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

her nearly ten years as daily companion of Hortense, did her speech or conduct betoken aught but refinement. More and more Hortense retreated to her wholesome companionship in face of the assaults of her mother’s trying volubility. In many ways this most unusual nurse protected her charge from the greater damage of poor mothering than actually occurred. The differences between these two women were reflected in the sensitive child’s life. Unconsciously at first, later in certain details, ultimately without reserve, she approved the standards of the one and repudiated those of the other. In contrast to her mother she grew into an abnormal reserve.

 

Hortense never attended the public schools but was regularly taught by Mrs. Place until she was fifteen, when she went East and entered her mother’s old school, in Washington. The years of her careful tutoring had failed to accustom her to competition of any kind, and this first year of school work was taxing and but indifferently successful.

During the spring term she had measles which left her with a hacking cough, and she did not regain her lost weight. The school-doctor sent her home, “for the southern climate,” where she remained for a year, rather frail and the object of much detailed, maternal solicitude. It was probably this same solicitude which finally became so wearying that she returned to school for relief. Hortense was now a year behind, but resented the rather superior airs of some of her old classmates so effectively that she got down to business, made up her back work, and graduated reasonably well up in her entrance class. Of light build, and always frail in appearance, she did commendable work in school athletics. She took private instruction in hockey, for she was determined “to make the team,” and her success in accomplishing this is significant of her ability to do, when she willed. At one of the later inter-scholastic games she met a handsome, manly, George Washington University student. She was nineteen, he twenty-three, and on his commencement day he honored her by offering his hand. Her southern love was aglow. Her lover was practically making his own way, but his prospects were excellent, his character superior, and they both cared very much.

 

Unhappily, Mrs. Place had returned to England, or Hortense would have confided in her and some futures might have been different. But the warmth of the new love seemed at the time to dissipate the chilliness toward her mother, which, unexpressed to herself, had through the years been increasing in the daughter’s heart. So she wrote a long letter full of the beautiful story of the growing happiness, with pages of fervid descriptions of a certain fine young fellow, and importuned her mother to come East at once and to bring her blessing.

No such filial warmth had Mrs. Orr ever before known. No such opportunity for a beneficent expression of the high privilege of motherhood had ever been entrusted to her. She responded without hesitation. She did not even wait to read their daughter’s letter to her husband. When she reached Washington she summoned the young suitor to her hotel, and succeeded in one masterful quarter of an hour in arousing his violent dislike and lasting contempt. Through diplomacy she got Hortense on the Memphis-bound train. She was determined that her “darling child” should never marry beneath her station, and she talked and talked, drowning her daughter’s protests, appeals and objections, in her merciless flow of words. Night after night she would stay with her till after twelve, leaving the poor girl tense, distracted and sleepless. And the habit of sleeplessness developed and with it a painfully abnormal sensitiveness to noises. The cruelly disappointed girl rapidly went to pieces. She craved a woman’s sympathy, she longed for a mother’s comprehending love, but she soon came to dread even her mother’s presence, and formed the habit of burying her ears in the pillows to shut out the sound of that voice which could have meant the sweetest music of all, yet which to her distraught nerves had become an irritating, repelling, hated noise.

Then special nurses came; the hot months were spent in the Rockies; several sea-trips were made; twice patient and nurse went East to forget it all in weeks of concerts and theaters in New York. But her inability to sleep was but temporarily relieved, while her antagonism to noises increased. She was then in Philadelphia for six months under the care of a noted neurologist, where she slowly gained considerably, physically, and was sufficiently well to spend a short, social “coming out season” with her parents. Yet the “at homes” and tea-parties and functions in which her mother reveled, never more than superficially interested her.

 

Rather strangely, father and daughter had not been as close as their similar natures and needs would suggest. While Mrs. Orr may not have been jealous, she preempted her husband’s home hours mercilessly; but in her father’s death Hortense came to know that one of the few props of her stability had been removed. Moreover, her mother’s incessant reiteration of her loneliness and sorrow, and the endless discussion of the details of her depressing widow’s weeds, and of her taxing, exhausting widow’s responsibilities, brought on a return of the old symptoms, with the antipathy to noises even intensified. We may think of Hortense Orr as inherently weak. This is not so. Save as influenced in her girlhood by Mrs. Place, and while stimulated during her last three years at school by personal ambition, she had known no duties nor responsibilities. There had never been any necessity for specific effort or sacrifice. After her great disappointment she had surrendered to depression of spirit, and she reacted in the same way after her father’s death. And this surrender was early followed by weakness of her disused body. She also surrendered to the weakness of self-pity, that craven mocker of self-respect. She was not a will-less girl, but life had brought her small chance to develop that will which masters, while wilfulness, that will which demands selfishly for self, grew out of the soil so largely of her mother’s preparing. This wilfulness, first asserted in small things, grew and grew.

 

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 housekeeping 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