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

notes a mother’s agony. The doctors offered no hope. The child was starving; no food nor medicine had agreed, and the end was near. A neighboring grandmother told how her child had been sick the same way, and how she had given him baked sweet potato which was the first thing he had digested for days. As fate would have it, it was even so with Fred, and he recovered leaving his mother devoid of faith in any one calling himself doctor, and fanatically devoted to the child she had so nearly lost. From that sickness she hovered over him, protecting him from the training she gave her other children—the kind she herself had received. His wish became her law; he was humored into weakness. He never became robust physically, and early showed defects quite unknown in either branch of the family. He failed in college, for which failure his mother found adequate excuse. He entered the bank, but within a few months his peculations would have been discovered had he not confessed to his mother, who made the discrepancy good from her private funds. During the next few years she found it necessary on repeated occasions to draw cheeks on her personal account to save him from trouble—but never a word of censure for him, always excuses. He was drinking, those days, and gambling. In the near-by state capitol the cards went his way one night. Hilarious with success and drink, he started for his room. There was a mix-up with his companions. He was left in the snow, unconscious—his winnings gone. The wealth of his father and the devotion of his mother could not save him, and he went with pneumonia a few days later. It was said that this caused her breakdown—let us see.

 

As a girl, Elizabeth had lived in a home of plenty, in a home of local aristocracy. She was perfectly trained in all household activities and, for that period, had an excellent education, having spent one year in a far-away “Female Seminary.” Her mind was good, her pride in appearance almost excessive. She said she “loved Sam Clayton,” and probably did, though with none of the devotion she gave her son, nor with sufficient trust to share her patrimony which amounted to a small fortune with him when it came. In fact, she ran her own business, nor relied upon the safety of the “Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank” in making her deposits. She was a housewife of repute, devoted to every detail of housewifery and economics. There was always plenty to eat and of the best; perfect order and cleanliness of the immaculate type were her pride. Excellent advice she frequently gave her husband about finances and management, but otherwise she added no interest to his life, and there was peace between husband and wife—because Sam was a peaceable man. As a mother, she taught the two older children domestic usefulness, with every care; they were always clad in good, clean clothes, clad better than the neighbors’ children, and education was made to take first rank in their minds. Her sense of duty to them was strong; she frequently said: “I live and save and slave for my children.” Fred, as we have seen, was her weakness. For him she broke every rule and law of her life.

 

At forty-five she was thin, her face already deeply seamed with worry lines, a veritable slave to her home, but an autocrat to servants, agents and merchants. They said her will was strong; at least, excepting Fred, she had never been known to give in to any one. We have not spoken of Mary. Poor woman! She, too, was a slave—she was the hired girl. Meek almost to automatism, a machine which never varied from one year’s end to another, faithful as the proverbial dog, she noiselessly slipped through her unceasing round of duties for twenty-three years—then catastrophe. “That fool hired man has hoodwinked Mary.” No wedding gift, no note of well-wishing, but a rabid bundling out of her effects. Howbeit, Central Ohio could not produce another Mary, and from then on a new interest was added to the Claytons’ table-talk as one servant followed another into the Mother’s bad graces. She was already worn to a feather-edge before Mary’s ingratitude. But the shock of Fred’s death completed the demoralization of wrongly lived years. For weeks she railed at a society which did not protect its citizens, at a church which failed to make men good, while she now recognized a God against whom she could express resentment.

