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

Then, when she neglected, even for an hour, her household duties or school-work for church-socials or class-picnics, her conscience, and usually her stepmother, pounced upon her mercilessly. At early fourteen, she was feeling the chilling shadows of a morbid conscience.

Her stepmother was away for two weeks attending a denominational conference, and it seemed to Irene that she had more time than usual; so she talked her perplexities over with the pastor of her mother’s church. A good man he was, but far from being an expert physician of the soul. He did not seem to sense her deeper problem-the one daily hurting her sensitive spirit, but asked a number of questions, her answers to which convinced him that she was entirely ready to join the church, which he definitely advised her to do, believing thereby she would find the peace she sought. So without delay, even before her stepmother’s return, and without consulting her, she followed the minister’s advice. Unhappily, her business-burdened father had no special interest in the welfare of any one’s soul. Mrs. Yarnell henceforth treated Irene as a religious inferior. High school brought more work and little play. The unsuccessful father died with bad arteries when Irene was eighteen. He left little beside the mortgaged place; so Irene took up bookkeeping, and before she was twenty had a bank-position which, through her ability and merit and trustworthy conscientiousness, she has held through the years and the vicissitudes, supporting herself and her stepmother. Irene’s play days had been rare. Her conscience was a grim-visaged angel whose flaming sword she ever saw barring each path to pleasure.

The president of her bank was also an elder in her church. His mind was pretty well filled with business, still he took occasional thought for his employees, and the summer Irene was twenty-three, he asked her how she would spend her two vacation weeks. “No,” she was not going to leave Wheeling. “Yes,” it was hot, but she had much sewing to do, and if she could save for two years more, the mortgage would be paid. The banker noticed, even as they talked, the slight tremor of fingers and lips which bespeaks tension; and that not a little of her appearance of reserve and strength had slipped away through the grind of the years.

Three delegates were to be sent to the Chautauqua Assembly for a two weeks’ special conference, and somehow it turned out that, with those of Mrs. Crumb, the pastor’s wife, and Matthew Reynolds, a theologic student the church was helping educate, Irene Tarnell’s name was read.

Two weeks at Chautauqua, her railway-fare paid both ways!-a score of the best people of the church assuring her that it was her duty-and an envelope with the banker’s personal check for twenty dollars, endorsed “for incidentals as delegate”! Thus Irene set forth on her first foreign mission, her first trip out into this big, busy world, about which she had, wrongfully, of course, wasted a few minutes now and then in dreaming. Who could have been more companionable than Matthew, or who more thoughtful and self-eliminating than Mrs. Crumb whose thrifty, matronly heart early sensed the promise and wisdom-and excitement, too, of a romance en route. And dear Mrs. Crumb was deft, and Matthew supremely susceptible, and Irene-she was in the clouds!

How like a story-book, the kind that ends happily, it would have worked out, if alas! Matthew had not been quite so susceptible. There was a Pittsburgh girl who had the advantage of prior association and, unfortunately, the young student’s pledge of eternal devotion. Still, Irene was a mighty good-looking girl; in fact, Matthew admitted, the third day of their trip, when her fine color began to flash back, that she was better looking than his promised, and so refreshingly free from worldly-mindedness. Mrs. Crumb did not know of Matthew’s entanglements, while the devotion of his attentions, a certain lighting of his eyes, and gentleness of speech and demeanor convinced her that all she wished was going very well. So convinced was she that she made bold, early the second week, to express her belief in Irene’s almost unequaled qualifications for a minister’s wife, to which dutiful Matthew gave unreserved assent.

Nothing of importance was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, and Mrs.

Crumb showed that she was not lacking in an understanding of young folks’ human nature when she planned the little excursion which was to offer ample opportunity for the consummation she believed so impending. They had all taken some tramps together. She was not quite equal, she said, to the walk around to Mayfield, but it would make a fine afternoon trip for the young folks. She would go down on the steamer, and they could all come back and enjoy the refreshing, evening water-trip together.

Matthew had certainly been attentive, giving an attention which Irene had never before received. For days she had been happy, the first joy-days she had known since she was eight. The very near future loomed large with intoxicating promise. Mrs. Crumb had talked to her, also, of Matthew, and of his fine record at college, and of his gentle nature. The early afternoon was hot; they walked slowly; they loitered when they came to shade. Then out of the west came booming black clouds, and they were caught in a midsummer thunderstorm. He helped her as they ran for shelter, but, almost blinded by the pelting rain, she tripped and fell awkwardly, twisting her ankle cruelly. She probably fainted. Matthew was frightened, and in his helplessness lost his head. She was roused by him chafing her hands, and his importunate “Dear Irene,” bundled stunned senses, soaked, chilling apparel and stabbing ankle into one unutterable confusion of unspeakable joy. And “devil-inspired fool” that she was, she reached up, drew his tense face, so near, against hers, and “hateful bliss,” it stayed there a full minute. Then life went black, for he tore himself away, almost savagely putting her arm aside. “It is wrong; you have made me sin!”

