Kitabı oku: «The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York», sayfa 17

XXVII.
A BAD CASE

Notwithstanding Phillida's efforts to the contrary, the most irrelevant things were sufficient to send her thoughts flitting – like homing pigeons that can ply their swift wings in but one direction – toward Millard, or toward that past so thickly peopled by memories of him. Now that Eleanor Arabella Bowyer, Christian Scientist and metaphysical healer of ailments the substantial existence of which she denied, had cast a shadow upon her, Phillida realized for the first time the source of that indignant protest of Millard's which had precipitated the breaking of their engagement. Her name was on men's lips in the same class with this hard-cheeked professor of religious flummery, this mercenary practitioner of an un-medical imposture calculated to cheat the unfortunate by means of delusive hopes. How such mention of her must have stung a proud-spirited lover of propriety like Millard! For the first time she could make allowance and feel grateful for his chivalrous impulse to defend her.

No child is just like a parent. Phillida differed from her strenuous father in nature by the addition of esthetic feeling. Her education had not tended to develop this, but it made itself felt. Her lofty notions of self-sacrifice were stimulated by a love for the sublime. Other young girls read romances; Phillida tried to weave her own life into one. The desire for the beautiful, the graceful, the externally appropriate, so long denied and suppressed, furnished the basis of her affection for Millard. A strong passion never leaves the nature the same, and under the influence of Millard her esthetic sense had grown. Nothing that Eleanor Arabella Bowyer had said assailed the logical groundwork of her faith. But during the hours following that conversation it was impossible for her to reflect with pleasure, as had been her wont, on the benefits derived from her prayers by those who had been healed in whole or in part through her mediation. A remembrance of the jargon of the Christian Scientist mingled with and disturbed her meditations; the case of a belief in rheumatism and the case of a belief in consumption with goitre stood grinning at her like rude burlesques of her own cures, making ridiculous the work that had hitherto seemed so holy. But when the morrow came she was better able to disentangle her thoughts of healing from such phrases as "the passive impressible state" and "interior perception." And when at length the remembrance of Miss Bowyer had grown more dim, the habitual way of looking at her work returned.

One morning about ten days later, while she was at breakfast, the basement door-bell was rung, and when the servant answered it Phillida heard some one in the area, speaking with a German accent.

"Please tell Miss Callender that Rudolph Schulenberg will like to speak with her."

Phillida rose and went to the door.

"Miss Callender," said Rudolph, "Mina is so sick for three days already and she hopes you will come to her right away this morning, wunst, if you will be so kind."

"Certainly I will. But what is the matter with her? Is it the old trouble with the back?"

"No; it is much worse as that. She has got such a cough, and she can not breathe. Mother she believe that Mina is heart-sick and will die wunst already."

"I will come in half an hour or so."

"If you would. My mother her heart is just breaking. But Mina is sure that if Miss Callender will come and pray with her the cough will all go away wunst more already."

Phillida finished her breakfast in almost total silence, and then without haste left the house. She distinctly found it harder to maintain her attitude of faith than it had been. But all along the street she braced herself by prayer and meditation, until her spirit was once more wrought into an ecstasy of religious exaltation. She mounted the familiar stairs, thronged now with noisy-footed and vociferous children issuing from the various family cells on each level to set out for school.

"How do you do, Mrs. Schulenberg?" said Phillida, as she encountered the mother on the landing in front of her door. "How is Wilhelmina?"

"Bad, very bad," whispered the mother, closing the door behind her and looking at Phillida with a face laden with despair. Then alternately wiping her eyes with her apron and shaking her head ominously, she said: "She will never get well this time. She is too bad already. She is truly heart-sick."

"Have you had a doctor?"

"No; Mina will not have only but you. I tell her it is no use to pray when she is so sick; she must have a doctor. But no."

"How long has she been sick?"

"Well, three or four days; but she was not well" – the mother put her hand on her chest – "for a week. She has been thinking you would come." Mrs. Schulenberg's speech gave way to tears and a despairing shaking of the head from side to side.

Phillida entered, and found Mina bolstered in her chair, flushed with fever and gasping for breath. The sudden change in her appearance was appalling.

"I thought if you would come, nothing would seem too hard for your prayers. O Miss Callender," – her voice died to a hoarse whisper, – "pray for me, I wanted to die wunst already; you remember it. But ever since I have been better it has made my mother and Rudolph so happy again. If now I die what will mother do?"

The spectacle of the emaciated girl wrestling for breath and panting with fever, while her doom was written upon her face, oppressed the mind of Phillida. Was it possible that prayer could save one so visibly smitten? She turned and looked at the mother standing just inside the door, her face wrung with the agony of despair while she yet watched Phillida with eagerness to see if she had anything to propose that promised relief. Then a terrible sense of what was expected of her by mother and daughter came over her mind, and her spirits sank as under the weight of a millstone.

