fl 1 ML #3, CT 275 .B69 B695 1895 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/annalsofinverteb01boyk (In fancy dress as "Evangeline.") . THE ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. BY LAURETTE XISBET BOYKIN. " Happy are the people whose annals are tiresome." — Montesquieit PRESS OF BRAXDOX PRIXTIXG COMPANY. Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1895, By Mrs. S. Boykin, in the Office of the librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. (0 7 9/ TO MY PHYSICIAN, WHOSE DAILY TASK IS TO HELP OTHERS AND TO BRING THEM OUT OF PAIN. 170703 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 170703 " The light across our darkness drifts ; More than we asked our God has given.. We asked for her all earth's poor gifts, He gave her — heaven ! " BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. "Quod tetigit ilia ornavii." Laurette Xisbet Boy kin was born in Macon, Ga., on the 7th of June, 1866. at the residence of her grandfather. Judge Eugenius A. Xisbet. of the Supreme Court of Georgia. She died in Nashville, Tenn., on the 1st da}* of July. 1894. From her beautiful childhood to her brilliant womanhood, she was a most interesting personal- ity. A record kept of her infantile prattle, from two to six years of age, shows an intellectual precocity which, while gratifying to her parents, filled them with alarm for the future well-being of their child — for years the only one. It is re- corded that she could repeat several Psalms, the Ten Commandments and short poems when three years of age, and. at five, read any child's book. Nursery stories she read in French at the same age, being taught sight reading by a native teacher. At nine she could repeat the whole of the Shorter Catechism. The limits of this sketch will not admit of even a few of the wise remarks of this child, showing a discriminating power of thought that would have done credit to an adult. She was surrounded with little cousins, but loved (7) 8 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. most to be with her mother or nurse, or alone. Her childish scrap-books, albums and herbariums are still in evidence of the originality and bright- ness of the little girl. We recall her sitting for hours, on sunny afternoons, in a flower garden watching the busy community of a large ant hill in one of the walks. She became acquainted with their intelligent municipal government and do- mestic habits; and her father placed in her hands Prof. Willet's book on the "Wonders of Insect Life," which she read with the greatest delight. Another favorite pastime was stealing up to her father's study at night and lying on a couch, by the window, gazing at the stars. An astro- nomical chart was furnished her, and with this she learned to name and locate all the Constella- tions. It was in her father's study that she be- came a student of the Bible, at the tender age of nine years. Eminently religious by nature, she took hold of the great truths of Christianity with such understanding and belief that her teachers in the Sunday school professed themselves amazed. Music was early a passion with her, and she mastered it with the ease that she did every thing else. We recall her rapture as she would lie prone upon the rug, on winter evenings, listen- ing to the flute and piano, as played by Sidney Lanier and her mother. In after years, when the BIOGRAPHICAL, SKETCH. 9 poet had removed from Georgia, and was then unrecognized as the genius he is acknowledged to have been, she, at the age of sixteen, would read his poems and point out beauties or explain obscurities that were hidden from critics older and more learned than she. An essay she wrote a year or two later on the " Home Life of Lanier." and read before a literary club in Atlanta, Ga., was very much applauded for its beaut}* of thought and diction. At the age of eight or nine we find her forced to leave school for eighteen months. Vaulting ambition in the child, and unintentional forcing by her parents and teachers, overstrained the nerves of her delicate physique, and prostration resulted. With restoration to health she returned to school, and we find her, after going brilliantly through the public schools, leaving her home for Shorter College, Rome, Ga., at the age of fifteen. Three years of college life, with its disastrous physical results, are recalled now with the keen- est pain. No pupil ever made a more shining record. In the general curriculum of study, in the languages, in music, in elocution and art, she stood facile princeps. Her studious habits, and exhausting practice on the piano, doubtless sowed the seeds that bore the fruit of physical delicacy and disease that shortened her life. IO BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. With