PART III.

Now that I have come to the love part of my story, I am suddenly

conscious of dingy common colors on the palette with which I have been

painting. I wish I had some brilliant dyes. I wish, with all my heart, I

could take you back to that "Once upon a time" in which the souls of our

grandmothers delighted,--the time which Dr. Johnson sat up all night to

read about in "Evelina,"--the time when all the celestial virtues, all

the earthly graces were revealed in a condensed state to man through the

blue eyes and sumptuous linens of some Belinda Portman or Lord Mortimer.

None of your good-hearted, sorely-tempted villains then! It made your

hair stand on end only to read of them,--dyed at their birth clear

through with Pluto's blackest poison, going about perpetually seeking

innocent maidens and unsophisticated old men to devour. That was the

time for holding up virtue and vice; no trouble then in seeing which

were sheep and which were goats! A person could write a story with a

moral to it, then, I should hope! People that were born in those days

had no fancy for going through the world with half-and-half characters,

such as we put up with; so Nature turned out complete specimens of each

class, with all the appendages of dress, fortune, _et cetera_, chording

decently. At least, so those veracious histories say. The heroine, for

instance, glides into life full-charged with rank, virtues, a name

three-syllabled, and a white dress that never needs washing, ready to

sail through dangers dire into a triumphant haven of matrimony;--all

the aristocrats have high foreheads and cold blue eyes; all the

peasants are old women, miraculously grateful, in neat check aprons, or

sullen-browed insurgents planning revolts in caves.

Of course, I do not mean that these times are gone: they are alive (in

a modern fashion) in many places in the world; some of my friends have

described them in prose and verse. I only mean to say that I never was

there; I was born unlucky. I am willing to do my best, but I live in

the commonplace. Once or twice I have rashly tried my hand at dark

conspiracies, and women rare and radiant in Italian bowers; but I have a

friend who is sure to say, "Try and tell us about the butcher next door,

my dear." If I look up from my paper now, I shall be just as apt to see

our dog and his kennel as the white sky stained with blood and Tyrian

purple. I never saw a full-blooded saint or sinner in my life. The

coldest villain I ever knew was the only son of his mother, and she a

widow,--and a kinder son never lived. I have known people capable of a

love terrible in its strength; but I never knew such a case that some

one did not consider its expediency as "a match" in the light of dollars

and cents. As for heroines, of course I know beautiful women, and good

as fair. The most beautiful is delicate and pure enough for a type of

the Madonna, and has a heart almost as warm and holy as hers who was

blessed among women. (Very pure blood is in her veins, too, if you care

about blood.) But at home they call her Tode for a nickname; all we can

do, she will sing, and sing through her nose; and on washing-days she

often cooks the dinner, and scolds wholesomely, if the tea-napkins are

not in order. Now, what is anybody to do with a heroine like that? I

have known old maids in abundance, with pathos and sunshine in their

lives; but the old maid of novels I never have met, who abandoned

her soul to gossip,--nor yet the other type, a lifelong martyr of

unselfishness. They are mixed generally, and are not unlike their

married sisters, so far as I can see. Then as to men, certainly I know

heroes. One man, I knew, as high a chevalier in heart as any Bayard of

them all; one of those souls simple and gentle as a woman, tender in

knightly honor. He was an old man, with a rusty brown coat and rustier

wig, who spent his life in a dingy village office. You poets would have

laughed at him. Well, well, his history never will be written. The kind,

sad, blue eyes are shut now. There is a little farm-graveyard overgrown

with privet and wild grape-vines, and a flattened grave where he was

laid to rest; and only a few who knew him when they were children care

to go there, and think of what he was to them. But it was not in the far

days of Chivalry alone, I think, that true and tender souls have stood

in the world unwelcome, and, hurt to the quick, have turned away and

dumbly died. Let it be. Their lives are not lost, thank God!

I meant only to ask you, How can I help it, if the people in my story

seem coarse to you,--if the hero, unlike all other heroes, stopped to

count the cost before he fell in love,--if it made his fingers thrill

with pleasure to touch a full pocket-book as well as his mistress's

hand,--not being withal, this Stephen Holmes, a man to be despised? A

hero, rather, of a peculiar type,--a man, more than other men: the very

mould of man, doubt it who will, that women love longest and most madly.

Of course, if I could, I would have blotted out every meanness or

flaw before I showed him to you; I would have given you Margaret an

impetuous, whole-souled woman, glad to throw her life down for her

father without one bitter thought of the wife and mother she might have

been; I would have painted her mother tender as she was, forgetting how

pettish she grew on busy days: but what can I do? I must show you men

and women as they are in that especial State of the Union where I live.

In all the others, of course, it is very different. Now, being prepared

for disappointment, will you see my hero?

He had sauntered out from the city for a morning walk,--not through

the hills, as Margaret went, going home, but on the other side, to

the river, over which you could see the Prairie. We are in Indiana,

remember. The sunlight was pure that morning, powerful, tintless, the

true wine of life for body or spirit. Stephen Holmes knew that, being a

man of delicate animal instincts, and so used it, just as he had used

the dumb-bells in the morning. All things were made for man, weren't

they? He was leaning against the door of the school-house,--a red,

flaunting house, the daub on the landscape: but, having his back to

it, he could not see it, so through his half-shut eyes he suffered the

beauty of the scene to act on him. Suffered: in a man, according to his

creed, the will being dominant, and all influences, such as beauty,

pain, religion, permitted to act under orders. Of course.

It was a peculiar landscape,--like the man who looked at it, of a

thoroughly American type. A range of sharp, dark hills, with a sombre

depth of green shadow in the clefts, and on the sides massed forests of

scarlet and flame and crimson. Above, the sharp peaks of stone rose into

the wan blue, wan and pale themselves, and wearing a certain air of

fixed calm, the type of an eternal quiet. At the base of the hills lay

the city, a dirty mass of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far edge

flowed the Wabash,--deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling

and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and mud-covered

rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,--the Prairies.

Not the dreary deadness here, as farther west. A plain dark russet in

hue,--for the grass was sun-scorched,--stretching away into the vague

distance, intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and puny streams that

only made the vastness and silence more wide and heavy. Its limitless

torpor weighed on the brain; the eyes ached, stretching to find some

break before the dull russet faded into the amber of the horizon and was

lost. An American landscape: of few features, simple, grand in outline

as a face of one of the early gods. It lay utterly motionless before

him, not a fleck of cloud in the pure blue above, even where the mist

rose from the river; it only had glorified the clear blue into clearer

violet.

Holmes stood quietly looking; he could have created a picture like

this, if he never had seen one; therefore he was able to recognize it,

accepted it into his soul, and let it do what it would there.

Suddenly a low wind from the far Pacific coast struck from the amber

line where the sun went down. A faint tremble passed over the great

hills, the broad sweeps of color darkened from base to summit, then

flashed again,--while below, the prairie rose and fell like a dun sea,

and rolled in long, slow, solemn waves.

The wind struck so broad and fiercely in Holmes's face that he caught

his breath. It was a savage freedom, he thought, in the West there,

whose breath blew on him,--the freedom of the primitive man, the untamed

animal man, self-reliant and self-assertant, having conquered Nature.

Well, this fierce masterful freedom was good for the soul, sometimes,

doubtless. It was old Knowles's vital air. He wondered if the old man

would succeed in his hobby, if he could make the slavish beggars and

thieves in the alleys yonder comprehend this fierce freedom. They craved

leave to live on sufferance now, not knowing their possible divinity.

It was a desperate remedy, this sense of unchecked liberty; but their

disease was desperate. As for himself, he did not need it; that element

was not lacking. In a mere bodily sense, to be sure. He felt his arm.

Yes, the cold rigor of this new life had already worn off much of the

clogging weight of flesh, strengthened the muscles. Six months more in

the West would toughen the fibres to iron. He raised an iron weight that

lay on the steps, carelessly testing them. For the rest, he was going

back here; something of the cold, loose freshness got into his brain,

he believed. In the two years of absence his power of concentration had

been stronger, his perceptions more free from prejudice, gaining every

day delicate point, acuteness of analysis. He drew a long breath of

the icy air, coarse with the wild perfume of the prairie. No, his

temperament needed a subtiler atmosphere than this, rarer essence than

mere brutal freedom. The East, the Old World, was his proper sphere for

self-development. He would go as soon as he could command the means,

leaving all clogs behind. _All_? His idle thought balked here, suddenly;

the sallow forehead contracted sharply, and his gray eyes grew in an

instant shallow, careless, formal, as a man who holds back his thought.

There was a fierce warring in his brain for a moment. Then he brushed

his Kossuth hat with his arm, and put it on, looking out at the

landscape again. Somehow its meaning was dulled to him. Just then a

muddy terrier came up, and rubbed itself against his knee. "Why, Tige,

old boy!" he said, stooping to pat it kindly. The hard, shallow look

faded out, and he half smiled, looking in the dog's eyes. A curious

smile, unspeakably tender and sad. It was the idiosyncrasy of the man's

face, rarely seen there. He might have looked with it at a criminal,

condemning him to death. But he would have condemned him, and, if no

hangman could be found, would have put the rope on with his own hands,

and then most probably would have sat down pale and trembling, and

analyzed his sensations on paper,--being sincere in all.

He sat down on the school-house step, which the boys had hacked and

whittled rough, and waited; for he was there by appointment, to meet Dr.

Knowles.

