THE TANGLED SKEIN
Warm balls of comfort, a thousand sheep feed on the hillside, turning
herb and green growing things into food and wool. After the shearing
and the washing, ten thousand soft strands are spun into a single
thread, and each length of thread is a promise of warmth and
protection for years to come. Then the wool-white yarn is dyed in
colors symbolizing the strength of the navy, the loyalty of the army
or the honor of the alma mater. Reeled into a skein, the wool is now
all but ready for the fingers of the knitter; it has but to be wound
in a ball. Yet here danger lurks. An inadvertent twist or a simple
tangle quickly knots the thread, unless thoughtful patience rescues.
Recklessness means hopeless disarray, and the soft fluff of warming
color becomes unkempt disorder, a confused mass from which the thread
broken again and again is extracted. The work of careful hands has
been reduced to lasting defect.
Francis Weston was reared in one of the prosperous, middle-Western
cities, on the northern bank of the Ohio. The family had succeeded
well and represented large manufacturing interests. All burdens which
money could lift were removed, from his shoulders. He finished college
in the East and entered business, never having felt a hand's weight of
responsibility. As vice-president and director in one of the banks
organized largely by the family's capital, he was free to follow his
impulses. No details demanded his attention; other minds in the bank
cared for these.
Across the river a southern town nestled in cozy comfort, having for
generations maintained a conscious superiority to its smoking,
northern neighbor. Several handsome daughters of Kentucky aristocracy
gave tangible evidence of the tone of the community, and Francis
Weston's impulses made his trips across the river increasingly
frequent. And, as it should have been, North and South were joined
closer by one more golden link, when an only daughter of Kentucky
wealth became Mrs. Weston. The marriage contract held but one
stipulation: their home was to be in the bride's village. It looked as
though one of Love's best plans had succeeded. The husband proved
deeply devoted to his wife and the new home. The bank continued to
take most excellent care of itself, and his trips north, across the
river, were but occasional. The Weston mansion and estate in every way
befitted the combined wealth of the two families, and the wife gave
much time to making it increasingly attractive, and to the training of
her good servants. The husband read much, exercised little, and the
only reason for gentle protest from the wife was his excessive
smoking.
A little daughter came, but as though Fate would say, "I am Master,"
she lived but a few days. The shock was cruel, and the father seemed
to suffer the more intensely. Mrs. Weston took her sorrow in a fine
way; she seemed to realize that she, of the two, must turn away the
threat of morbidness. But the touch of Fate was not to be denied.
Still, three years later, it would seem that nothing but thankfulness
and abounding joy should have filled the Weston home--a son came. They
named him Harold. The father's solicitude for the little fellow's life
was as pathetic as it was abnormal. The bank was now unvisited for
months by its first vice-president. As the boy grew the father gave
him more and more of himself. He was his companion in play, and
personally taught him, seriously taking up study after study, until at
sixteen Harold was well prepared for college--scholastically prepared,
we should amend--for unconsciously the father had kept him from the
normal comradeship with boys of his age. Much of excellent theory the
youth had, some wisdom beyond his years, but no knowledge of denials,
no spirit of give and take, no thought of the other fellow--his rights
and wrongs. In spite of their long walks and rides on gaited Kentucky
thoroughbreds, Harold was not physically robust, so it was decided to
send him to a southern college, and he went to Vanderbilt. During his
second year the father had a long siege of typhoid, and recovery was
pitiably imperfect. His mentality did not return with his body
strength--he remained a harmless, weak-minded man. Much care was
exercised to keep the details from Harold, though both families were
unwilling to have the broken man sent to an institution, and for four
years professional nurses attended him at home. In spite of the
mother's best efforts to distract and neutralize, the son could but
feel the unnaturalness of the home atmosphere and profoundly miss the
devotion of his father. Still from what little he did see of the
invalid, it was a relief when, four years later, an accident took him
away.