“It is wrong; you have made me sin!” were burned in loathsome black across the face of her conscience, accusing cruelly, unendingly accusing. Tears passed-those years that drag, and she never knew of the girl in Pittsburgh. She did not know other than that she had transgressed and tempted a fine, good man; that she had tempted him from the sanctity of great religious purpose-and her branded, sick conscience proved itself a poison to mind and body.

Dazed, the hurt woman returned to the loveless home. Mechanically, for months, her hands made that home comfortable and toiled on at the bank. We wonder how the break could have been held back so long, in one so sensitive. The staunch body and well-trained mind must have carried her on through mere momentum. But it had to come. Self-condemnation and self-depreciation gave birth to false self-accusation. She began to question the worth of all she did. Repeatedly she must add and re-add a column of figures; even the evidence of the adding-machine had to be proven. She wakened at night questioning the correctness of her entries, and her work became slow and inaccurate.

All she did, physically and mentally, became a dread. The very act of walking to and from the bank seemed to drain her waning strength. She refused a vacation suggested by her employer, who gradually became genuinely concerned about her health. He knew but little of the affair at Chautauqua. Mrs. Crumb was too good a woman to let drop any hint of what she may have surmised; she actually knew only of the storm and sprained ankle.

One morning Mrs. Yarnell called a neighboring doctor. She couldn’t waken Irene. It was found that her sleep had become so poor that she had bought some powders from the druggist. Never having taken medicine, she was easily influenced, and the ordinary dose left her confused for twenty-four hours. Two weeks’ rest at home, if one could rest in Mrs. Yarnell’s company, found the girl no stronger. The banker and the doctor had a conference. She must be gotten away from home.

The banker had a doctor-friend, a man whose means made it unnecessary for him to give his years of strength to the unceasing demands of a general practice. He had long been keenly interested in the complicated and growing problem of nervousness. He owned a beautiful place down the Ohio River where, for years, he had been taking into his home a few deserving, nervous invalids. He had learned to enter into their lives with a specialist’s skill-with a father’s understanding. Thus he gave largely—to some it would seem, of his substance, but the true giving was his discerning, constructive comprehension of human problems. Into this atmosphere, God and the banker sent Irene.

For nearly twenty years this oversensitive girl had known few hours of understanding and sympathy. For a week or two she merely rested; then one evening, it seemed precipitate, but some way it was as easy as anything she had ever done, she told the story we have heard. There, revealed, was the defect of a life, a problem to be worked out by the analytic student of mankind. Was it to introduce a little saving recklessness, the redeeming truth of honesty and justice to self, or the neutralizing of self-negation by the acceptance of merited worth!

Even through our weaknesses are we sometimes healed. If any reason existed which could merit one self-accusing thought, the doctor found it when he uncovered the resentment which had never healed toward the usurping stepmother—“a woman who had proved her limitations and should be mercifully judged thereby,” he told Irene.

“Yes,” the doctor said, “you have missed the ‘second blessing’; you have missed a thousand blessings because the generosity of your years of fine doing were lacking in the gentleness of feeling which Aunt Effie taught you, and which made your mother so beloved. Lacking this, even in the fulness of your much giving, you have failed. You have been seeking the true religion. Your mother had it-the kind that lightens the dead heaviness and puts heaven’s color into the dull, dark hours at home. Herein, only, have you fallen short.”

The doctor knew men, and he was able to show her how utterly innocent she was of the slightest hint of wrong in her relations with Matthew, how impossible that her spontaneous act could have wrought a second’s harm to any good man. There was much more said helpfully, but the most good, unquestionably, came from the unspoken influence of the thoughtful personal consideration and discerning kindness of this scientific lover of his kind. Three months Irene spent with them, the doctor and his equally good wife; she returned home radiant.

The years pass. During the Great War, when trained men were scarce, our restituted woman acted as cashier and drew almost a cashier’s salary. The mortgage is paid. Two women live in the little house. The older is very religious. She still attends many church services; she dutifully gives her tenth to the cause, and, in and out of season, proclaims her way as the perfect road to the heights beyond. Old and practically unchangeable, she is not lovable and she never has been, but near-by tenderness has softened some of her self-satisfied asperities. Still radiant is the younger woman-the righteous woman whose righteousness has put unfailing cheer in service most of us would call “fierce,” a righteousness which has learned to be charitably blind where most of us would see and resent, a righteousness which has brought abiding happiness to a life that had long suffered, a slave to its conscience. Cleverness and wealth-having not charity-have sought such happiness in vain through the ages.