Life Unveiled, by a Child of the Drumlins — Chapter 8 Part V - The Medic

The first real sorrow of my life came to me that year: One forenoon, as we all piled out from the lecture room and rushed to the mail-rack for our home letters, a tall blond youth who was usually on hand to lift down my microscope and sharpen my dissecting knives handed me the home letter which was always too high on the rack for me to reach--the letter which never failed to come on Tuesday noon.

Running with it to the cloak room, eager for the home news, I read: Grandpa is very ill.

The Doctor says he cannot get well.

“Tell Eugenie I shall never see her again,” he said last night.

Perhaps you can write him a letter we can read to him.

You better not try to come home.

It is too far, would cost so much, and would break into your studies so.

How the sunshine vanished as my thoughts flew to that little bedroom where he lay--my dear, touchy, indulgent grandfather!

I did not go to the lecture that afternoon, but stayed in the library and wrote him a farewell letter.

I should like to see that letter now.

I wonder what I wrote; I know nothing more genuine and tender ever went from one soul to another.

Besides a loving farewell, which his approaching death made possible for me to express, reticent as I was by nature and training, it contained, I know, a passionate assurance that it would be well with him where he was going.

I knew that Mother was praying and thinking, “Oh, if he were only prepared to go!

” Something of this might be in his own heart, too.

I thought of his ungodly life, of his profanity;

but against these I weighed his uprightness and his big loving heart, and _I knew_ that these would count--count with _what_ I was no wise sure; but I knew that it was right thus to try to ease the terrors of his last hours, if such were troubling him.

It was the passionate protest of my struggling mind, becoming tinctured with Unitarianism and Universalism, against the suffering that I knew was Mother’s (if, indeed, it was not Grandpa’s also), with her Methodist way of looking at things.

Somehow, I could see my grandfather, sturdy to the last, scorning weakly to repent, even to escape the terrors of the Unknown into which he must soon go.

He never saw that letter.

Whether he became unconscious before it reached there; or whether Mother in her zeal felt that it might prevent his last chance of repentance; or whether, because of its passionate, perhaps hysterical, character, it was deemed by my parents better withheld, I never knew.

I was unwilling to inquire when, months later, I reached home.

Mother said it seemed best only to tell him of my good-bye.

Perhaps it was; but I wonder if he didn’t know without seeing it--I felt very near him that hour in the library framing my farewell, and learning for the first time what it means when Death comes to our own.

After some months, Belle and I took a larger room at the Y. W.

C. A.

, and a girl in the class ahead of us joined us--a quiet, amiable girl who acted as a kind of buffer between us, after which we got on much more comfortably.

One evening she took me with her to a confinement case on which she and a senior student were engaged.

It was my first experience in dispensary quarters, and the sordid surroundings, the mean tenements, the poverty and misery were a revelation to me.

Everything was untidy and unclean.

I could not bear even to sit on the chairs.

The night was long; the groans of the woman were painful to hear.

Being only a junior, with no knowledge of obstetrics, I had little intelligent interest in the case.

I gathered from the low conferences of the students, after their frequent examinations, that all was not progressing satisfactorily;

and some time after midnight they told me they would need to call in the professor in obstetrics, since it promised to be a case for instrumental interference.

Undergraduates were not allowed to assume charge of such cases unaided.

The senior student and I went for the professor.

I had never been on the street at so late an hour, and felt a pleasurable excitement in the adventure.

I dreaded most those mean streets through which we had to go before reaching the more respectable quarters.

We had gone only a short way when our progress was arrested by a night-prowler, though no more formidable one than a goat.

On nearing Boylston Street we met a few men and saw an occasional policeman.

Everyone we passed showed more or less curiosity, and one policeman halted near us, but said nothing, Miss Farnsworth’s obstetric bag perhaps indicating to him and others that we were out on some legitimate errand.

Presently my heart almost stopped: A man stepping alongside Miss Farnsworth had caught step and was walking by her side without a word.

Glancing up at her in apprehension, I saw her face was pale and stern, but she looked straight ahead, apparently oblivious of his presence.

Soon I felt her crowding me, and saw he was pushing close to her side;

but she neither slackened her pace nor betrayed awareness of him.

My heart was going like a trip-hammer, but somehow I felt secure, she seemed so unmoved.

Soon the man ceased crowding, lifted his hat, and in a deferential tone said, “I beg your pardon, ladies,” and walked on.

We walked on, too, not speaking till he had disappeared from sight; then the imperturbable young woman, with trembling voice, told me she had heard that that was the best way to treat such an encounter, but that it was the first time she had had to test the advice.

Professor S---- went back with us and delivered the child.

I heard Lowell lecture two or three times that first year--conversational talks and readings from the early English dramatists.

I liked his scholarly face and voice, and felt the charm of his manner, but recall almost nothing of his talks.