Knowles had gone out early in the morning to look at the ground he was

going to buy for his Phalanstery, or whatever he chose to call it. He

was to bring the deed of sale of the mill out with him for Holmes. The

next day it was to be signed. Holmes saw him at last lumbering across

the prairie, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. Summer or

winter, he contrived to be always hot. There was a cart drawn by an old

donkey coming along beside him. Knowles was talking to the driver.

The old man clapped his hands as stage-coachmen do, and drew in long

draughts of air, as if there were keen life and promise in every breath.

They came up at last, the cart empty, and drying for the day's work

after its morning's scrubbing, Lois's pock-marked face all in a glow

with trying to keep Barney awake. She grew quite red with pleasure

at seeing Holmes, but went on quickly as the men began to talk. Tige

followed her, of course; but when she had gone a little way across

the prairie, they saw her stop, and presently the dog came back with

something in his mouth, which he laid down beside his master, and bolted

off. It was only a rough wicker-basket which she had filled with damp

plushy moss, and half-buried in it clusters of plumy fern, delicate

brown and ashen lichens, masses of forest-leaves all shaded green with a

few crimson tints. It had a clear woody smell, like far-off myrrh. The

Doctor laughed as Holmes took it up.

"An artist's gift, if it is from a mulatto," he said. "A born colorist."

The men were not at ease, for some reason; they seized on every trifle

to keep off the subject which had brought them together.

"That girl's artist-sense is pure, and her religion, down under the

perversion and ignorance of her brain. Curious, eh?"

"Look at the top of her head, when you see her," said Holmes. "It is

necessity for such brains to worship. They let the fire lick their

blood, if they happen to be born Parsees. This girl, if she had been a

Jew when Christ was born, would have known him as Simeon did."

Knowles said nothing,--only glanced at the massive head of the speaker,

with its overhanging brow, square development at the sides, and lowered

crown, and smiled significantly.

"Exactly," laughed Holmes, putting his hand on his head. "Crippled there

by my Yorkshire blood,--my mother. Never mind; outside of this life,

blood or circumstance matters nothing."

They walked on slowly towards town. Surely there was nothing in the

bill-of-sale which the old man had in his pocket but a mere matter of

business; yet they were strangely silent about it, as if it brought

shame to some one. There was an embarrassed pause. The Doctor went back

to Lois for relief.

"I think it is the pain and want of such as she that makes them

susceptible to religion. The self in them is so starved and humbled that

it cannot obscure their eyes; they see God clearly."

"Say rather," said Holmes, "that the soul is so starved and blind that

it cannot recognize itself as God."

The Doctor's intolerant eye kindled.

"Humph! So that's your creed! Not Pantheism. _Ego sum_. Of course you go

on with the conjugation: _I have been, I shall be_. I,--that covers the

whole ground, creation, redemption, and commands the hereafter?"

"It does so," said Holmes, coolly.

"And this wretched huckster carries her deity about her,--her

self-existent soul? How, in God's name, is her life to set it free?"

Holmes said nothing. The coarse sneer could not be answered. Men with

pale faces and heavy jaws like his do not carry their religion on

their tongue's end; their creeds leave them only in the slow oozing

life-blood, false as the creeds may be.

Knowles went on hotly, half to himself, seizing on the new idea

fiercely, as men and women do who are yet groping for the truth of life.

"What is it your Novalis says? 'The true Shechinah is man.' You know no

higher God? Pooh! the idea is old enough; it began with Eve. It works

slowly, Holmes. In six thousand years, taking humanity as one, this

self-existent soul should have clothed itself with a freer, royaller

garment than poor Lois's body,--or mine," he added, bitterly.

"It works slowly," said the other, quietly. "Faster soon, in America.

There are yet many ills of life for the divinity within to conquer."

"And Lois and the swarming mass yonder in those dens? It is late for

them to begin the fight?"

"Endurance is enough for them here. Their religions teach them that they

could not bear the truth. One does not put a weapon into the hands of a

man dying of the fetor and hunger of the siege."

"But what will this life, or the lives to come, give to you champions

who know the truth?"

"Nothing but victory," he said, in a low tone, looking away.

Knowles looked at the pale strength of the iron face.

"God help you, Stephen!" he broke out, his shallow jeering falling off.

"For there _is_ a God higher than we. The ills of life you mean to

conquer will teach it to you, Holmes. You'll find the Something above

yourself, if it's only to curse Him and die."

Holmes did not smile at the old man's heat,--walked gravely, steadily.

There was a short silence. The old man put his hand gently on the

other's arm.

"Stephen," he hesitated, "you're a stronger man than I. I know what you

are; I've watched you from a boy. But you're wrong here. I'm an old man.

There's not much I know in life,--enough to madden me. But I do know

there's something stronger,--some God outside of the mean devil they

call 'Me.' You'll learn it, boy. There's an old story of a man like you

and the rest of your sect, and of the vile, mean, crawling things that

God sent to bring him down. There are such things yet. Mean passions in

your divine soul, low, selfish things, that will get the better of you,

show you what you are. You'll do all that man can do. But they are

coming, Stephen Holmes! they're coming!"

He stopped, startled. For Holmes had turned abruptly, glancing over at

the city with a strange wistfulness. It was over in a moment. He resumed

the slow, controlling walk beside him. They went on in silence into

town, and when they did speak, it was on indifferent subjects, not

referring to the last. The Doctor's heat, as it usually did, boiled out

in spasms on trifles. Once he stumped his toe, and, I am sorry to say,

swore roundly about it, just as he would have done in the new Arcadia,

if one of the jail-birds comprising that colony had been ungrateful for

his advantages. Philanthropists, for some curious reason, are not the

most amiable members of small families.

He gave Holmes the roll of parchment he had in his pocket, looking

keenly at him, as he did so, but only saying, that, if he meant to sign

it, it would be done to-morrow. As Holmes took it, they stopped at the

great door of the factory. He went in alone, Knowles going down the

street. One trifle, strange in its way, he remembered afterwards.

Holding the roll of paper in his hand that would make the mill his, he

went, in his slow, grave way, down the long passage to the loom-rooms.

There was a crowd of porters and firemen there, as usual, and he thought

one of them hastily passed him in the dark passage, hiding behind an

engine. As the shadow fell on him, his teeth chattered with a chilly

shudder. He smiled, thinking how superstitious people would say that

some one trod on his grave just then, or that Death looked at him, and

went on. Afterwards he thought of it. Going through the office, the fat

old book-keeper, Huff, stopped him with a story he had been keeping for

him all day. He liked to tell a story to Holmes; he could see into a

joke; it did a man good to hear a fellow laugh like that. Holmes did

laugh, for the story was a good one, and stood a moment, then went in,

leaving the old fellow chuckling over his desk. Huff did not know how,

lately, after every laugh, this man felt a vague scorn of himself, as if

jokes and laughter belonged to a self that ought to have been dead long

ago. Perhaps, if the fat old book-keeper had known it, he would have

said that the man was better than he knew. But then,--poor Huff! He

passed slowly through the long alleys between the great looms. Overhead

the ceiling looked like a heavy maze of iron cylinders and black

swinging bars and wheels, all in swift, ponderous motion. It was enough

to make a brain dizzy with the clanging thunder of the engines, the

whizzing spindles of red and yellow, and the hot daylight glaring over

all. The looms were watched by women, most of them bold, tawdry girls

of fifteen or sixteen, or lean-jawed women from the hills, wives of the

coal-diggers. There was a breathless odor of copperas. As he went from

one room to another up through the ascending stories, he had a vague

sensation of being followed. Some shadow lurked at times behind the

engines, or stole after him in the dark entries. Were there ghosts,

then, in mills in broad daylight? None but the ghosts of Want and Hunger

and Crime, he might have known, that do not wait for night to walk our

streets: the ghosts that poor old Knowles hoped to lay forever.

Holmes had a room fitted up in the mill, where he slept. He went up

to it slowly, holding the paper tightly in one hand, glancing at the

operatives, the work, through his furtive half-shut eye. Nothing escaped

him. Passing the windows, he did not once look out at the prophetic

dream of beauty he had left without. In the mill he was of the mill.

Yet he went slowly, as if he shrank from the task waiting for him.

Why should he? It was a simple matter of business, this transfer of

Knowles's share in the mill to himself; to-day he was to decide whether

he would conclude the bargain. If any dark history of wrong lay

underneath, if this simple decision of his was to be the struggle for

life and death with him, his cold, firm face told nothing of it. Let us

be just to him, stand by him, if we can, in the midst of his desolate

home and desolate life, and look through his cold, sorrowful eyes at

the deed he was going to do. Dreary enough he looked, going through the

great mill, despite the power in his quiet face. A man who had strength

to be alone; yet, I think, with all his strength and power, his mother

could not have borne to look back from the dead that day, to see her boy

so utterly alone. The day was the crisis of his life, looked forward to

for years; he held in his hand a sure passport to fortune. Yet he thrust

the hour off, perversely, trifling with idle fancies, pushing from him

the one question which all the years past and to come had left for this

day to decide.

Some such idle fancy it may have been that made the man turn from the

usual way down a narrow passage into which opened doors from small

offices. Margaret Howth, he had learned to-day, was in the first one. He

hesitated before he did it, his sallow face turning a trifle paler; then

he went on in his hard, grave way, wondering dimly if she remembered his

step, if she cared to see him now. She used to know it,--she was the

only one in the world who ever had cared to know it,--silly child!

