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.
* * * * *
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.