DOCTORS AND BOYS.
Here were two elements of Barton society with which Mr. Crupp had not
been so successful as he had hoped; these were the doctors, and that
elastic body known as “the boys.” Individually, the physicians had
promised well at first; all of them but one were members of the Barton
Division of the Sons of Temperance, and the Division rooms afforded
the only floor upon which Dr. White, the allopathist, Dr. Perry, the
homeopathist, and Dr. Pykem, the water-cure physician, ever could meet
amicably, for they belonged to separate churches. Old Dr. Matthews,
who had retired from practice, was not a “Son,” only because he was a
conscientious opponent of secret societies; but he had signed every
public pledge ever circulated in Barton, and he had never drunk a
drop of liquor in his life. All the physicians freely admitted to Mr.
Crupp that alcohol was a never-failing cause of disease, or at least
of physical deterioration; all declared that no class of maladies
were so incurable, and so depressing to the spirits of the medical
practitioner, as those to which habitual drinkers, even those who
were never drunk, were subject; but--they really did not see what
more they, the physicians of Barton, could do than they were already
doing. Crupp discussed the matter with Parson Wedgewell, and the parson
volunteered to preach a sermon to physicians from the text, “Give
wine unto those that be of heavy hearts,” a text which had suggested
itself to him, or, rather, had been providentially suggested to him
on the occasion of his very first interview with Crupp, and which was
outlined in his mind in a manner suggestive of delightful subtleties
and a startling application. But when Crupp sounded the doctors as to
whether such a discourse would be agreeable, Dr. White said he would
be glad to listen to the eloquent divine; but he was conscientiously
opposed to appearing, even by the faintest implication, to admit that
the homeopathist was a physician at all. Dr. Perry felt his need, as a
partaker in the fall of Adam, to being preached to from any portion of
the inspired Word; but he could not sit in an audience to which such
a humbug as Pykem could be admitted in an official capacity; while
Dr. Pykem said that he would rejoice to encourage the preacher by his
presence, if he thought any amount of preaching would do any good
to a remorseless slaughterer like White, or an idiotic old potterer
like Perry. Then Mr. Crupp tried another plan: he himself organized
a meeting in which the exercises were to consist of short addresses
upon the physical bearing of intemperance, the addresses to be made
by “certain of our fellow-citizens who have had many opportunities
for special observation in this direction.” Even then Drs. White and
Perry objected to sitting on the same platform with Dr. Pykem, who had
never attended any medical school of any sort, and who would probably
say something utterly ridiculous in support of his own senseless
theories, and thus spoil the effect of the physiological facts and
deductions which Drs. Perry and White each admitted that the other
might be intellectually capable of advancing. Crupp arranged the matter
amicably, however, by having Pykem make the first address, during
which the other two physicians were to occupy back seats, where they
might, while unobserved, take notes of such of Pykem’s heresies as
they might deem it necessary to combat: he further arranged that,
immediately after Pykem had concluded, he was to be called away to a
patient, provided for the occasion. Still more--and great would have
been the disgust of White and Perry had they known of it--Crupp laid so
plainly before Pykem the necessities of the community, and the duty,
not only Christian, but of the simplest manliness, also, that men of
any intelligence owed to their fellow-men, that Pykem, who with all
his hobbies was a man of Christian belief and humane heart, confined
himself solely to the preventive efficacy of external applications
of water, not unmixed with soap, in the case of persons who felt
toward alcohol a craving which they could not logically explain; he
thus delivered an address which might, with cause, be repeated in
every community in the United States. Then Dr. Perry, whose forte was
experimental physiology, read whole tables of statistics based upon
systematic observations; and Dr. White unrolled and explained some
charts and plates of various internal organs, naturally unhandsome
in themselves, which had been injured by alcohol. It was declared by
close observers that for a few days after this meeting the demand for
sponges and toilet soap exceeded the experience of the old and single
apothecary of the village, and that liquor-sellers looked either sober
or savage, according to their respective natures.