Doubtless she was wiser now. He remembered he used to think, that, when

this woman loved, it would be as he himself would love, with a simple

trust which the wrong of years could not touch. And once he had

thought--Well, well, he was mistaken. Poor Margaret! Better as it was.

They were nothing to each other. She had put him from her, and he had

suffered himself to be put away. Why, he would have given up every

prospect of life, if he had done otherwise! Yet he wondered bitterly if

she had thought him selfish,--if she thought it was money he cared for,

as the others did. It mattered nothing what they thought, but it wounded

him intolerably that she should wrong him. Yet, with all this, whenever

he looked forward to death, it was with the certainty that he should

find her there beyond. There would be no secrets then; she would know

then how he had loved her always. Loved her? Yes; he need not hide it

from himself, surely.

He was now by the door of the office;--she was within. Little Margaret,

poor little Margaret! struggling there day after day for the old father

and mother. What a pale, cold little child she used to be! such a child!

yet kindling at his look or touch, as if her veins were filled with

subtile flame. Her soul was like his own, he thought. He knew what it

was,--he only. Even now he glowed with a man's triumph to know he held

the secret life of this woman bare in his hand. No other human power

could ever come near her; he was secure in possession. She had put him

from her;--it was better for both, perhaps. Their paths were separate

here; for she had some unreal notions of duty, and he had too much to do

in the world to clog himself with cares, or to idle an hour in the rare

ecstasy of even love like this.

He passed the office, not pausing in his slow step. Some sudden impulse

made him put his hand on the door as he brushed against it: just a

quick, light touch; but it had all the fierce passion of a caress. He

drew it back as quickly, and went on, wiping a clammy sweat from his

face.

The room he had fitted up for himself was whitewashed and barely

furnished; it made one's bones ache to look at the iron bedstead and

chairs. Holmes's natural taste was more glowing, however smothered, than

that of any saffron-robed Sybarite. It needed correction, he knew, and

this was the discipline. Besides, he had set apart the coming three or

four years of his life to make money in, enough for the time to come. He

would devote his whole strength to that work, and so be sooner done with

it. Money, or place, or even power, was nothing but means to him: other

men valued them because of their influence on others. As his work in the

world was only the development of himself, it was different, of course.

What would it matter to his soul the day after death, if millions called

his name aloud in blame or praise? Would he hear or answer then? What

would it matter to him then, if he had starved with them or ruled over

them? People talked of benevolence. What would it matter to him then,

the misery or happiness of those yet working in this paltry life of

ours? In so far as the exercise of kindly emotions or self-denial

developed the higher part of his nature, it was to be commended; as

for its effect on others, that he had nothing to do with. He practised

self-denial constantly to strengthen the benevolent instincts. That

very morning he had given his last dollar to Joe Byers, a half-starved

cripple. "Chucked it at me," Joe said, "like as he'd give a bone to a

dog, and be damned to him! Who thanks him?" To tell the truth, you will

find no fairer exponent than this Stephen Holmes of the great idea of

American sociology,--that the object of life is _to grow_. Circumstances

had forced it on him, partly. Sitting now in his room, where he was

counting the cost of becoming a merchant prince, he could look back to

the time of a boyhood passed in the depths of ignorance and vice. He

knew what this Self within him was; he knew how it had forced him to

grope his way up, to give this hungry, insatiate soul air and freedom

and knowledge. All men around him were doing the same,--thrusting and

jostling and struggling, up, up. It was the American motto, Go ahead;

mothers taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of

glittering prizes. He at least saw the higher meaning of the truth; he

had no low ambitions. To lift this self up into a higher range of

being when it had done with the uses of this,--that was his work.

Self-salvation, self-elevation,--the ideas that give birth to, and

destroy half of our Christianity, half of our philanthropy! Sometimes

sleeping instincts in the man struggled up to assert a divinity more

terrible than this growing self-existent soul that he purified and

analyzed day by day: a depth of tender pity for outer pain; a fierce

longing for rest, on something, in something, he cared not what. He

stifled such rebellious promptings,--called them morbid. He called it

morbid, too, the passion now that chilled his strong blood, and wrung

out these clammy drops on his forehead, at the mere thought of this girl

below.

He shut the door of his room tightly: he had no time to-day for lounging

visitors.

For Holmes, quiet and steady, was sought for, if not popular, even in

the free-and-easy West; one of those men who are unwillingly masters

among men. Just and mild, always; with a peculiar gift that made men

talk their best thoughts to him, knowing they would be understood; if

any core of eternal flint lay under the simple, truthful manner of the

man, nobody saw it.

He laid the bill of sale on the table; it was an altogether practical

matter on which he sat in judgment, but he was going to do nothing

rashly. A plain business document: he took Dr. Knowles's share in the

factory; the payments made with short intervals; John Herne was to be

his indorser: it needed only the names to make it valid. Plain enough;

no hint there of the tacit understanding that the purchase-money was a

wedding dowry; even between Herne and himself it never was openly put

into words. If he did not marry Miss Herne, the mill was her father's;

that of course must be spoken of, arranged to-morrow. If he took it,

then? if he married her? Holmes had been poor, was miserably poor yet,

with the position and habits of a man of refinement. God knows it was

not to gratify those tastes that he clutched at this money. All the slow

years of work trailed up before him, that were gone,--of hard, wearing

work for daily bread, when his brain had been starving for knowledge,

and his soul dulled, debased with sordid trading. Was this to be always?

Were these few golden moments of life to be traded for the bread and

meat he ate? To eat and drink,--was that what he was here for?

As he paced the floor mechanically, some vague recollection crossed his

brain of a childish story of the man standing where the two great roads

of life parted. They were open before him now. Money, money,--he took

the word into his heart as a miser might do. With it, he was free from

these carking cares that were making his mind foul and muddy. If he had

money! Slow, cool visions of triumphs rose before him outlined on the

years to come, practical, if Utopian. Slow and sure successes of science

and art, where his brain could work, helpful and growing. Far off, yet

surely to come,--surely for him,--a day to come when a pure social

system should be universal, should have thrust out its fibres of light

knitting into one the nations of the earth, when the lowest slave should

find its true place and rightful work, and stand up, knowing itself

divine. "To insure to every man the freest development of his

faculties": he said over the hackneyed dogma again and again, while the

heavy, hateful years of poverty rose before him that had trampled him

down. "To insure to him the freest development," he did not need to wait

for St. Simon, or the golden year, he thought with a dreary gibe; money

was enough, and--Miss Herne.

It was curious, that, when this woman, whom he saw every day, came up in

his mind, it was always in one posture, one costume. You have noticed

that peculiarity in your remembrance of some persons? Perhaps you would

find, if you looked closely, that in that look or indelible gesture

which your memory has caught there lies some subtile hint of the tie

between your soul and theirs. Now, when Holmes had resolved coolly

to weigh this woman, brain, heart, and flesh, to know how much of a

hindrance she would be, he could only see her, with his artist's sense,

as delicate a bloom of coloring as eye could crave, in one immovable

posture,--as he had seen her once in some masquerade or _tableau

vivant_. June, I think it was, she chose to represent that evening,--and

with her usual success; for no woman ever knew more thoroughly her

material of shape or color, or how to work it up. Not an ill-chosen

fancy, either, that of the moist, warm month. Some tranced summer's day

might have drowsed down into such a human form by a dank pool, or on the

thick grass-crusted meadows. There was the full contour of the limbs hid

under warm green folds, the white flesh that glowed when you touched it

as if some smothered heat lay beneath, the sleeping face, the amber hair

uncoiled in a languid quiet, while yellow jasmines deepened its hue into

molten sunshine, and a great tiger-lily laid its sultry head on her

breast. June? Could June become incarnate with higher poetic meaning

than that which this woman gave it? Mr. Kitts, the artist I told you

of, thought not, and fell in love with June and her on the spot, which

passion became quite unbearable after she had graciously permitted him

to sketch her,--for the benefit of Art. Three medical students and one

attorney Miss Herne numbered as having been driven into a state

of dogged despair on that triumphal occasion. Mr. Holmes may have

quarrelled with the rendering, doubting to himself if her lip were not

too thick, her eye too brassy and pale a blue for the queen of months;

though I do not believe he thought at all about it. Yet the picture

clung to his memory.

As he slowly paced the room to-day, thinking of this woman as his

wife, light blue eyes and yellow hair and the unclean sweetness of

jasmine-flowers mixed with the hot sunshine and smells of the mill. He

could think of her in no other light. He might have done so; for the

poor girl had her other sides for view. She had one of those sharp,

tawdry intellects whose possessors are always reckoned "brilliant women,

fine talkers." She was (aside from the necessary sarcasm to keep up this

reputation) a good-humored soul enough,--when no one stood in her way.

But if her shallow virtues or vices were palpable at all to him to-day,

they became one with the torpid beauty of the oppressive summer day,

and weighed on him alike with a vague disgust. The woman luxuriated in

perfume; some heavy odor always hung about her. Holmes, thinking of her

now, fancied he felt it stifling the air, and opened the window for

breath. Patchouli or copperas,--what was the difference? The mill and

his future wife came to him together; it was scarcely his fault, if he

thought of them as one, or muttered, "Damnable clog!" as he sat down to

write, his cold eye growing colder. But he did not argue the question

any longer; decision had come keenly in one moment, fixed, unalterable.