Phillida was not one of those philanthropists whom use has enabled to look on suffering in a dry and professional way. She was most susceptible on the side of her sympathies. Her depression came from pity, and her religious exaltation often came from the same source. After a minute of talk and homely ministry to Wilhelmina's comfort, Phillida's soul rose bravely to its burden. The threat of bereavement that hung over the widow and her son, the shadow of death that fell upon the already stricken life of the unfortunate young woman, might be dissipated by the goodness of God. The sphere into which Phillida rose was not one of thought but one of intense and exalted feeling. The sordid and depressing surroundings – the dingy and broken-backed chairs, the cracked and battered cooking-stove, the ancient chest of drawers without a knob left upon it, the odor of German tenement cookery and of feather-beds – vanished now. Wilhelmina, for her part, held Phillida fast by the hand and saw no one but her savior, and Phillida felt a moving of the heart that one feels in pulling a drowning person from the water, and that uplifting of the spirit that comes to those of the true prophetic temperament. She read in a gentle, fervent voice some of the ancient miracles of healing from the English columns of the leather-covered German and English Testament, while the exhausted Wilhelmina still held her hand and wrestled for the breath of life.

Then Phillida knelt by the well-worn wooden-bottom chair while Mrs. Schulenberg knelt by a stool on the other side of the stove, burying her face in her apron. Never was prayer more sincere, never was prayer more womanly or more touching. As Phillida proceeded with her recital of Wilhelmina's sufferings, as she alluded to the value of Mina to her mother and the absent Rudolph, and then prayed for the merciful interposition of God, the mother sobbed aloud, Phillida's faith rose with the growing excitement of her pity, and she closed the prayer at length without a doubt that Mina would be cured.

"I do feel a little better now," said Wilhelmina, when the prayer was ended.

"I will bring you something from the Diet Kitchen," said Phillida as she went out. The patient had scarcely tasted food for two days, but when Phillida came back she ate a little and thought herself better.

Phillida came again in the afternoon, and was disappointed not to find Mina improving. But the sick girl clung to her, and while Phillida remained she would have nothing even from the hand of her mother. The scene of the morning was repeated; again Phillida prayed, again Wilhelmina was a little better, and ate a little broth from the hands of her good angel.

The burden of the poor girl and her mother rested heavily on Phillida during the evening and whenever she awakened during the night. Mrs. Callender and Agatha only asked how she found Wilhelmina; they thought it best not to intrude on the anxiety in Phillida's mind, the nature of which they divined.

When breakfast was over the next morning Phillida hastened again to the Schulenbergs.

"Ah! it is no good this time; I shall surely die," gasped Wilhelmina, sitting bolstered on her couch and looking greatly worse than the day before. "The night has been bad. I have had to fight and fight all the long night for my breath. Miss Callender, my time has come."

The mother was looking out of the window to conceal her tears. But Phillida's courage was of the military sort that rises with supreme difficulty. She exhorted Wilhelmina to faith, to unswerving belief, and then again she mingled her petitions with the sobs of the mother and the distressful breathing of the daughter. This morning Wilhelmina grew no better after the prayer, and she ate hardly two spoonfuls of the broth that was given her. She would not take it from Phillida this time. Seeing prayers could not save her and that she must die, the instincts of infancy and the memories of long invalidism and dependence were now dominant, and she clung only to her mother.

"You haf always loved me, mother; I will haf nobody now any more but you, my mother, the time I haf to stay with you is so short. You will be sorry, mother, so sorry, when poor unfortunate Wilhelmina, that has always been such a trouble, is gone already."

This talk from the smitten creature broke down Phillida's self-control, and she wept with the others. Then in despondency she started home. But at the bottom of the stairs she turned back and climbed again to the top, and, re-entering the tenement, she called Mrs. Schulenberg to her. "You'd better get a doctor."

Wilhelmina with the preternaturally quick hearing of a feverish invalid caught the words and said: "No. What is the use? The doctor will want some of poor Rudolph's money. What good can the doctor do? I am just so good as dead already."

"But, Wilhelmina dear," said Phillida, coming over to her, "we have no right to leave the matter this way. If you die, then Rudolph and your mother will say, 'Ah, if we'd only had a doctor!'"

"That is true," gasped Mina. "Send for Dr. Beswick, mother."

A neighbor was engaged to carry the message to Dr. Beswick in Seventeenth street, and Phillida went her way homeward, slowly and in dejection.