 

This woman endowed with an excellent physical and mental organization had allowed her ability and capacity to become perverted. Orderliness, at first a well planned daily routine, gradually degenerated into an obsession for cleanliness. Each piece of furniture went through its weekly polishing, rugs were swept and dusted, sponged and sunned—even Mary could not do the table-linen to her taste—and Tuesday afternoon through the years went to immaculate ironing. The obsession for cleanliness bred a fear of uncleanliness, and for years each dish was examined by reflected light, to be condemned by one least streak. The milk and butter especially must receive care equaled only by surgical asepsis. Then there were the doors. The front door was for company, and then only for the elect—and Fred; the side door was for the family, and woe to the neighbor’s child or the green delivery boy who tracked mud through this portal. No amount of foot-wiping could render the hired man fit for the kitchen steps after milking time—he used a step-ladder to bring up the milk to the back porch. Such intensity of attention to detail could not long fail to make this degenerating neurotic take note of her own body, which gradually became more and more sensitive, till she was fairly distraught between her fear of draughts and her mania for ventilation. It was windows up and windows down, opening the dampers and closing the dampers, something for her shoulders and more fresh air. Church, lecture-halls and theaters gradually became impossible. Finally she was practically a prisoner in the semiobscurity of her home—a prisoner to bodily sensation. Then came the autos to curse. The Clayton home was within a hundred yards of the county road, and when the wind was from the west really visible dust from passing motors presumed to invade the sanctity of parlor and spare rooms, and with kindling resentment windows were closed and windows were opened, rooms were dusted and redusted until she hated the sound of an auto-horn, until the smell of burning gasoline caused her nausea—but each year the autos multiplied.

 

At last the family realized that her loss of control was becoming serious, that she was really a sufferer; but her antagonism to physicians was deep-set, so the osteopath was called. Had he been given a fair chance, he might have helped, but her obsessions were such that she resented the touch of his manipulations, fearing that some unknown infection might exude from his palms to her undoing.

Reason finally became helpless in the grip of her phobias. Her stomach lining was “destroyed,” and into this “raw stomach” only the rarest of foods and those of her own preparation could be taken. She had fainted at Fred’s funeral, and repeatedly became dazed, practically unconscious, at the mention of his name. Self-interests had held her attention from girlhood to her wreckage, and from this grew self-study, which later degenerated into self-pity. Her converse was of food and feelings and self. She bored all she met, for self alone was expressed in actions and words.

 

Father and daughter finally, under the pretext of a trip for her health, placed her in a Southern sanitarium. Much was done here for her, in the face of her protest. Illustrative of the unreasoning intensity with which fear had laid hold upon her was her mortal dread of grape-seeds. As she was again being taught to eat rationally, grapes were ordered for her morning meal. The nurse noticed that with painful care she separated each seed from the pulp, and explained to her the value of grape-seeds in her case. She wisely did not argue with the nurse, but two mornings later she was discovered ejecting and secreting the seeds. The physician then kindly and earnestly appealed for her intelligent cooperation. She thereupon admitted that many years ago a neighbor’s boy had died of appendicitis, which the doctor said was caused by a grape-seed. The fallacy of these early-day opinions was shown her. Then was illustrated the weakness of her faith and the strength of her fear. She produced a draft for one thousand dollars, which she said she always carried for unforeseen emergencies, and offered it to the doctor to use for charity or as he wished, if he would change the order about the grapes. Suffice it to say she learned to eat Concords, Catawbas, Tokays and Malagas. She returned home better, but was never wholesomely well, and to-day dreads the death for which her family wait with unconscious patience.

 

What is the secret of this miserable old woman’s failure to adjust herself to the richness which life offered her? A selfish self peers out from every act. Even her generosity to Fred was the pleasing of self. Given all that she had, what could she not have been!

Physically, with the advantages of plenty and her country life and the promise of her fair girlhood, what attraction could not have been hers had kindness and generosity softened her eyes, tinted her cheeks, and love-wrinkles come instead of worry-wrinkles.

 

Her mind was naturally an unusual one. She lived within driving distance of one of Ohio’s largest colleges—only an hour by train to the state capital. Fortune had truly smiled and selected her for happiness, but from the first it was self or her family and no further thought or plan or consideration.

 

Elizabeth Clayton was given a nervous system of superb quality, which used for the good of those she touched would have hallowed her life; misused, she drifts into unlovable old age, a selfish neurotic. She could have been a leader in her community, a blessing in her generation, a builder of faiths which do not die, but she failed to choose the good part which neither loss of servant, death of child nor advancing age can take away.