If, through the long day, the starved heart of the man called feebly for

its natural food, he called it a paltry weakness; or if the old thought

of the quiet, pure little girl in the office below came back to him,

he--he wished her well, he hoped she might succeed in her work, he

would always be ready to lend her a helping hand. So many years (he was

ashamed to think how many) he had built the thought of this girl as his

wife into the future, put his soul's strength into the hope, as if love

and the homely duties of husband and father were what life was given

for! A boyish fancy, he thought. He had not learned then that all dreams

must yield to self-reverence and self-growth. As for taking up this life

of poverty and soul-starvation for the sake of a little love, it would

be an ignoble martyrdom, the sacrifice of a grand unmeasured life to a

shallow pleasure. He was no longer a young man now; he had no time to

waste. Poor Margaret! he wondered if it hurt her now.

He left the writing in the slow, quiet way natural to him, and after

a while stooped to pat the dog softly, who was trying to lick his

hand,--with the hard fingers shaking a little, and a smothered

fierceness in the half-closed eye, like a man who is tortured and alone.

There is a miserable drama acted in other homes than the Tuileries, when

men have found a woman's heart in their way to success, and trampled

it down under an iron heel. Men like Napoleon must live out the law of

their natures, I suppose,--on a throne or in a mill.

So many trifles that day roused the under-current of old thoughts and

old hopes that taunted him,--trifles, too, that he would not have heeded

at another time. Pike came in on business, a bunch of bills in his hand.

A wily, keen eye he had, looking over them,--a lean face, emphasized

only by cunning. No wonder Dr. Knowles cursed him for a "slippery

customer," and was cheated by him the next hour. While he and Holmes

were counting out the bills, a little white-headed girl crept shyly

in at the door, and came up to the table,--oddly dressed, in an

old-fashioned frock fastened with great horn buttons, and with an

old-fashioned anxious pair of eyes, the color of blue Delft. Holmes

smoothed her hair, as she stood beside them; for he never could help

caressing children or dogs. Pike looked up sharply,--then half smiled,

as he went on counting.

"Ninety, ninety-five, _and_ one hundred, all right,"--tying a bit of

tape about the papers. "My Sophy, Mr. Holmes. Good girl, Sophy is. Bring

her up to the mill sometimes," he said, apologetically, "on 'count of

not leaving her alone. She gets lonesome at th' house."

Holmes glanced at Pike's felt hat lying on the table: there was a rusty

strip of crape on it.

"Yes," said Pike, in a lower tone, "I'm father and mother, both, to

Sophy now."

"I had not heard," said Holmes, kindly. "How about the boys, now?"

"Pete and John's both gone West," the man said, his eyes kindling

eagerly. "'S fine boys as ever turned out of Indiana. Good eddications I

give 'em both. I've felt the want of that all my life. Good eddications.

Says I, 'Now, boys, you've got your fortunes, nothing to hinder your

bein' President. Let's see what stuff's in ye,' says I. So they're doin'

well. Wrote fur me to come out in the fall. But I'd rather scratch on,

and gather up a little for Sophy here, before I stop work."

He patted Sophy's tanned little hand on the table, as if beating some

soft tune. Holmes folded up the bills. Even this man could spare time

out of his hard, stingy life to love, and be loved, and to be generous!

But then he had no higher aim, knew nothing better.

"Well," said Pike, rising, "in case you take th' mill, Mr. Holmes,

I hope we'll be agreeable. I'll strive to do my best,"--in the old

fawning manner, to which Holmes nodded a curt reply.

The man stopped for Sophy to gather up her bits of broken China with

which she was making a tea-party on the table, and went down-stairs.

Towards evening Holmes went out,--not going through the narrow passage

that led to the offices, but avoiding it by a circuitous route. If it

cost him any pain to think why he did it, he showed none in his calm,

observant face. Buttoning up his coat as he went: the October sunset

looked as if it ought to be warm, but he was deathly cold. On the street

the young doctor beset him again, with bows and news: Cox was his name,

I believe; the one, you remember, who had such a Talleyrand nose for

ferreting out successful men. He had to bear with him but for a few

moments, however. They met a crowd of workmen at the corner, one of

whom, an old man freshly washed, with honest eyes looking out of

horn spectacles, waited for them by a fire-plug. It was Polston, the

coal-digger,--an acquaintance, a far-off kinsman of Holmes, in fact.

"Curious person making signs to you, yonder," said Cox; "hand, I

presume."

"My cousin Polston. If you do not know him, you'll excuse me?"

Cox sniffed the air down the street, and twirled his rattan, as he went.

The coal-digger was abrupt and distant in his greeting, going straight

to business.

"I will keep yoh only a minute, Mr. Holmes"----

"Stephen," corrected Holmes.

The old man's face warmed.

"Stephen, then," holding out his hand, "sence old times dawn't shame

yoh, Stephen. That's hearty, now. It's only a wured I want, but it's

immediate. Concernin' Joe Yare,--Lois's father, yoh know? He's back."

"Back? I saw him to-day, following me in the mill. His hair is gray? I

think it was he."

"No doubt. Yes, he's aged fast, down in the lock-up; goin' fast to the

end. Feeble, pore-like. It's a bad life, Joe Yare's; I wish 'n' 't would

be better to the end"----

He stopped with a wistful look at Holmes, who stood outwardly attentive,

but with little thought to waste on Joe Yare. The old coal-digger

drummed on the fire-plug uneasily.

"Myself, 't was for Lois's sake I thowt on it. To speak plain,--yoh'll

mind that Stokes affair, th' note Yare brought? Yes? Ther's none knows

o' that but yoh an' me. He's safe, Yare is, only fur yoh an' me. Yoh

speak the wured an' back he goes to the lock-up. Fur life. D' yoh see?"

"I see."

"He's tryin' to do right, Yare is."

The old man went on, trying not to be eager, and watching Holmes's face.

"He's tryin'. Sendin' him back--yoh know how _that_ 'll end. Seems like

as we'd his soul in our hands. S'pose,--what d' yoh think, if we give

him a chance? It's yoh he fears. I see him a-watchin' yoh; what d' yoh

think, if we give him a chance?" catching Holmes's sleeve. "He's old,

an' he's tryin'. Heh?"

Holmes smiled.

"We didn't make the law he broke. Justice before mercy. Haven't I heard

you talk to Sam in that way, long ago?"

The old man loosened his hold of Holmes's arm, looked up and down the

street, uncertain, disappointed.

"The law. Yes. That's right! Yoh're a just man, Stephen Holmes."

"And yet?"----

"Yes. I dun'no'. Law's right, but Yare's had a bad chance, an' he's

tryin'. An' we're sendin' him to hell. Somethin's wrong. But I think

yoh're a just man," looking keenly in Holmes's face.

"A hard one, people say," said Holmes, after a pause, as they walked on.

He had spoken half to himself, and received no answer. Some blacker

shadow troubled him than old Yare's fate.

"My mother was a hard woman,--you knew her?" he said, abruptly.

"She was just, like yoh. She was one o' th' elect, she said. Mercy's fur

them,--an' outside, justice. It's a narrer showin', I'm thinkin'."

"My father was outside," said Holmes, some old bitterness rising up in

his tone, his gray eye lighting with some unrevenged wrong.

Polston did not speak for a moment.

"Dunnot bear malice agin her. They're dead, now. It wasn't left fur her

to judge him out yonder. Yoh've yer father's eyes, Stephen, 'times.

Hungry, pitiful, like women's. His got desper't' 't th' last. Drunk

hard,--died of't, yoh know. But _she_ killed him,--th' sin was writ down

fur her. Never was a boy I loved like him, when we was boys."

There was a short silence.

"Yoh're like yer mother," said Polston, striving for a lighter tone.

"Here,"--motioning to the heavy iron jaws. "She never--let go. Somehow,

too, she'd the law on her side in outward showin', an' th' right. But I

hated religion, knowin' her. Well, ther's a day of makin' things clear,

comin'."

They had reached the corner now, and Polston turned down the lane.

"Yoh'll think o' Yare's case?" he said.

"Yes. But how can I help it," Holmes said, lightly, "if I am like my

mother here?"--putting his hand to his mouth.

"God help us, how can yoh? It's harrd to think father and mother leave

their souls fightin' in their childern, cos th' love was wantin' to make

them one here."

Something glittered along the street as he spoke: the silver mountings

of a low-hung phaëton drawn by a pair of Mexican ponies. One or two

gentlemen on horseback were alongside, attendant on a lady within. She

turned her fair face, and pale, greedy eyes, as she passed, and lifted

her hand languidly in recognition of Holmes. Polston's face colored.

"I've heered," he said, holding out his grimy hand. "I wish yoh well,

Stephen, boy. So'll the old 'oman. Yoh'll come an' see us, soon? Ye 'r'

lookin' fagged, an' yer eyes is gettin' more like yer father's. I'm glad

things is takin' a good turn with yoh; an' yoh'll never be like him,

starvin' fur th' kind wured, an' havin' to die without it. I'm glad

yoh've got true love. She'd a fair face, I think. I wish yoh well,

Stephen."

Holmes shook the grimy hand, and then stood a moment looking back to

the mill, from which the hands were just coming, and then down at the

phaëton moving idly down the road. How cold it was growing! People

passing by had a sickly look, as if they were struck by the plague. He

pushed the damp hair back, wiping his forehead, with another glance at

the mill-women coming out of the gate, and then followed the phaëton

down the hill.