XXVIII.
DR. BESWICK'S OPINION

Dr. Beswick of East Seventeenth street was a man from the country, still under thirty, who had managed to earn money enough to get through the College of Physicians and Surgeons by working as a school-teacher between times. Ambitious as such self-lifted country fellows are apt to be, he had preferred to engage in the harsh competition of the metropolis in hope of one day achieving professional distinction. To a poor man the first necessity is an immediate livelihood. Such favorite cross-streets of the doctors as Thirty-fourth, and the yet more fashionable doctor-haunted up-and-down thoroughfares, were for long years to come far beyond the reach of a man without money or social backing, though Beswick saw visions of a future. He had planted himself in Mackerelville, where the people must get their medical advice cheap, and where a young doctor might therefore make a beginning. The sweetheart of his youth had entered the Training School for Nurses just when he had set out to study medicine. They two had waited long, but she had saved a few dollars, and at the end of his second year in practice, his income having reached a precarious probability of five hundred a year, they had married and set up office and house together in two rooms and a dark closet. There were advantages in this condensed arrangement, since the new Mrs. Beswick could enjoy the husband for whom she had waited so long and faithfully, by sitting on the lounge in the office whenever she had sedentary employment – the same lounge that was opened out at night into a bed. Both of the Beswicks were inured to small and hard quarters, and even these they had been obliged to share with strangers; since, therefore, they must lead a kind of camp life in the crowded metropolis they found it delightful to season their perpetual picnic with each other's society. And, moreover, two rooms for two people seemed by comparison a luxury of expansion. When youth and love go into partnership they feel no hardships, and for the present the most renowned doctor in Madison Avenue was probably something less than half as happy as these two lovers living in a cubbyhole with all the world before them, though but precious little of it within their reach beyond two well-worn trunks, three chairs, a table, and a bedstead lounge.

Dr. Beswick was profoundly unknown to fame, but he was none the less a great authority on medicine as well as on most other things in the estimation of Mrs. Beswick, and, for that matter, of himself as well. He liked, as most men do, to display his knowledge before his wife, and to her he talked of his patients and of the good advice he had given them and how he had managed them, and sometimes also of the mistakes of his competitors; and he treated her to remarks on that favorite theme of the struggling general practitioner, the narrowness of the celebrated specialists. When he came back from his visit to Wilhelmina it was with a smile lighting up all that was visible of his face between two thrifty patches of red side-whiskers.

"The patient is not very sick, I should say from your face," was Mrs. Beswick's remark as she finished sewing together the two ends of a piece of crash for a towel. For this towel the doctor had made a kind of roller, the night before, by cutting a piece off a broken mop-stick and hanging it on brackets carved with his jack-knife and nailed to the closet-door. "I can always tell by your face the condition of the patient," added Mrs. Beswick.

"That's where you're mistaken this time, my love," he said triumphantly. "The Schulenberg girl will die within two weeks." And he smiled again at the thought.

"What do you smile so for? You are not generally so glad to lose a patient," she said, holding up the towel for his inspection, using her hand and forearm for a temporary roller to show it off.

"Oh! no; not that," he said, nodding appreciatively at the towel while he talked of something else. "I suppose I ought to be sorry for the poor girl, and her mother does take on dreadfully. But this case'll explode that faith-quackery if anything can. The Christian Science doctor, Miss Cullender, or something of the sort, made her great sensation over this girl, who had some trouble in her back and a good deal the matter with her nerves."

"She's the one there was so much talk about, is she?" asked Mrs. Beswick, showing more animation than sympathy.

"Yes; when her mind had been sufficiently excited she believed herself cured, and got up and even walked a little in the square. That's what gave the woman faith-doctor her run. I don't know much about the faith-doctor, but she's made a pretty penny, first and last, out of this Schulenberg case, I'll bet. Now the girl's going to die out of hand, and I understand from the mother that the faith-cure won't work. The faith-doctor's thrown up the case."

"I suppose the faith-doctor believes in herself," said the wife.

"Naah!" said the doctor with that depth of contempt which only a rather young man can express. "She? She's a quack and a humbug. Making money out of religion and tomfoolery. I'll give her a piece of my mind if she ever crosses my track or meddles with my patients."

Crowing is a masculine foible, and this sort of brag is the natural recreation of a young man in the presence of femininity.