a beautiful face, every feature of which was of classic mold, a lissome form, every move- ment of which was of Delsartean grace, it is not surprising that, after leaving school, she should have shone a very star in society, a queen of the salon. This experience, alas, like the others, was hurtful in its passionate intensity and enthusiasm. Her fine nature, exquisitely attuned to pain and pleasure, quaffed deep draughts of both, and left her, after a few T years, a woman well acquainted with human nature, marked as a brilliant conver- sationalist, a notable person of influence, but physically fragile and with vital forces spent. Her love of study was inherent, and she never for a moment relaxed in her omniverous reading. She searched for truth — truth religious, truth scientific, truth philosophical, for the sincere pleasure of the mental exercise. Indeed, the ab- normal activity of her brain was the sure cause of her early death. She had a true artistic soul. Nature in its myriad phases appealed passionateby to her, and form and color spoke to her as to an artist. A votary of art, and imbued with aestheticism, she created beauty every where. A discord in dress or in house decoration hurt her as painfully as a dissonance in music. The perfume of the orange blossom, exhaled from the groves of Florida, in- BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. II toxicated her (as she said) more than it did the bees that swarmed among the branches. With this super-sensitive nature, this extremely deli- cate and nervous organization, is it surprising that, like a restless bird imprisoned, she should have fallen exhausted, and, when freed from the bars that fettered it, her soul should have swiftly winged its flight to a more congenial home? She was prostrated with neurasthenia, and, for thirteen months, lay upon her bed, a miracle of gentle and uncomplaining patience. Six months previous to her death, consumption seized upon her devitalized system and hope died. Leaving the " outgrown shell by life's unrest- ing sea"- — with an earnest whisper, "I am all peace," her soul floated heavenward, and " Out of the day aud night A joy had taken flight," from the aching heart of Her Mother. PROLOGUE. PROLOGUE. '• We are such stuff as dreams are made of. And our little life is rounded with a sleep." — Shakespeare. This is to be no proper history, but a selfish and intimate chronicle of pain and pleasure ; woven out of a tissue of shadows, enacted be- yond the reach of eventful and objective life, in the realm of sub-consciousness, and distilled from the necrotic subtleties and killing keennesses of a morbid mentality, turned inward, to feed upon itself. (15) I. THE HIDDEN TERROR. 2 I. THE HIDDEN TERROR. " That door could lead to hell ? That shining merely meant Damnation ? " —Mrs. Browning . If you had looked in upon a certain reception held in a city home one night in October, you might have seen me, standing under a blaze of light in a group of people. Around me you would have noticed groups laughing and talking in the unnatural key common to overfilled draw- ing rooms. Beyond, you would have heard an •orchestra of strings, urging these excited voices to a keener pitch. On every hand you would have felt the pres- ence of brilliancy, carelessness and flattery, held under by an omnipresent tyranny of artificial decorum. If you are a vivisectionist, your eyes would surely have wandered back to me, and singled (19) 20 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. me out as a supreme type of incandescent life, raised to concert pitch. What you would not have seen was a panic - apprehension that pressed in upon m} r heated brain, and turned me sick with fear. A thousand nights of social dissipation, fol- lowing a thousand days of ambitious effort at school, both acting upon an unbalanced and sen- sitive organism, had brought me to the brink of nervous exhaustion ; and, as I stood thus, dog- gedly playing my gruesome part, the conviction spread itself like poison through my veins, that something was wrong with my head. For months I had been fighting headache, but here was an enemy more portentous than any physical dis- comfort. I heard my voice saying accustomed things ; I perceived my body undulating through the suite of rooms ; but why I acted, or what I said, I could not tell. My behavior was automatic — born of a galvanized effort, which consciousness did but barely record. This was the Hidden Terror that spread its invisible, vampire wings above me. My head ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. 