Our Nervous Friends - Robert S. Carroll (pdf ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: Robert S. Carroll
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Dave was accepting his need for the bitter medicine which was being administered. He had forgiven Adelaide who sided with his father and, for the first time, had written, acknowledging some of his past failures. He wanted some books. He needed clothes. The orders given the doctor had been rigid as to spending-money and diversions. The determined father disapproved the expense account. Another man was sent to relieve the doctor-companion-a man who could be depended upon to carry out the letter of the father’s law. Rebellion, fierce—and it seemed, righteous—flamed forth in Dave Scott’s soul. He was doing his best. He was working as he never had worked before. He had seen his need—he had the vision of self-mastery. All this, and more he had seriously confided to the man his father, through the court, had placed over him. Without a word of explanation he was again to be turned over to the custody of a stranger. Was he a child or a chattel?
Was he mentally irresponsible that he should be thus transferred from one hand to another without a hearing? He wired his protests, and received in return an assurance that he would accept his new custodian or be cut off without a cent. In that hour the real character of David Scott was born. He consulted an attorney and learned the limited power of his guardians. Outside of Ohio he was legally free. He pawned some of his few belongings. Adelaide and the child were financially cared for. Over night he left the State. He would be a man, penniless, rather than the chattel-son of a millionaire!
The United States had just entered the Great War. The Marines were being recruited everywhere for “early over-seas service,” and Dave Scott, the aesthetic, volunteered as a “buck-private.” Few got over as fast as they wished. It was six months for Dave at Paris Island. There were few in the ranks of his mental ability, and physically he became as hard as the toughest. He was soon a corporal and later a sergeant.
And he worked. He met the roughest of camp duties, at first with set jaw and revolting senses, later with a grim smile; finally, and then the emancipation, with a sense of the closeness of man to man in mankind’s work. And the men began turning to him, and as he sweated with them he learned to discern the manliness in the crudest of them.
He went across at the end of six months, to France. He was a replacement in the Sixth.
The French line had been beaten thin as gold-foil. If it broke, Paris was at the mercy of the Hun. Then eight thousand of Uncle Sam’s Marines were thrown in where the line was thinnest and the pressure heaviest. Sharp-shooters, expert marksmen, were most of them. The enemy was now in the open. They had not before met riflemen who boldly stood up and coolly killed at one thousand yards. Crested German helmets made superb targets, and the officers bit the dust disastrously. At the end of three days, six thousand of these eight thousand Marines were dead or casuals. But the tide of the Great War was turned-and Dave Scott was one of the immortals who forced the flood back upon the Rhine. What miracle was it that shielded that ever-smiling white face, crowned with its flaming shock, from the storm of lead and death? With the fate of nations trembling in the balance, who can know the part his blue eyes, now true as steel, played in the great decision as, hour after hour with deadly precision, he turned his hand to slaughter? Five times the gun he was using became too hot and was replaced by that of a dead comrade. After those three days at Chateau-Thierry, no mortal could question that Dave Scott had forsworn aesthetics; that he was a demon of reality.
Later he saw service on the Champagne front, and then was invalided home.
It was a chastened father, a magnificently proud father, who was the first to greet him. For the time he was unable to put into words the honor he had for the son whom, so few months before, he considered worthless. “It’s all past now, Dave. That past we won’t speak of again. I’ve arranged for your discharge. You’ll be home to stay, inside of a month.”
Dave’s answer, probably more than any act in battle, proved that his character had been remade: “No, Father, I have enlisted for four years. I belong to the Marines till my time is up. I owe it to you, to Adelaide, to the boy, to myself, to prove that I can be the man in peace that I have tried to be in training-camp and in France. I know I can face reality when spurred by excitement. I have yet to prove that I can face the monotony of two years and a half of routine service.”
FINDING THE VICTORIOUS SELF
The victorious soul counts life as a gift which, far from growing darker and more dreary as the sun falls into the west, may daily become more rich and beautiful and worthy. To the soul victorious our span of years is not menaced by misfortune and misery, is not degraded by bitterness, discord and hatred, but hourly thrills with the realization that the worst which life may bring but challenges the divine within to masterful assertion. And the soul victorious has risen unscathed—glorified—above every attack of fate.