In reading he pronounced ocean “o-ce-an.

” One day in walking down Tremont Street, as we halted at Miss Thorndike’s boarding-house, we saw a stout, middle-aged woman in the window, who nodded pleasantly to Miss Thorndike: “That is the poet, Lucy Larcom,” she whispered, to our awed surprise.

We used to go to King’s Chapel just to see Dr. Holmes, who always sat in the same place in the gallery--the little old man, looking somewhat sleepy and very remote, but very fitting in that quaint old meeting-house.

I first read his books in Boston, and it was such a delight in walking across the Common to realize that it was amid these very scenes that he had written the “Autocrat” and the “Professor.

” It was a notable day when we went to Cambridge and visited Harvard University, the Old Craigie House, the Washington Elm, and Mount Auburn.

Then there were the trips to Charlestown and Bunker Hill, and the Navy Yard--these soon after our arrival there--it all seemed like stepping out of real life into a novel.

What a glamour there was over everything!

I remember my awed feeling on gaining admission to Longfellow’s home, when, standing in the darkened study, we saw his table, his books and papers, they said, just as he had left them.

I had then scarcely emerged from the spell of his poems, and, as we looked on the River Charles that afternoon, and thought of the poet standing in the very places where we stood; then, on returning to Boston across the long bridge, saw the lights reflected in the dark waters, and the stream of people hurrying to and fro, it all seemed a beautiful, sacred experience, linked as it was, with the Sunday afternoons at home, when I used to sing Father to sleep with “The Bridge” and “The Day Is Done.

” “The Bridge” may have meant London Bridge, but to me it will ever be that long bridge spanning the Charles, over which we returned to Boston after our pilgrimage to the poet’s home.

Mary A. Livermore’s lecture on Harriet Martineau was an event of that _annus mirabilis_; I sent reports of it home to our village paper, having previously written up several of our noteworthy excursions in and around Boston.

This had begun by Brother letting the editor of the paper read one of my home letters, which he subsequently published, my first intimation of it being its discovery in the paper.

I heard Joseph Cook lecture on the Indians, and heard Will Carlton read some of his own poems, and tried to be impressed with each, but was not.

But I heard Beecher and was impressed without trying.

He lectured on the Conscience; he said some persons’ consciences were like livery horses--they kept them all saddled and bridled and ready to let, but never used them themselves.

My first play in Boston was Booth in “Hamlet,” and I was a bit disappointed, having expected to be swept off my feet; instead, I found myself coolly watching it all, interested, but calmly, almost critically so, if a girl at her first real play _can be_ critically interested.

But when I saw J. Wilson Barrett in “The Poet Chatterton” I _was_ moved, and forgot everything but the woes of that ill-fated youth whose suffering and tragic death Barrett made so real.

My throat ached and the tears fell fast as the frenzied poet on his knees before an old chest frantically destroyed his rejected manuscripts.

I wonder if the same thing would not seem melodramatic now.

Toward the close of our first year several of the students were invited to Cambridge to visit the Agassiz Museum, and take supper with one of our class-mates.

It was the first time I had been in a home in all that year, and I shall never forget the feeling that came over me after those months spent in a large institution with its huge dining room, and a hundred or more girls at table: to sit down in a real home once more, and see a real mother pouring tea; to hear “Anna” called by her given name, and see all the intimate home life, was a precious experience.

Until then I had not realized how homesick I had been.

I

wondered if they knew how beautiful it all was--they seemed so calm about it, so unconcerned, while in spite of all I could do my tears were crowding fast.

No one but Belle had called me by my given name since I had left home, eight long months before; that “Anna” in the mother’s voice made me hungry to hear my own name.

I recall how odd it sounded to hear them speak of “Mr. ” Longfellow, and “Mr. Agassiz,” as they recounted every-day things about them.

From their talk one would think they came and went around Cambridge like ordinary persons!

It seemed as if this casual manner of speaking of these great men must be assumed.

Among the revelations of that first year were the vehement women friendships we saw in Boston.

Of course I had known of extravagant girl friendships, schoolgirls, but these were women, and they acted like lovers.

There was something unpleasant in it to me, even before I learned, as I did in later years, that such companionships sometimes degenerate into perverted associations.

Not that this was the case in any of the women I knew, but I had no liking for the peculiar, absorbing feminine intimacies I saw at the College, at the Association, and wherever I had near views of the lives of New England women.

Even “Our Caddie” had a beautiful senior student who adored her--a tall, dark dignified maiden.

They were said to be inseparable outside of college precincts; a strange contrast, this pair!

There were several “pairs” in the senior class, and among the “middlers,” and even with the juniors they sprang up like mushrooms.

They gazed at each other soulfully; they lived and thought in unison, communicating by glances rather than by the crudity of the spoken word.