* * * * *

HEALTH IN THE HOSPITAL.

In preparing to do the duty of society towards the wounded or sick

soldier, the first consideration is, What is a Military Hospital? No two

nations seem to have answered this question in the same way; yet it is a

point of the first importance to them all.

When England went to war last time, after a peace of forty years, the

only idea in the minds of her military surgeons was of Regimental

Hospitals. There was to be a place provided as an infirmary for a

certain number of soldiers; a certain number of orderlies were to be

appointed as nurses; and the regimental doctor and hospital-sergeant

were to have the charge of the inmates. In each of these Regimental

Hospitals there might be patients ill of a great variety of disorders,

from the gravest to the lightest, all to be treated by the same doctor

or doctors. These doctors had to make out statements of all the diets,

as well as all the medicines required by their patients, and send in

their requisitions; and it might be said that arrangements had to be

separately made for every individual patient in the whole army. The

doctors went to work each in his own way, even in the case of epidemics.

There was no knowing, except by guess, what diseases were the most to be

apprehended in particular places or circumstances; nor what remarkable

phenomena of disease were showing themselves on any extended scale; nor

what improvements could be suggested in the treatment. There was no

possibility of such systematic cleanliness and such absolute regularity

of management as can be secured by organization on a large scale. Yet

the medical officers preferred the plan to any other. One plea was, that

the medical officers and the patients were acquainted with and attached

to each other: and this was very true. Another consideration was, that

each surgeon liked to have his field of duty to himself, and found it an

advantage to have a large variety of ailments to treat, to the constant

improvement of his experience. They said that doctors and patients and

nurses all liked the Regimental Hospital best, and this was clear proof

that it was the best. They could at that time say also, that every

soldier and every doctor had a horror of General Hospitals, where the

mortality was so excessive during the Peninsular War that being carried

to the General Hospital was considered the same thing as being sentenced

to death.

Such being the state of opinion and feeling in the profession, it

naturally happened that British army-surgeons stuck to their Regimental

Hospitals as long as they could, and, when compelled to cooperate in a

General Hospital, made the institution as like as possible to a group

of Regimental Hospitals,--resisting all effective organization, and

baffling all the aims of the larger institution.

In busy times, no two Regimental Hospitals were alike in their

management, because the scheme was not capable of expansion. The surgeon

and his hospital-sergeant managed everything. The surgeon saw and

treated the cases, and made out his lists of articles wanted. It was his

proper business to keep the books,--to record the admissions, and make

the returns, and keep the accounts, and post up all the documents: but

professional men do not like this sort of work, when they want to be

treating disease; and the books were too often turned over to the

hospital-sergeant. His indispensable business was to superintend the

wards, and the attendance on the patients, the giving them their

medicines, etc., which most of us would think enough for one man: but he

had besides to keep up the military discipline in the establishment,--to

prepare the materials for the surgeon's duty at the desk,--to take

charge of all the orders for the diet of all the patients, and see them

fulfilled,--to keep the record of all the provisions ordered and used

in every department,--and to take charge of the washing, the hospital

stores, the furniture, the surgery, and the dispensary. In short, the

hospital-sergeant had to be at once ward-master, steward, dispenser,

sergeant, clerk, and purveyor; and, as no man can be a six-sided

official, more or fewer of his duties were deputed to the orderly, or to

anybody within call.

Nobody could dispute the superior economy and comfort of having a

concentration of patients arranged in the wards according to their

ailments, with a general kitchen, a general laundry, a dispensary and

surgery, and a staff of officials, each with his own distinct business,

instead of as many jacks-of-all-trades, each doing a little of

everything. Yet the obstinacy of the fight made by the surgeons for the

system of Regimental Hospitals was almost insuperable. There was no

desire on any hand to abolish their hospitals, which must always be

needed for slight, and also for immediately pressing cases. What was

asked of them was to give way when epidemics, or a sudden influx of

wounded, or protracted cases put a greater strain upon the system than

it would bear.

The French, meantime, had three sorts of hospitals,--the Divisional ones

coming between the Regimental and the General. Only the very slightest

cases ever enter their Regimental Hospital; those which may last weeks

are referred to the Divisional; and those which may last months, with

prospect of recovery, to the General Hospital. The Sardinian plan was

nearly the same. The Russians had Divisional Hospitals at various

stations; and all cases were carried to them.

The Regimental Hospitals are wherever the regiments are. The advantage

is, that aid can be immediately rendered,--not only in case of wounds,

but of cholera, in which it is desirable to lay a patient down in the

nearest bed to which he can be conveyed. The disadvantages are the

hap-hazard quality of the site, the absence of quiet and seclusion, and

the liability of being near the scene of conflict. These things cause

the French to prefer the Divisional Hospital, which, while still within

reach, is set farther back from the force, in a picked situation, and

managed on a large scale and with nicer exactitude.

The General Hospital is understood to be at the base of operations: and

this supposes, as a part of its organization, a system of transport, not

only good of its kind, but adequate to any demands consequent on a

great battle, or the spread of an epidemic in the camp. The nearer the

hospital is to the active force, the better, of course; but there are

conditions to be fulfilled first. It must be safe from the enemy. It

must be placed in a permanent station. It must be on a good road, and

within immediate reach of markets. It ought also to be on the way home,

for the sake of the incurable or the incapacitated who must be sent

home.

In the Regimental Hospital, the surgeon may be seen going from the man

who has lost a finger to a fever patient,--and then to one who has

ophthalmia,--passing on to a fellow raving in delirium tremens,--next to

whom is a sufferer under bronchitis, who will not be allowed to go out

of doors for weeks to come; and if half a dozen are brought in with

cholera in the course of the day, the officials do not know which way to

turn. It is possible that the surgeon may be found making starch over

the kitchen fire, because there is nobody at hand who understands how to

make starched bandages; or he may be at the desk, casting up columns of

figures, or writing returns, when he is urgently wanted at the bedside.

Such things can hardly happen now; but they have happened within ten

years. The Russians, meantime, would be carrying all manner of patients

to one of their hospital-stations,--each sufferer to the hospital of his

own division. The French would leave the men with scratches and slight

diarrhea and delirium tremens in the Regimental Hospital,--would send

the fever and bronchitis and scorbutic patients to the Divisional,--and

any gravely wounded, or rheumatic, or other very long cases to the

General Hospital at the base of operations.

Such arrangements, however, are of no use, if the last be not so

organized as to render it fit to supply what the others cannot give, and

to answer purposes which the others cannot even propose.

When doctors and soldiers alike shuddered at the mention of the General

Hospital as a necessary institution at or near the seat of war, they

were thinking of what they had seen or heard of during the Peninsular

Campaigns. There were such infirmaries wherever there was a line of

march in Spain; and they seemed to be all alike. Hospital gangrene set

in among the wounded, and fever among the sick, so that the soldiers

said, "To send a poor fellow to the hospital is to send him to death."

Yet there was nothing else to be done; for it was impossible to treat

the seriously sick and wounded at the spot where they fell. During that

war, nearly twice the number which composed the army passed through the

hospitals every year; and of these there were known deaths to the amount

of thirteen thousand five hundred; and thousands more were never the

same men again. When the case was better understood,--as during the last

year in the Crimea,--the mortality in the hospitals barely exceeded that

of the Guards in their barracks at home! Recovery had become the rule,

and death a remarkable event. General Hospitals had come to surpass all

other means of curing patients, while fulfilling their own peculiar

service to society through new generations.

What are the functions of General Hospitals, besides curing the sick and

wounded? some readers may ask, who have never particularly attended to

the subject.

The first business of such institutions is undoubtedly to restore as

many as possible of the sufferers brought into them: and this includes

the duty of bringing in the patients in the most favorable way,

receiving them in an orderly and quiet manner, doctoring, nursing,

feeding, clothing, and cleaning them, keeping their minds composed and

cheerful, and their manners creditable, promoting their convalescence,

and dismissing them in a state of comfort as to equipment. This is the

first duty, in its many subdivisions. The next is to obviate, as far as

possible, future disease in any army. The third grows out of this. It is

to improve the science of the existing generation by a full use of the

peculiar opportunities of observation afforded by the crop of sickness

and wounds yielded by an army in action. To take these in their reverse

order.

There must be much to learn from any great assemblage of sickness, under

circumstances which can be fully ascertained, even at home,--and much

more in a foreign climate. The medical body of every nation has very

imperfect knowledge of classes and modifications of diseases; so that

one of the strongest desires of the most learned physicians is for

an improved classification and constantly improving nomenclature of

diseases; and hospital-records afford the most direct way to this

knowledge. Thus, while the phenomena are frittered away among

Regimental or unorganized General Hospitals, a well-kept record in each

well-organized hospital will do more than all other means to promote the

scientific understanding of disease.

The statistics of disease in armies, the ascertainment of the numbers

who sicken and who die of particular diseases, would save more lives

in future generations than can be now appreciated; but what can the

regimental surgeon do towards furnishing any trustworthy materials to

such an inquiry? A dozen doctors, with each his smattering of patients,

can learn and teach but little while they work apart: whereas a regular

system of inquiry and record, in action where the sick are brought in in

battalions, is the best possible agency. Not only are these objects lost

when surgeons are allowed to make the great hospital a mere receptacle

for a cluster of small and desultory hospitals, but the advantages of a

broad study of diseases and their treatment are lost. Inestimable facts

of treatment are learned by watching, at the same time and in the same

place, a ward full of patients ill of the same disease. People of all

countries know this by the special learning which their physicians

obtain in large civil hospitals: and the same thing happens in military

hospitals, with the additional advantage that the information and

improved art tend to the special safety of the future soldiery, in

whatever climate they may be called on to serve.