Mrs. Herman Judson was a sight to make the gods weep. With features more than usually attractive, softened by a halo of waving, silvery hair, she was but a mushy bog of misery. It was three P. M.; she had just been carried downstairs, and in spite of the usual host of apprehension, with some added new ones for to-day, no slightest accident had marred the perilous trip from her front bedroom to the living-room below; still everything and everybody, save old Dr. Bond, was in a flutter. Tension and apprehension marked the faces and actions of all. Not till the last of six propping, easing, supporting pillows had been adjusted; till hot-water bottles were in near contact with two “freezing” ankles; till her shoulder-shawl had been taken off—a twist straightened out—and accurately replaced; till the room, already ventilated to a preordered nicety of temperature, had a door opened and both windows closed; not till the screen had been moved twice to modify the “glare” of the lights, and to protect from possible “draughts”; not until the “Sunset Scene from Venice” had been turned face to the wall so the reflection from its glass wouldn’t make her “eyes run cold water”; and finally, not until ten drops from the bottle labeled “For spinal pain” had been taken, and five minutes spent by her niece, fanning so very gently, “so as not to smother my breath”—not till this formidable contribution to the pitiful slavery of petted sensations had been slavishly offered, could the invalid find strength to greet her childhood playmate, quiet, observing, charitable Dr. Willard Bond.
Twice a day for many months the household held its breath while this moving-down, and later moving-back (and to-day’s was an uncomplicated, unusually peaceable one), was being accomplished. “Held its breath,”
is really not quite accurate, for Ben, the colored butler, and ‘Lissie, the colored cook, found much reason for strenuous respiration, as Mrs. Judson and her rocker, with pillows, blankets and the ever present afghan, weighed two hundred and eight pounds-one hundred and eighty pounds of woman, twenty-eight pounds of accessories! And Ben and ‘Lissie were the ones who logically deserved fanning and attention to ventilation, especially after the seven P. M.
trip back.
And they were always so solemn, so tensifyingly solemn, these risky journeys up and down. The niece, Irma, carried the hot-water bottles, the extra blankets and the fan. The nurse had the medicine-box and a small tray with water-glasses—for when things went wrong, the cavalcade must stop and some of the “Heart-weakness drops” be given, or some whiffs taken from the pungent “For tightness of breath”
bottle, before further progress was safe.
Mrs. Judson knew her symptoms so well. There were eighteen of special importance; and Dr. Cummings, the successful young surgeon, a far-away relative-by-marriage, had, in all seriousness, prescribed eighteen lotions, elixirs, powders, pills and potions, to meet each of the eighteen varied symptoms. Nine months ago this progressively developing invalidism of twenty years had culminated in what Dr.
Cummings suspected to be a severe gall-stone attack. A few days later, when his sensitive patient was measurably relieved, he had told her his fears and suggested a possible operation. Within two minutes Mrs.
Judson was faint and chilling. Since then the doctor, the nurse, the niece, not to forget Ben and ‘Lissie, had labored without ceasing to prevent a return of the “awful gall-stone attacks,” and, with the Lord’s help, to get Mrs. Judson “strong enough for an operation.” But progress was dishearteningly slow. Every mention of “operation” seemed to make their patient worse. And now for over eight months she had not walked a step and had been an hourly care.
For the first time since the beginning of the gall-stone trouble, Dr.
Cummings was going to be away for two weeks, and he, with Dr. Bond, had witnessed the downstairs trip in anticipation of a conference. Dr.
Bond lived but two doors away, and as he had retired from active practice, could always respond to a call if needed. Moreover, it had been discovered that he was a neighbor-playmate of Mrs. Judson during her girlhood. He had but recently come to Detroit from their old home in Charlestown, under the shadow of Bunker Hill monument, about which they had often played as children. Dr. Bond had lived there alone for many years following his wife’s death, and had now come to make a home with his successful son. He was giving his time, and he felt the best year of his life, writing a series of chapters on “Our Nerves and Our Morals.” He had never been a specialist, claiming only to be a family-doctor. But for over thirty years he had been ministering most wisely to the ills of the soul as well as of the body. A large, compelling sympathy he gave his patients. He saw their ills. He felt their fears.
He sensed their sorrows. He understood their weaknesses. He looked beyond the manifest ailments of flesh and blood. His fine discernment revealed the obscure sicknesses which affect hearts and souls. And his rational sympathies penetrated with the deftness and beneficence of the surgeon’s scalpel. He stood for that type of man whom God has raised up to help frail and needing human-kind in body, mind and spirit.
“Sixty years
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