Two hours later, a frugal dinner of soup and bread and butter having been served and eaten in the mean time, and Mrs. Beswick having also washed a double set of plate, cup, saucer, knife, and fork, – there were no tumblers; it seemed more affectionate and social in this turtle-dove stage to drink water from a partnership cup, – the afternoon hung a little heavy on their hands. It was not his day at the dispensary, and so there was nothing for the doctor to do but to read a medical journal and wait for patients who did not come, while his wife sat and sewed. They essayed to break the ennui a little by a conversation which consisted in his throwing her a kiss upon his hand, now and then, and her responding with some term of endearment. But even this grew monotonous. Late in the afternoon the bell rang, and the doctor opened the door. There entered some one evidently not of Mackerelville, a modestly well-dressed young lady of dignified bearing and a gentle grace of manner that marked her position in life beyond mistake. Mrs. Beswick glanced hurriedly at the face, and then made a mental but descriptive inventory of the costume down to the toes of the boots, rising meanwhile, work in hand, to leave the room.

"Please don't let me disturb you," said the newcomer to the doctor's wife; "don't go. What I have to say to the doctor is not private."

Mrs. Beswick sat down again, glad to know more of so unusual a visitor.

"Dr. Beswick, I am Miss Callender," said the young lady, accepting the chair the doctor had set out for her. "I called as a friend to inquire, if you don't mind telling me, what you think of Wilhelmina Schulenberg."

When Dr. Beswick had made up his mind to dislike Miss Callender and to snub her on the first occasion in the interest of science and professional self-respect, he had not figured to himself just this kind of a person. So much did she impress him that if it had not been for the necessity he felt to justify himself in the presence of his wife he might have put away his professional scruples. As it was he colored a little, and it was only after a visible struggle with himself that he said:

"You know, Miss Callender, that I am precluded by the rules of the profession from consultation with one who is not a regular practitioner."

Miss Callender looked puzzled. She said, "I did not know that I was violating proprieties. I did not know the rules were so strict. I thought you might tell me as a friend of the family."

"Don't you think you might do that, dear?" suggested Mrs. Beswick, who felt herself drawn to this young lady, for Miss Callender had won her heart by an evident deference for Dr. Beswick's position and professional knowledge, and she was touched by a certain sadness in the face and voice of the visitor.

The doctor relented when he found that his wife would sustain him in it.

"I may answer your question if you ask it merely as a friend of the patient, but not as recognizing your standing as a practitioner," he said.

Phillida answered with a quick flush of pain and surprise, "I am not a practitioner, Dr. Beswick. You are under some mistake. I know nothing about medicine."

"I didn't suppose you did," said the doctor with a smile. "But are you not what they call a Christian Scientist?"

"I? I hate what they call Christian Science. It seems to me a lot of nonsense that nobody can comprehend. I suppose it's an honest delusion on the part of some people and a mixture of mistake and imposture on the part of others."

"You have made a pretty good diagnosis, if you are not a physician," said Dr. Beswick, laughing, partly at Phillida's characterization of Christian Science and partly at his own reply, which seemed to him a remark that skillfully combined wit with a dash of polite flattery. "But, Miss Callender, – I beg your pardon for saying it, – people call you a faith-doctor."

"Yes; I know," said Phillida, compressing her lips.

"Did you not treat this Schulenberg girl as a faith-healer?"

"I prayed for her as a friend," said Phillida, "and encouraged her to believe that she might be healed if she could exercise faith. She did get much better."

"I know, I know," said the doctor in an offhand way; "a well-known result of strong belief in cases of nerve disease. But, pardon me, you have had other cases that I have heard of. Now don't you think that the practice of faith-healing for – for – compensation makes you a practitioner?"

"For compensation?" said Phillida, with a slight gesture of impatience. "Who told you that I took money?"

It was the doctor's turn to be confounded.

"I declare, I don't know. Don't you take pay, though?"

"Not a cent have I ever taken directly or indirectly." Phillida's already overstrained sensitiveness on this subject now broke forth into something like anger. "I would not accept money for such a service for the world," she said. "In making such an unwarranted presumption you have done me great wrong. I am a Sunday-school teacher and mission worker. Such services are not usually paid for, and such an assumption on your part is unjustifiable. If you had only informed yourself better, Dr. Beswick – "

"I am very sorry," broke in the doctor. "I didn't mean to be offensive. I – "

"Indeed, Miss Callender," said Mrs. Beswick, speaking in a pleasant, full voice and with an accent that marked her as not a New Yorker, "he didn't mean to be disrespectful. The doctor is a gentleman; he couldn't be disrespectful to a lady intentionally. He didn't know anything but just what folks say, and they speak of you as the faith-doctor and the woman doctor, you see. You must forgive the mistake."