There has long been some general notion of the duty of army-surgeons

to record what they saw in foreign campaigns; but no benefit has been

reaped till of late. The works of French field-surgeons have long been

justly celebrated; but I do not know that in the statistics and the

nomenclature of disease they have done much more than others. The

English surgeons carried or sent home in 1810 a mass of papers about the

Walcheren fever, and afterwards of the diseases of the Peninsular force:

but the Director General of the Medical Department considered such a

bulk of records troublesome, and ordered them to be burnt! Such an

act will never be perpetrated again; but directors will have a more

manageable mass of documents to deal with henceforth. With a regular

system of record, at a central station of observation, much more may be

done with much less fatigue to all parties.

But how is it to be done? may well be asked. In the hurry and confusion

of a war, and amidst the pressure of hundreds of new cases in a day,

what can the surgeons of the hospital be expected to do for science, or

even for the improvement of medical and surgical practice?--The answer

is seen in the new arrangements in England, where a statistical branch

has been established in the Army Medical Department. Of course, no one

but the practising surgeon or physician can furnish the pathological

facts in each individual case; but this is what every active and earnest

practitioner does always and everywhere, when he sees reason for it.

His note-book or hospital-journal provides that raw material which the

statistical department is to arrange and utilize. The result will be

that a flood of light will be cast on matters affecting the health and

life of soldiers and other men, in regard to which we might have gone on

groping for centuries among the confusion of regimental records, without

getting what we wanted. As to the method of proceeding, I may have

something to say farther on. Meantime, we must turn to the primary

object of the institution of the Military Hospital,--the cure of the

wounded and sick of the army.

In the case of active war, foreign or civil, the General Hospital is

usually an extemporized establishment, the building a makeshift, and

the arrangements such as the building will admit. In Spain, the British

obtained any houses they could get; and the soldiers were sometimes

crowded into half a dozen of them in one town. In the last war, the

great buildings at Scutari were engaged three months before they were

wanted for extensive use; so that there was plenty of time for making

them clean, airy, warm, and commodious, and for storing them with all

conveniences. This was not done; and the failure and its consequences

afford a lesson by which every people engaged in war should profit. A

mere outline of what was not done at Scutari may be an indication of

what should be done with all convenient speed elsewhere.

There was a catgut manufactory close at hand, which filled the

neighborhood with stench. Half a dozen dead dogs festered under the

windows in the sun; and a dead horse lay in the aqueduct for six weeks.

The drain-pipes within the building were obstructed and had burst,

spreading their contents over the floors and walls. The sloping boarded

divans in the wards, used for sleeping-places, were found, after the

building became crowded, to be a cover for a vast accumulation of dead

rats, old rags, and the dust of years. Like all large stone buildings in

the East, it was intolerably cold in winter, with its stagnant air,

its filthy damps, and its vaultings and chill floors. This wonderful

building was very grandly reported of to England, for its size and

capacity, its imposing character, and so forth; and the English

congratulated themselves on the luck of the wounded in having such a

hospital. Yet, in the next January, fourteen hundred and eighty were

carried out dead.

It appears that nobody knew how to go to work. Everybody writes to

somebody else to advise them to "observe"; and there are so many

assurances that everybody means to "observe," that there seems to have

been no leisure to effect anything. One thinks that this, that, or the

other should be attended to; and another states that the matter is

under consideration. It was some weeks before anybody got so far in

definiteness as to propose whitewash. Somebody understood that somebody

else was intending to have the corridors scoured; and representations

were to be made to the Turkish authorities about getting the drain-pipes

mended. The Turkish authorities wished to employ their own workmen in

putting in the stoves; and on the 18th of December the responsible

British officer hoped the stoves would be put up immediately, but could

not be certain, as Turkish workmen were in question. This was a month

after large companies of wounded and sick had been sent in from the seat

of war. Even then, nothing had been done for ventilation, or, on any

sufficient scale, for putting the poor sufferers comfortably to bed.

These things confirm the necessity of a regulated cooperation between

the sanitary, the medical, and the military officers of an army. The

sanitary officer should be secure of the services of engineers enough to

render the hospital, as well as the camp, safely habitable. As soon as

any building is taken possession of for a hospital, men and their tools

should be at command for exploring the drains and making new ones,--for

covering or filling up ditches,--for clearing and purifying the

water-courses, and leading in more water, if needed,--for removing all

nuisances for a sufficient distance round,--and for improving to the

utmost the means of access to the house. There must be ventilating

spaces in the roof, and in the upper part of all the wards and passages.

Every vaulted space, or other receptacle of stagnant air, should have a

current established through it. All decaying wood in the building should

be removed, and any portion ingrained with dirt should be planed clean.

A due water-supply should be carried up to every story, and provided

for the bathrooms, the wash-houses, and the kitchen. Every edifice in

America is likely to be already furnished with means of warmth; and

the soldiers are probably in no danger of shivering over the uncertain

promise of stoves on the 18th of December.

Next comes the consideration of store-place, which can be going forward

while busy hands are cleaning every inch of ceiling, walls, floors,

and windows within. There must be sheds and stables for the transport

service; and a surgery and dispensary planned with a view to the utmost

saving of time and trouble, so that medicines and utensils may be

within reach and view, and the freest access allowed to applicants. The

kitchens must have the best stoves and boilers, dressers and scales, and

apparatus of every kind that is known to the time; for more lives depend

on perfect food being administered with absolute punctuality than

upon any medical treatment. There must be large and abundant and airy

store-places for the provisions, and also for such stocks of linen and

bedding as perhaps nobody ever dreamed of before the Crimean War.

The fatal notions of Regimental Hospital management caused infinite

misery at Scutari. In entering the Regimental Hospital, the soldier

carries his kit, or can step into his quarters for it: and the

regulations, therefore, suppose him to be supplied with shirts and

stockings, towel and soap, brushes and comb. This supposition was

obstinately persevered in, at Scutari, till private charity had shamed

the authorities into providing for the men's wants. When the wounded

were brought from the Alma, embarked on crowded transports straight from

the battle-field, how could they bring their kits? Miss Nightingale,

and benevolent visitors from England, bought up at Constantinople,

and obtained from home, vast supplies of body- and bed-linen, towels,

basins, and water-cans; and till they did so, the poor patients lay on

a single blanket or coarse canvas sheet, in their one shirt, perhaps

soaked in blood and dirt. There were some stores in the hospital, though

not enough; and endless difficulty was made about granting them, lest

any man should have brought his kit, and thus have a double supply.

Amidst the emergencies of active war, it seems to be an obvious

provision that every General Hospital should have in store, with ample

bedding, body-linen enough for as many patients as can occupy the

beds,--the consideration being kept in view, that, where the sick and

wounded are congregated, more frequent changes of linen are necessary

than under any other circumstances.

The excellent and devoted managers of the hospitals of the Union army

need no teaching as to the daily administration of the affairs of

the wards. They will never have to do and dare the things that Miss

Nightingale had to decide upon, because they have happily had the

privilege of arranging their hospitals on their own principles. They

will not know the exasperation of seeing sufferers crowded together on a

wooden divan (with an under-stratum of dead rats and rotting rags) while

there is an out-house full of bedsteads laid up in store under lock and

key. Not being disposed to acquiesce in such a state of things, and

failing in all attempts to get at the authority which had charge of the

locked door, Miss Nightingale called to an orderly or two, and commanded

them to break open the door. They stared; but she said she assumed the

responsibility; and presently there were as many men in bed as there

were bedsteads. Her doctrine and practice have always been,--instant

and silent obedience to medical and disciplinary orders, without any

qualification whatever; and by her example and teaching in this respect

she at length overcame the jealousy and prejudices of authorities,

medical and military: but in such a case as the actual presence of

necessaries for the sick, sent out by Government or by private charity

for their use, she claimed the benefit, and helped her patients to it,

when there was no other obstruction in the way than forms and rules

never meant to apply to the case.

What the jealousy was appeared through very small incidents. A leading

medical officer declared, in giving evidence, that the reason why the

patients' meals were sometimes served late and cold, or half-cooked,

was, that Miss Nightingale and her nurses were forever in the way in the

general kitchen, keeping the cooks from the fire: whereas the fact was,

that neither Miss Nightingale nor any nurse had ever entered the general

kitchen, on any occasion whatever. Their way was to have a kitchen of

their own. The very idea of that kitchen was savory in the wards; for

out of it came, always at the right moment, arrowroot, hot and of the

pleasantest consistence,--rice puddings, neither hard on the one hand

nor clammy on the other,--cool lemonade for the feverish, cans full of

hot tea for the weary, and good coffee for the faint. When the sinking

sufferer was lying with closed eyes, too feeble to make moan or sign,

the hospital spoon was put between his lips, with the mouthful of strong

broth or hot wine which rallied him till the watchful nurse came round

again. The meat from that kitchen was tenderer than any other; the

beef-tea was more savory. One thing that came out of it was a lesson on

the saving of good cookery. The mere circumstance of the boiling water

being really boiling there made a difference of two ounces of rice in

every four puddings, and of more than half the arrowroot used. The same

quantity of arrowroot which made a pint, thin and poor, in the general

kitchen, made two pints, thick and good, in Miss Nightingale's.