Harold Weston's college life held true to his training. Quietly
friendly, he mixed poorly; mentally well-equipped, he was an excellent
student--brilliant in some classes, good in all. Athletics and
fraternities, feeds and "femmies" dissipated none of his energies, nor
added aught to the fulness of his living. He continued his college
work until he had received both Bachelor's and Master's degrees. The
spring he was twenty-three, he returned home for the summer, an
attractive young man. A classmate had interested him in tennis, for
which he showed some natural aptitude. The year's work had taxed him
lightly. The skein of yarn gave promise of a perfect fabric.
Mother and son had a happy summer. She saw to it that the home was
alive with young folks, and one week-end party followed another.
Harold had decided to study law, and nothing indicated that he would
meet any obstacles during his course at Law School. All believed he
was sufficiently strong to take this at Yale. There were brilliant
minds in his classes--he was accustomed to lead. He dropped his
tennis, he studied hard. In his second year he began losing weight
after the holidays, and found difficulty in getting to sleep; his
appetite became irregular, and his smoking, which had been moderate
for some years, became a dependence. His nervous system was pretty
well "shot up"--it had never been case-hardened. A weight of
apprehension had become constantly present, and he let its burden
depress him miserably. One of his professors, noting his appearance,
talked with him earnestly, and with lay acumen decided his digestion
was "out of fix" and told him of a "fine New York doctor." The stomach
specialist worthily stood high in his profession. The examination was
painstaking and exhaustive; the diagnosis seemed ominous to the morbid
patient; the whole process was a revelation to him of organs and
functions and laws of eating and drinking unheard in his years of
study. "Chronic intestinal indigestion with food decomposition and
auto-intoxication, augmented by nicotine," the doctor said. There had
been a distinct lessening of efficiency in his law-school work. Study
for the first time in his life required wearying effort. He did not
feel himself, he was facing his first test, he was meeting his first
strain. For the first time the skein was being mussed.
Harold Weston began reading, indiscriminately, literature on food and
digestion and diets. The doctor had given him a strict regimen. He
began to note minutely the foods he ordered and to question the
wholesomeness of their quality and preparation. Caution and over
emphasis on details of food and habits of eating rapidly developed.
Later not only the food in the dish, but most unhappily the foods he
had swallowed were scrutinized by every alertness of sensation and
imagination, and most damagingly did he become a victim of the
unwholesome symptom-studying habit. Within two months his discerning
physician recognized that the self-interest which had started in the
physical damage of rapid eating of rich foods was developing into an
obsession more detrimental than the original physical disorder, and
thought it wise for him to discontinue study and return home to rest
for the summer. The thread was tangled.
The home-coming was not happy. From the first meal, the specialist's
warnings were in conflict with the home diet, and resentments were not
withheld from the good old dishes which had for a generation bedecked
the home table. The delicacy instinctive to the family and to his
earlier life was cast aside, and the subjects of food and its
digestion, of food-poisoning and its consequences, made unpleasant
every meal. Innocently and seriously the mother pointed to her good
health and to rugged ancestors who had lived long and hale,
unconsciously superior to food and drink. He brooked none of her
suggestions, and finally when she honestly could not see it all his
way, in the heat of his intensity he accused her of being to blame for
all his trouble: she had fed him wrong from the first; she had fed his
father wrong; the New York doctor had told him that certain mental
diseases could be caused by food-poisoning, and his father would not
have been a mental wreck, nor his own career cut short, had she only
known what wives and mothers of this generation should know, and set a
table which was not a laboratory of poison. These ideas, once
accepted, never left him. They formed a theme which, after finding
expression, recurred with ominously increasing frequency. A year
before, Harold Weston was a kindly fellow, almost retiring, but with a
peculiar lighting of his face in response which endeared him to
feminine hearts. On a variety of subjects he was well-informed, his
professors bespoke for him a high and honorable standing in the
judiciary, but, from the mass of this fine mind's possibilities, a
second wretched choice was now made. "Father's typhoid affected his
mind, his brain must have been defective; my heredity is imperfect; my
first illness damages my class work. I can never go on in my
profession, there is no future for me but suffering." From this
wrecking thought it was an easy step to condemnation of his father for
his fatherhood, which, with his near-enmity toward his mother for her
"criminal ignorance" in rearing him, introduced a sordidly
demoralizing element into his mind which forever viciously tinctured
memories and relations which should have been his sacred helpers. The
normal mind can select well its world--miserably his mind lived with
these dregs of his own choice. The power of normal selection will, in
the best mind, be gradually lost through habitual surrender to the
morbid.
