had broken the thread.

 

Two women were left to suffer. The elder, haunted by the re-echoings of an only son’s condemnation, lives out her years in a loneliness which will not break, harrowed by questions of the wisdom of her mother-love, the best she had to give. Some mother’s son she may yet help save, for she