I felt inclined to ridicule them, yet there were some who were restrained in conduct, and who seemed so unmistakably congenial that their attention for each other, singular as it was to me, commanded respect.

Still I was wont to say that if ever I did fall in love, it would be with a man.

It seemed to surprise the students of both sexes when it dawned upon them that Belle and I were not that kind of friends.

Miss Thorndike, our Buffalo friend, attracted the prim Miss Wilkins in this same way.

It amused Belle and me to see Miss Wilkins actually blush at little attentions from Miss Thorndike; but Belle herself soon succumbed to the strange attraction: One night after a quiz held at Miss Thorndike’s room, Belle having lingered behind a little, on joining me, grasped my hand and fervently whispered, “Genie!

Miss Thorndike kissed me good night!

” I could feel only pitying amusement at such extravagance.

Miss Thorndike evidently enjoyed such triumphs; she tried to get me under her spell.

The more I saw of her, I saw that certain girls and women were always falling a victim to her.

Years later a sickly, neurotic girl became so absorbed in her as to become almost estranged from her family; she lived merely to bask in the Doctor’s presence--distinctly an unhealthy relation.

My own instincts from the first led me to avoid such associations.

In the years that followed, coming upon such attachments, I clearly saw how it hampered women in their work, the “vinewoman” acting like a parasite to the more rugged, energetic personality; the latter having a multiplicity of interests, while the clinging vine would be wretched at any interests in which she did not have the lion’s share; in fact, was always chary of sharing her inamorata with others to any degree.

There was a lackadaisical girl in our class, several years older than I, who had been thus inclined toward me.

I did not understand it at first.

She followed me about, trying to absorb my time and attention, eager to do all sorts of little services for me; but I quickly put a stop to it, though having to seem unkind in doing it.

And there was a married woman in our class who attempted a like attachment.

One night when several of us were discussing this topic, I must have spoken of myself as bullet proof, as I ridiculed such folly.

Suddenly this student seized and kissed me, not once or twice, but several times, fiercely, almost brutally.

Surprised and indignant, I was actually weak and unresisting for a moment, the others looking and laughing while this aggressive creature triumphed and sparkled as she said, “There!

that is the way I would make you love me!

” There were but two ways to treat her assault--as a jest, or an indignity--I chose the former, and shunned her throughout the rest of the course.

I had disliked her glittering black eyes and her personality anyhow, and this incident only strengthened my instinctive repugnance.

Still another student, one of the juniors when I was “middler,” showed a romantic inclination toward me: I had befriended her in little ways because she seemed forlorn, and because I remembered every little kindness shown me during the first year.

She was of the pronounced masculine type and seemed to glory in it, was careless in dress;

unprepossessing, and with a heavy voice.

She was docile as a lamb with me, and I succeeded in getting her to abandon some of her mannish ways, and to be more mindful of her appearance.

She would have been my willing slave; but her devotion was irksome and I nipped it in the bud; I neither wanted to adore, nor to be adored.

Even at their best, these inordinate attachments seem like outlets into a false channel--the natural one being impeded.

They affect me much as does a woman’s silly devotion to a pet dog when, failing to find its natural outlet, her maternal love degenerates, descending to the dog-kennel, instead of blessing the nursery.

The religious qualms and questions of my school days were still actively disturbing during that first college year, and I did not cease trying to get on comfortable footing concerning them, though knowing it could never be on the old footing.

Miss Wilkins, a good orthodox Congregationalist, listening sympathetically to my doubts and difficulties, attempted to help me, finally urging me to let the doubts go and just pray.

I tried hard to follow her advice.

On my knees alone I prayed earnestly, but could get no awareness of a listening Father;

still I prayed, but soon, to my shame and sorrow (and, yes, to my amusement, too), my mind having wandered, I found myself repeating the branches of the axillary artery which I had been studying that evening!

I arose with a helpless feeling, convinced that it was useless to try further.

The next day when I told Miss Wilkins, grieved, but a bit amused, too, she shook her head--at a loss whether to scold or to pet me.

As soon as our first-year “exams” were over I was wild to get home.

Shall I ever look forward to anything with the eagerness I looked to that first home-going?

Belle, who had gone at the Christmas holidays, was less eager.

I had set the date of arrival a day later than I intended reaching there, just to surprise them.

When, on nearing Utica we saw the fertile Mohawk valley, in such contrast to the stony, more picturesque scenery of New England, we grew wild with delight.

This was the home country; we were no longer on alien soil.

And when the drumlins came in sight, we jumped from side to side of the car, hungrily regarding them.

The conductor and the few passengers smiled indulgently; they knew we were going home!

That final twenty-five-mile stretch was interminable, and when, at the last stop but one, three miles from our station, we saw our own drumlins, and the familiar houses and trees, my heart leaped for joy.