But the boys! Crupp found himself in time really disposed to ask
Pastors Wedgewell and Brown whether there wasn’t Scriptural warrant for
the supposition that Job obtained his sons by marrying a widow with a
grown-up family. “The boys” numbered about a hundred specimens, ranging
in age from fourteen years to forty; no two were alike in disposition,
as Crupp had long known; they came from all sorts of peculiar social
conditions that warred against their physical and moral well-being;
some of them seemed wholly corrupt, and bent upon corrupting others;
many more exhibited a faculty for promising which could be matched in
magnitude only by their infirmity of performance. By a vigorous course
of individual exhortation, the burden of which was that everybody knew
they drank because they were too cowardly to refuse, and that nobody
despised them so heartily as the very men who sold them the rum,
Crupp lessened the number of drinking boys by about one-fourth, thus
rescuing those who were easiest to save and most worth saving, but the
remainder made as much trouble as the collective body had done. Crupp
scolded, pleaded, and argued; he hired some boys to drop liquor for at
least a stated time; he importuned some of the more refined citizens
to interest themselves socially in certain boys; he lent some of these
boys money with which to buy clothing which would bring their personal
appearance up to the Barton standard of respectability, and he covertly
excited some of the merchants up to a genuine interest in certain boys,
by persuading them to sell to said boys coats, boots, and hats on
credits nominally short.
He enjoyed the hearty co-operation of the village pastors, all of
whom preached sermons to young men and to parents; but his principal
practical assistance came, quite unexpectedly, from old Bunley. Bunley
had not yet succeeded in finding anything to do, and, as he had on his
hands all of his time which was not needed at the family woodpile,
he went around talking to the boys. Bunley had been, according to
the Barton classification, a “boy” himself; he had drunk in a not
remote day with any boy who invited him; he knew more jolly songs
than any other half dozen inebriates in the village, and was simply
oppressed with the load of good (bad) stories which he never tired of
telling; he had been always ready to play cards with any boy, and
had come to be regarded, among the youngsters, as “the best fellow
in the village.” Now that he had reformed, his success in reforming
boys was simply remarkable--so much so that Parson Wedgewell began to
tremble over the thought that Bunley, by the present results of the
experience of his sinful days, might demonstrate, beyond the hope of
refutation, the dreadful proposition that it was better that a man
should be a sinner in his youth, so as to know how to be a saint when
he became old. This idea Parson Wedgewell laid, with much trepidation,
before the Reverend Timotheus Brown, and the two old saints and new
friends had a delightfully doleful time on their knees over it, until
there occurred to the Reverend Timotheus Brown a principle which he
proceeded to formulate as follows: The greater the capacity of a
misguided faculty for evil, the greater the good the same faculty may
accomplish when in its normal condition. To be sure, the discovery was
not original with him; the same statement had been made by peripatetic
phrenologists at Barton; indeed, it was visible, to one who could read
rather than merely repeat words, in every chapter of the Bible so dear
to this good old man; but the illusion under which Parson Brown was
allowed to labor worked powerfully for his own good and for that of
the community, for from that time forth both he and Parson Wedgewell
displayed their greatest earnestness in work with cases apparently the
most hopeless. These they found among “the boys,” and harder work no
reformer ever laid out for himself. The ingenuity, the persistence,
the determined brutality of some of the boys, the logical acuteness
displayed in varied fits of deception, only stimulated the old man
to greater industry, and slowly, after hard work, often after work
that seemed more like hard fighting, but yet surely, Parson Brown
reformed one after another of several hard cases. The villagers,
most of whom considered that their whole duty consisted in critical
observation, applauded handsomely, and Bunley was astonished, and felt
considerably mortified at the marked success of his new rival, while
Parson Wedgewell found it necessary to pray earnestly that unchristian
jealousy might be banished from his own mind. But to Parson Brown
the greatest triumph occurred when Crupp--Crupp, the literalist,
the hard-headed, the man who trusted in the arm of flesh, the man
of action, he who slightingly received any suggestions of special
thank-offerings of prayer for special services received--Crupp came to
him by night--it reminded Parson Brown of Nicodemus--and exclaimed,
“It’s no use, Parson; I’ve done my best on Frank Pughger, but he’s a
goner if God don’t put in a special hand. I’ll turn him over to you, I
guess.”