For the next year he lived unhappily in a home which he made unhappy.
Naturally thoughtful, he daily took long walks, brooding over his
wrongs--walks which brought him little benefit physically, as he
considered himself unable to put into them sufficient effort to wring
perspiration from his brow or toxins from his muscles. False
interpretation of his own symptoms increased with the abnormal
closeness of his scrutiny of them. His superficial knowledge he
accepted as final. Ignorant of the limitations of heredity, will and
judgment became subservient to pessimism, and the days marked a
gradual, deepening depression. The skein was asnarl.
A relative physician responded to the mother's call of distress and
spent a week in the home, then took Harold under his personal care to
a series of specialists--but not stomach specialists. Serious
treatment was carried out at home with a young physician as companion.
Two institutions offered the best help of their elaborate equipments
and perfected methods. Three years of badly discounted usefulness
passed. Long since had any call of responsibility ceased to elicit
response. Toward the end of this time he seemed better, and was
spending the summer at a health-resort, living a relatively normal
life. Fate then seemed to smile--dainty fingers appeared from the
nowhere, which promised gently, patiently, surely to loosen each
tangled snarl.
Eva Worth was another only child of affluence. She, too, was
recuperating, spending the summer at the same resort as Harold.
"Overwork at college," it was said. Petite of person, pleasing in
manner, sweetly spoiled, with sympathies quickly born but usually
displaced by fresher interests, she was bright and responsive in mind,
and her attraction to Harold Weston gave promise of being the touch
needed to complete his restoration. Providence only knows the
possibilities latent in a union of these poor children of wealth. For
him there was an unquestioned awakening. The somber clouds of his
moods seemed destined to be transformed into delicate pastels by the
promises of love. It was more than an infatuation for them both, and
an understanding which was virtually an engagement left them happy
even in their parting. But happiness was not a word for Harold
Weston's conjuring. Throughout the weeks of his association with this
fair girl, the first woman for whom he had ever cared, the thought had
repeatedly come that he owed her a full and explicit explanation of
his illness and of his "defective heredity." At home where the
brooding habit had grown strong and fixed, this idea became so
insistent, within two weeks, that he relieved the tension of its
demands by a long letter of details, which even to the sympathetic ear
of love were more than disquieting. The letter ended with a question
of her willingness to indicate a final decision in her response. The
appeal of his fine eyes was not there to help--other eyes were nearer.
Eva Worth was but twenty-two. Home training, the reading of much fine
literature, a college education, her own poor little heart, all failed
to bespeak for her wisdom in this crisis. An impulsive, almost
resentful refusal was sent. Second thoughts held more wisdom, for
woman's pity was now wisdom, so another day saw another letter, one
with a few saving words of hope. The first reply was handed to Harold
after luncheon. Quietly he left the house, apparently for one of his
afternoon walks. By morning he had not returned and a general alarm
went out. Some days later two boys, fishing in the river from an old
log, saw a cap in an eddy. No more has been seen or heard of Harold
Weston. A hasty hand, a hasty touch had broken the thread.
Two women were left to suffer. The elder, haunted by the re-echoings
of an only son's condemnation, lives out her years in a loneliness
which will not break, harrowed by questions of the wisdom of her
mother-love, the best she had to give. Some mother's son she may yet
help save, for she knows the vital error which shielded and guarded
her boy till he reached his majority, never having met trial,
hopelessly untrained in coping with adversity. The younger, sobered by
the voice of self-accusation, ever feels the weight of the
consciousness of a grave duty slighted; she was made more wise in a
day of deep reality than by twenty years of conventional training.
Tested again she would give as she has never known giving, give that
she might protect.