Then there was the difference in readiness and punctuality. Owing

to cumbrous forms and awkward rules, the orderlies charged with the

business were running round almost all day about the food for their

wards; and the patients were disgusted with it at last. There were

endless orders and details, whenever the monotonous regular diet was

departed from; whereas the establishment of several regular diets,

according to the classifications in the wards, would have simplified

matters exceedingly. When everything for dysentery patients, or for

fever patients, or for certain classes of wounded was called "extra

diet," there were special forms to be gone through, and orders and

contradictions given, which threw everything into confusion, under

the name of discipline. The authority of the ward would allow some

extra,--butter, for instance; and then a higher authority, seeing the

butter, and not knowing how it came there, would throw it out of the

window, as "spoiling the men." Between getting the orders, and getting

the meat and extras, and the mutual crowding of the messengers, some

of the dinners were not put on the fire till an hour or two after the

fainting patient should have had his meal: and then, of course, he could

not take it. The cold mutton-chop with its opaque fat, the beef with its

caked gravy, the arrowroot stiff and glazed, all untouched, might be

seen by the bedsides in the afternoons, while the patients were lying

back, sinking for want of support. Probably the dinners had been brought

up on a tray, cooling all the way up-stairs and along the corridors; and

when brought in, there was the cutting up, in full view of the intended

eaters,--sometimes on the orderly's own bed, when the tables were

occupied. Under such a system, what must it have been to see the quick

and quiet nurses enter, as the clock struck, with their hot-water tins,

hot morsels ready-cut, hot plates, bright knife and fork and spoon,--and

all ready for instant eating! This was a strong lesson to those who

would learn; and in a short time there was a great change for the

better. The patients who were able to sit at table were encouraged to

rise, and dress, and dine in cheerful company, and at the proper hour.

It was discovered, that, if an alternation was provided of soups,

puddings, fish, poultry, and vegetables, with the regular beef dinner,

the great mass of trouble about extras was swept away at once; for these

varieties met every case in hospital except the small number which

required slops and cordials, or something very unusual. By this

clearance, time was saved to such an extent that punctuality became

possible, and the refusal of food almost ceased.

All these details point to the essential badness of the system of

requisitions. In the old days, when war was altogether a mass of

formalities,--and in peace times, when soldiers and their guardians had

not enough to do, and it was made an object and employment to save the

national property by hedging round all expenditure of that property with

difficulties, the system of requisitions might suit the period and the

parties. Amidst the rapid action and sharp emergencies of war it is

out of place. It was found intolerable that nothing whatever could be

had,--not a dose of medicine, nor a candle, nor a sheet, nor a spoon or

dish, nor a bit of soap,--without a series of permits, and applications,

and orders, and vouchers, which frittered away the precious hours,

depressed the sick, worried their nurses, and wasted more of money's

worth in official time, paper, and expensive cross-purposes than could

possibly have been saved by all the ostentatious vigilance of the

method. The deck-loads of vegetables at Balaklava, thrown overboard

because they were rotten before they were drawn, were not the only

stores wasted for want of being asked for. When the Scutari hospitals

had become healthy and comfortable, there was a thorough opening-out of

all the stores which had before been made inaccessible by forms. No

more bedsteads, no more lime-juice, no more rice, no more beer, no

more precious medicines were then locked away, out of the reach or the

knowledge of those who were dying, or seeing others die, for want of

them.

One miserable consequence of the cumbrous method was, that there was no

certainty at any hour of some essential commodity not falling short. It

would have been a dismal day for the most suffering of the patients when

there was not fuel enough to cook "extras," if Miss Nightingale had not

providently bought four boat-loads of wood to meet such a contingency.

It was a dreadful night in the hospital, when, as cholera patients were

brought in by the score, the surgeons found there were no candles to be

had. In that disease, of all maladies, they had to tend their patients

in the dark all night; and a more shocking scene can scarcely be

conceived.

Every great influx of patients was terrible, whether from an epidemic

or after a battle; but experience and devotedness made even this

comparatively easy before the troops turned homewards. The arrival of

a transport was, perhaps, the first intimation of the earlier battles.

Then all was hurry-skurry in the hospitals; everybody was willing to

help, but the effectual organization was not yet ready.

Of every hundred on board the transport, an average of ten had died

since leaving the Crimea. The names and causes of death of these men

ought to be recorded; but the surgeons of the transport are wholly

occupied in despatching their living charge to the hospital; and the

surgeons there have enough to do in receiving them. Attempts are made to

obtain the number and names and injuries of the new patients: there may

or may not be a list furnished from the ship; and the hospital surgeons

inquire from bed to bed: but in such a scene mistakes are sure to arise;

and it was found, in fact, that there was always more or less variation

between the numbers recorded as received or dead and the proper number.

No one could wonder at this who had for a moment looked upon the scene.

The poor fellows just arrived had perhaps not had their clothes off

since they were wounded or were seized with cholera, and they were

steeped in blood and filth, and swarming with vermin. To obtain shirts

and towels was hard work, because it had to be proved that they brought

none with them. They were laid on the floor in the corridors, as close

as they could be packed, thus breathing and contaminating the air which

was to have refreshed the wards within. If laid upon so-called sheets,

they entreated that the sheets might be taken away; for they were of

coarse canvas, intolerable to the skin. Before the miserable company

could be fed, made clean, and treated by the surgeons, many were dead;

and a too large proportion were never to leave the place more, though

struggling for a time with death. It was amidst such a scene that

Florence Nightingale refused to despair of five men so desperately

wounded as to be set aside by the surgeons. The surgeons were right. As

they said, their time was but too little for the cases which were not

hopeless. And Florence Nightingale was right in finding time, if she

could, to see whether there was really no chance. She ascertained that

these five were absolutely given over; and she and her assistants

managed to attend to them through the night. She cleaned and comforted

them, and had spoonfuls of nourishment ready whenever they could be

swallowed. By the morning round of the surgeons, these men were ready to

be operated upon; and they were all saved.

It would have been easier work at a later period. Before many months

were over, the place was ready for any number to be received in peace

and quietness. Instead of being carried from one place to another,

because too many had been sent to one hospital and too few to another,

the poor fellows were borne in the shortest and easiest way from the

boat to their beds. They were found eager for cleanliness; and presently

they were clean accordingly, and lying on a good bed, between clean,

soft sheets. They did not come in scorbutic, like their predecessors;

and they had no reason to dread hospital gangrene or fever. Every floor

and every pane in the windows was clean; and the air came in pure from

the wide, empty corridors. There was a change of linen whenever it was

desired; and the shirts came back from the wash perfectly sweet and

fresh. The cleaning of the wards was done in the mornings, punctually,

quickly, quietly, and thoroughly. The doctors came round, attended by

a nurse who received the orders, and was afterwards steady in the

fulfilment of them. The tables of the medicines of the day were hung up

in the ward; and the nurse went round to administer them with her own

hand. Where she was, there was order and quietness all day, and the

orderlies were worth twice as much as before the women came. Their

manners were better; and they gave their minds more to their business.

The nurse found time to suit each patient who wished it with a book or a

newspaper, when gifts of that sort arrived from England. Kind visitors

sat by the beds to write letters for the patients, undertaking to see

the epistles forwarded to England. When the invalids became able to rise

for dinner, it was a turning-point in their case; and they were soon

getting into the apartment where there were games and books and meetings

of old comrades. As I have said before, those who died at these

hospitals were finally scarcely more than those who died in--not the

hospitals--but the barracks of the Guards at home.

What were the changes in organization needed to produce such a

regeneration as this?

They were such as must appear to Americans very simple and easy. The

wonder will be rather that they were necessary at last than that they

should have been effected with any difficulty. But Americans have never

known what it is to have a standing army as a long-established and

prominent national institution; and they can therefore hardly conceive

of the strength of the class-spirit which grows up in the various

departments of the military organization. This jealousy, egotism, and

stiffness of prejudice were much aggravated by the long peace, in which

a great rusting of the apparatus of the system took place, without at

all impairing the complacency of those who formed a part of it. The old

medical officers were incapable, pedantic, and jealous; and no proper

relation had ever been established between them and the military

authorities. The imbecility of the system cost the lives of others than

the soldiers who died in hospital. Brave men arose, as in all such

crises, to bear the consequences of other men's mistakes, and the burden

of exposing them; and several physicians and surgeons died, far from

home, in the effort to ameliorate a system which they found unworkable.

The greatest benefactor in exhibiting evils and suggesting remedies, Dr.

Alexander, lived to return home, and instigate reforms, and receive the

honors which were his due; but he soon sank under the consequences of

his labors. So did Lord Herbert, the Secretary of War, to whom, in

conjunction with Miss Nightingale, the British army, at home, in India,

and everywhere, owes its redemption from special sickness and undue

mortality. In America the advantages may be enjoyed without tax or

drawback. The citizens are accustomed to organize themselves for action

of all sorts; and no stiff-necked classes stand in the way of good

management. The difficulty in America must rather be to understand how

anything so perverse as the management of British military hospitals ten

years ago can have existed to so late a date.

It was supposed, ten years since, that there must be nine separate

departments in every Military General Hospital, and the officials

bore titles accordingly; but there was such an odd confusion in their

functions that every one of the nine was often seen doing the business

of some other. The medical officers were drawing corks and tasting wines

and inspecting provisions, when they should have been by the bedside.