My eyes were blinded with happy tears when the train pulled in.

There was the very platform on which I had stood in the darkness months ago and torn myself from my sister’s embrace!

There was the dear old rattly “stage” and the familiar driver to take us to the village!

How good everyone about the station looked!

I felt like hugging everybody.

Our trunks were put on; the horses started; the bells jingled; the windows rattled in the old coach as we jolted along all too slowly over the mile that lay between me and Home!

It was a beautiful summer evening.

I glanced hungrily from the windows at every familiar sight--it all seemed so real, yet so incredible--here were the old scenes just as I had known them, unchanged, when so much had been happening to me!

“Unchanged?

” But there was a change, a glamour over everything, a light that never had been, and never could be again--the light in which one sees a dear, familiar scene on returning to it after his first absence!

When we got to the “corner”--the top of the hill that leads down to our house--I climbed out and ran ahead to surprise them before they should hear the stage-bells.

I can see myself now, flying down the hill in the June twilight, and running up the steps into Mother’s arms, almost before she knew who it was.

Home again, among the four beings I loved best in all the world!

If one wants to know how much he loves home and family, let him go away in his youth to a distant city for long months, then let him come back to that shelter and learn to the full the blessedness, the sacred joy of all that is comprised in that word “Home”!

How late we talked that night!

Neighbours and friends flocked in to see the wanderer; how good they all looked!

but how odd their voices sounded--every _r_ in their words stood out with such distinctness, after hearing the broad _a_’s and the softened _r_’s of the New England pronunciation.

I spoke of the peculiarities of the New England speech; how funny it had seemed to hear the College professors speak of idea_r_s; how the chemistry professor talked of soda_r_ ash, and, unless she was very careful, the Maine elocutionist called her room-mate “Anna_r_”; of how affected it seemed to omit their _r_’s in words where they should be, and insert them where they did not belong.

I said I had noticed a decided difference in Belle’s speech, although she had ridiculed it as much as I did when we went there.

While I was speaking of this, a smile went round the family circle, finally they laughed outright.

“What are you all laughing at?

” I asked, a bit nettled.

They said they guessed Belle was not the only one who had taken on the Boston pronunciation.

“Do you mean me?

” I asked incredulously.

“We certainly do.

” They had been amused ever since I had arrived to note the change in my speech.

After we had been home a few days my mark in anatomy came.

Belle and I had been so scared when we had gone into “Our Caddie’s” examination, that we had cared little about what marks we would get, if we could only squeeze through.

On opening the envelope I thought there must be some mistake, for there was my name and number and my standing (in “Our Caddie’s” own handwriting)--“100 plus 1. ” She had deigned to write on the card: “This means that you stood ninety-nine on your paper, and, with twenty perfect plus marks in quizzes, it makes your standing 100 plus 1. One other in the class stood the same.

” Miss Thorndike was that other.

It was always a puzzle to us both that she and I received this high rating from the exacting Dr. Matson, for others in the class were unquestionably better students than we were.

My rejoicing, however, was keen--until I thought of what Belle would say; but she was off in the country, and I did not see her for some weeks; still there _was_ that fly in the ointment.

During that vacation I took the agency for a book called “Milestones,” and went about the village canvassing--distasteful work, but I cleared fifty dollars by the means.

One day when storm-stayed in a poor little house on the east side of the town, an unforgettable experience came to me.

I usually found my best customers in such houses, and rather enjoyed their rapt attention as I expatiated on the treasures in the book; for, discarding the printed tale which the publishers had advised agents to use, I adapted myself to each audience in turn, selecting for bait the pictures and articles that I thought they would best jump at.

Sometimes, under their interested attention, I would wax eloquent.

I always knew in advance when an order was forthcoming, but enjoyed quite as much getting my victim on the hook as securing the order.

As I waited that day in the little house till the rain should cease, a big, strapping neighbour, rushing in out of the storm, puffing and red-faced, blurted out, “John Stevens’s girl’s dead--died at four o’clock.

” Little did she or the others know!

To them it was just a piece of village news, yet this girl was my dearest friend!

I had known her death was near, but to learn of it in that squalid home, and from this loud-mouthed woman, seemed a desecration.

I sat very still till the rain ceased, hearing their talk as in a dream.

Our old cat’s time had come to go that summer, and I decided that I might relieve it of its existence, at the same time that I could add to my knowledge of comparative anatomy, and give the children in our street some instruction as well.

So, improvising a place in our back-yard under the Baldwin apple tree, I started out bravely to chloroform the cat.

But its writhings were too much for me; and Sister and our neighbour, Walter, had to take that part off my hands; the rest I did without a qualm, instructing the big-eyed, eager children about the muscles and viscera, and enjoying the amusing questions they asked.

CHAPTER IX