This pleading of a wife in defense of her husband touched a chord in Phillida and excited an emotion she could not define. There was that in her own heart which answered to this conjugal championship. She could have envied Mrs. Beswick her poverty with her right to defend the man she loved. She felt an increasing interest in the quiet, broad-faced, wholesome-looking woman, and she answered:

"I know, Mrs. Beswick, your husband is not so much to blame. I spoke too hastily. I am a little too sensitive on that point. I don't pretend to like to be talked about and called a faith-doctor."

There was an awkward pause, which the doctor broke by saying presently in a subdued voice:

"In regard to your perfectly proper question, Miss Callender, I will say that the Schulenberg young woman has acute pulmonary tuberculosis."

"Which means?" queried Phillida, contracting her brows.

"What people call galloping consumption," said the doctor. "Now, I can't help saying, Miss Callender," – the doctor's habitual self-contentment regained sway in his voice and manner, – "that this particular sort of consumption is one of the things that neither medicine nor faith was ever known to heal since the world was made. This young woman's lungs are full of miliary tubercles – little round bodies the size of a millet seed. The tissues are partly destroyed already. You might as well try to make an amputated leg grow on again by medicine or by prayer as to try to reconstruct her lungs by similar means. She has got to die, and I left her only some soothing medicine, and told her mother there was no use of making a doctor's bill."

There was a straightforward rectitude in Dr. Beswick that inclined Phillida to forgive his bluntness of utterance and lack of manner. Here at least was no managing of a patient to get money, after the manner hinted at by Miss Bowyer. The distinction between diseases that might and those that might not be cured or mitigated by a faith-process, which Phillida detected in the doctor's words, quickened again the doubts which had begun to assail her regarding the soundness of the belief on which she had been acting, and awakened a desire to hear more. She wanted to ask him about it, but sensitiveness regarding her private affairs made her shrink. In another moment she had reflected that it would be better to hear what was to be said on this subject from a stranger than from one who knew her. The natural honesty and courage of her nature impelled her to submit further to Dr. Beswick's rather blunt knife.

"You seem to think that some diseases are curable by faith and some not, Dr. Beswick," she said.

"Certainly," said Beswick, tipping his chair back and drumming on the table softly with his fingers. "We use faith-cure and mind-cure in certain diseases of the nerves. Nothing could have been better for that Schulenberg girl than for you to make her believe she could walk. I should have tried that dodge myself, but in a different way, if I had been called."

"Don't speak in that way, dear," interposed Mrs. Beswick, softly, seeing that Phillida was pained.

"Why, what's the matter with that way?" said the doctor, good-naturedly.

"Well, Miss Callender will think you are not honest if you talk about trying a dodge. Besides, I'm sure Miss Callender isn't the kind of person that would say what she didn't believe. It was no dodge with her."

"No; of course not," said the doctor. "I didn't mean that."

"You do not admit any divine agency in the matter, doctor?" asked Phillida.

"How can we? The starting-point of that poor girl's galloping consumption, according to the highest medical opinion of our time, is a little organism called a bacillus. These bacilli are so small that ten thousand of them laid in a row lengthwise would only measure an inch. They multiply with great rapidity, and as yet we can not destroy them without destroying the patient. You might just as well go to praying that the weeds should be exterminated in your garden, or try to clear the Schulenberg tenement of croton bugs by faith, as to try to heal that young woman in that way. Did you ever look into the throat of a diphtheria patient?"

"No," said Phillida.

"Well, you can plainly see little white patches of false membrane there. By examining this membrane we have come to know the very species that does the mischief – the micrococcus diphtheriticus."

The conversation was naturally a little disagreeable to Phillida, who now rose to depart without making reply. She went over and shook hands with Mrs. Beswick, partly from an instinctive kindness, judging from her speech that she was a stranger in New York. Besides, she felt strongly drawn to this simple and loyal-hearted woman.

"If you'd like to come to the mission, Mrs. Beswick," she said, "I'd take pleasure in introducing you. You'd find good friends among the people there and good work to do. The mission people are not all faith-healers like me."

"Oh, now, I'd like them better if they were like you, Miss Callender. I think I'd like to go. I couldn't do much; I have to do my own work; the doctor's practice is growing, but he hasn't been here long, you know. I think I might go" – this with a look of inquiry at her husband.

"Why not?" said Dr. Beswick. He could not help seeing that the association of his wife with the mission might serve to extend his practice, and that even Mrs. Beswick must grow tired after a while of conversations with him alone, sugared though they were.

When Phillida had gone the doctor's wife said to her husband that she never had seen a nicer lady than that Miss Callender. "I just love her," she declared, "if she does believe in faith-healing."

"Ah, well, what I said to her will have its effect," he replied, with suppressed exultation.

"You said just the right thing, my love. You 'most always do. But I was afraid you would hurt her feelings a little. She doesn't seem very happy."