The purveyor was counting the soldiers' money, and noting its amount,

when he should have been marketing, or ordering the giving out of the

provisions for the day. The paymaster could scarcely find time to

discharge the bills, so much was his day filled up with doing eternal

sums about the stoppages in the pay of the patients. There were thirteen

kinds of stoppages in the army, three of which were for the sick in

hospital: the paymaster could never be quite certain that he had

reckoned rightly with every man to the last penny; the men were never

satisfied; and the confusion was endless. The commissariat, the

purveyor, and the paymaster were all kept waiting to get their books

made up, while soldiers were working the sums,--being called from their

proper business to help about the daily task of the stoppages. Why there

should not be one uniform stoppage out of the pay of men in hospital no

person of modern ideas could see; and the paymaster's toils would

have been lessened by more than one-half, if he had had to reckon the

deduction from the patients' pay at threepence or fourpence each, all

round, instead of having to deal with thousands per day individually,

under three kinds of charge upon the pay.

The commandant's post was the hardest,--he being supposed to control

every province, and have every official under his orders, and yet being

powerless in regard to two or three departments, the business of which

he did not understand. The officers of those departments went each his

own way; and all unity of action in the establishment was lost. This is

enough to say of the old methods.

In the place of them, a far simpler system was proposed at the end of

the war. The eternal dispute as to whether the commandant should be

military or medical, a soldier or a civilian, was set aside by the

decision that he should be simply the ablest administrator that could

be found, and be called the Governor, to avoid the military title. Why

there should be any military management of men who are sick as men, and

not as soldiers, it is difficult to see; and when the patients are about

to leave the hospital, a stated supervision from the adjutant-general's

department is all that can be required. Thus is all the jealousy between

military and medical authority got rid of. The Governor's authority must

be supreme, like that of the commandant of a fortress, or the commander

of a ship. He will not want to meddle in the doctors' professional

business; and in all else he is to be paramount,--being himself

responsible to the War-Office. The office, as thus declared, is

equivalent to three of the nine old ones, namely, the Commandant, the

Adjutant-General, and the Quartermaster-General.

Next to the Governor, the Chief Medical Officer must be the most

important man in the establishment. He is to be concerned with

professional business only, and to see that all under him are to be

devoted in the same way. For this purpose there must be an end to the

system of requisitions. There must be a Steward, taking his orders from

the Governor alone, and administering a simple and liberal system

of diets and appliances of all sorts. It is his business to provide

everything for the consumption of the establishment, and to keep the

contractors up to their duty. The Treasurer's function speaks for

itself. All the accounts and payments under the Governor's warrant are

in his charge.

There is one more office, rendered necessary by the various and active

service always going on,--the superintendent of that service, or Captain

of the Wards. He is to have the oversight of the orderlies, cooks,

washers, and storekeepers; he is to keep order throughout the house; and

he is to be referred to in regard to everything that is wanted in the

wards, except what belongs to the department of the medical officers or

the steward.

As for the medical department, there is now a training provided for such

soldiers as wish to qualify themselves for hospital duty. Formerly, the

hospital was served by such men as the military officers thought fit to

spare for the purpose; and they naturally did not send the best. These

men knew nothing of either cleaning wards or nursing patients. Their

awkwardness in sweeping and scouring and making beds was extreme; and

they were helpless in case of anything being wanted to a blister or a

sore. One was found, one day, earnestly endeavoring to persuade his

patient to eat his poultice. It is otherwise now. The women, where

there are any, ought to have the entire charge of the sweeping and

cleaning,--the housemaid's work of the wards; and as to the rest, the

men of the medical-staff corps have the means of learning how to dress

a blister, and poultice a sore, and apply plasters, lint, and bandages,

and administer medicine, and how to aid the sick in their ablutions, in

getting their meals with the least fatigue, and so on.

Of female nurses it is not necessary to say much in America, any more

than in England or France. They are not admissible into Regimental

Hospitals, in a general way; but in great military and civil hospitals

they are a priceless treasure.

The questions in regard to them are two. Shall their office be confined

to the care of the linen and stores, and the supplying of extra diets

and comforts? If admitted to officiate in the wards, how far shall that

function extend?

In England, there seems to be a strong persuasion that some time must

elapse, and perhaps a generation of doctors must pass away, before the

ministration of female nurses in military hospitals can become a custom,

or even an unquestioned good. No rational person can doubt what a

blessing it would be to the patients to have such nurses administer

nourishment, when the rough orderlies would not have discernment or

patience to give the frequent spoonful when the very life may hang upon

it. Nobody doubts that wounds would be cleansed which otherwise go

uncleansed,--that much irritation and suffering would be relieved which

there are otherwise no hands to undertake. Nobody doubts that many lives

would be saved in every great hospital from the time that fevered frames

and the flickerings of struggling vitality were put under the charge of

the nurses whom Nature made. But the difficulties and risks are great.

On the whole, it seems to be concluded by those who know best, that

only a few female nurses should be admitted into military and naval

hospitals: that they should be women of mature age and ascertained good

sense, thoroughly trained to their business: that they should be

the women who have been, or who would be, the head nurses in other

hospitals, and that they should be paid on that scale: that they should

have no responsibility,--being wholly subject to the surgeons in

ward affairs, and to their own superintendent in all others: that no

enthusiasts or religious devotees should be admitted,--because that very

qualification shows that they do not understand the business of nursing:

that everything that can be as well done by men should be done by

trained orderlies: that convalescents should, generally speaking, be

attended on by men,--and if not, that each female nurse of convalescents

should have a hundred or so in her charge, whereas of the graver cases

forty or fifty are as many as one nurse can manage, with any amount

of help from orderlies. These proposals give some idea of what is

contemplated with regard to the ordinary nurses in a General Military

Hospital. The superintendent of the nurses in each institution must be a

woman of high quality and large experience. And she will show her good

sense, in the first place, by insisting on a precise definition of her

province, that there maybe no avoidable ill-will on the part of the

medical officers, and no cause of contention with the captain of

service, or whatever the administrator of the interior may be called.

She must have a decisive voice in the choice of her nurses; and she

will choose them for their qualifications as nurses only, after being

satisfied as to their character, health, and temper.

No good nurse can endure any fuss about her work and her merits.

Enthusiasts and devotees find immediately that they are altogether out

of place in a hospital,--or, as we may now say, they would find this, if

they were ever to enter a hospital: for, in fact, they never now arrive

there. The preparation brings them to a knowledge of themselves; and the

two sorts of women who really and permanently become nurses are those

who desire to make a living by a useful and valued and well-paid

occupation, and those who benevolently desire to save life and mitigate

suffering, with such a temper of sobriety and moderation as causes them

to endure hardship and ill-usage with firmness, and to dislike praise

and celebrity at least as much as hostility and evil construction.

The best nurses are foremost in perceiving the absurdity and

disagreeableness of such heroines of romance as flourished in the press

seven years ago,--young ladies disappointed in love, who went out to

the East, found their lovers in hospital, and went off with them, to

be happy ever after, without any anxiety or shame at deserting their

patients in the wards without leave or notice. Not of this order was

Florence Nightingale, whose practical hard work, personal reserve, and

singular administrative power have placed her as high above impeachment

for feminine weaknesses as above the ridicule which commonly attends the

striking out of a new course by man or woman. Those who most honor her,

and most desire to follow her example, are those who most steadily bring

their understandings and their hearts to bear upon the work which

she began. Her ill-health has withdrawn her from active nursing and

administration; but she has probably done more towards the saving of

life by working in connection with the War-Office in private than by her

best-known deeds in her days of health. Through her, mainly, it is that

every nation has already studied with some success the all-important

subject of Health in the Camp and in the Hospital. It now lies in the

way of American women to take up the office, and, we may trust, to

"better the instruction."

* * * * *

A STORY OF THANKSGIVING-TIME.

Old Jacob Newell sat despondent beside his sitting-room fire.

Gray-haired and venerable, with a hundred hard lines, telling of the

work of time and struggle and misfortune, furrowing his pale face, he

looked the incarnation of silent sorrow and hopelessness, waiting in

quiet meekness for the advent of the King of Terrors: waiting, but not

hoping, for his coming; without desire to die, but with no dread of

death.

At a short distance from him, in an ancient straight-backed

rocking-chair, dark with age, and clumsy in its antique carvings, sat

his wife. Stiffly upright, and with an almost painful primness in dress

and figure, she sat knitting rapidly and with closed eyes. Her face was

rigid as a mask; the motion in her fingers, as she plied her needles,

was spasmodic and machine-like; the figure, though quiet, wore an air of

iron repose that was most uneasy and unnatural. Still, through the mask

and from the figure there stole the aspect and air of one who had within

her deep wells of sweetness and love which only strong training or power

of education had thus covered up and obscured. She looked of that stern

Puritanical stock whose iron will conquered the severity of New England

winters and overcame the stubbornness of its granite hills, and whose

idea of a perfect life consisted in the rigorous discharge of all

Christian duties, and the banishment, forever and at all times, of the

levity of pleasure and the folly of amusement. She could have walked,

if need were, with composure to the stake; but she could neither have

joined in a game at cards, nor have entered into a romp with little

children. All this was plainly to be seen in the stern repose of her

countenance and the stiff harshness of her figure.