21 throbbed ominously ; my spine pulsated ; my eyes glittered. All that remained of my normal ■self was a characteristic repression, augmented .now into exquisite trickery, by which I hid, in slight, deft concealments, the confusion of my mind from my friends. So, stricken with bewilderment, and infinitely weary, I drifted across the evening like a ship without a rudder ; and, at the end, found myself driving home in my escort's carriage. I had hoped, vaguely, to shut out the Hidden Terror in the coolness and darkness of the night. But there to my side It clung, sinister and hideous; and the fear of It froze my scalp. II. II. COLLAPSE. " After me — the deluge." — Louis XV. A few minutes later — or was it two eterni- ties? — we stood alone, together — my Terror and I — in my bed-chamber. What came next? For the life of me, I could not think. The room revealed the extravagant disarray following a young woman's evening toilette ; but I could not understand what it meant, or why I should be there. The future was a blank ; the present, a blot. My past fell awaj r from me like a shattered thing ; and identity trembled in the balance. One vivid idea, from out this chaos, impressed itself on me. It was that I was a Human Violin, which some unmerciful hand had strung up to a breaking pitch, and left to vibrate until its heart broke. (25) 26 ANNAIyS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. Would nobody come to loosen the screws under my forehead? Mechanically, or by some dim association of ideas, I lifted my hands to unfasten my hair. The movement sent a spasm of pain through me, so intense that, with a quiv- ering cry, I fell prostrate to the floor; and Time and Terror were no more. III. THE CRUEL COST. III. THE CRUEL COST. " First or last — we must pay our entire debt." — Rmerson . " And some are sulky, while some will plunge ; Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge. Some — there are losses in every trade — Will break their hearts ere bitted and made, Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard And die dumb-mad in the breaking yard.'" — Kipling. When I opened my eyes it was broad day. I lay in bed, and my room was darkened. In spite of complete subsidence of strength, my first sen- sation was that of grateful relief to see that, once more, I coherently recognized objects around me and knew T somewhat of the meaning of myself. A physician was talking, in a smothered tone, to my mother, at the farther corner of my room. I heard him say : "A case of neurasthenia like this demands a long and absolute rest. There must be no reading, no company, no excitement, no effort. She has lived a long and tense life in (39) 30 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. a short space of time. These intensities of study and of society keep the candle burning at both ends ; and now Nature must be paid back the debt. I want her to lie fallow." (Imprisonment for debt ! ) I raised my head feebly to see who was thus pronouncing sentence upon me. As I did so a great wave of pain swept down my spine, and wrung a groan from me. My mother turned to the bed, her face pinched with anxiety. "Mamma!" I said, petulantly enough, "I can not move my back ! ' ' "Never mind, dear," she replied; "the doc- tor says you are to lie quite still now, and make believe that you haven't any back at all ! " This advice to live without a spinal column, supinely inert, was given by my mother with the forced and bantering cheerfulness which people adopt around sick folk, when the outlook is mor- tally serious. I answered her with a look of full comprehen- sion, then sank down into myself — and the pil- lows ; and thus my Annals, as an Invertebrate, began. IV. THE LOST RIVER. IV. THE LOST RIVER. " I am going a long way. To the island-valley of Avilion — Where I will heal me of my grievous wound. " — Tennyson. From this time forth there followed an endless vista of stupefied days and nights, all exactly alike, save for the occasional demarcation of some pang — acuter than its felkws — that would illumine an hour into a reddened landmark. I have no definite impression of those first, gray-toned months ; for I was inundated wdth narcotics, w T hich swept me far out from my wonted moorings, where I floated in poppied calm, careless of what came, — and took my full of rest. A year before, I had taken a voyage down the St. John's River in Florida, after a hurried tour of excitement through Cuba ; and the mood 3 (33) 34 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. which then saturated me was curiously identical with the first phase of my illness. Then, we glided for days along banks fringed with the illimitable stretches of the marshes, or festooned now and then with those vain and long-haired trees of the tropics, which are for- ever bending low to see their own images in the water. But the river noticed not their blandish- ments ; for it was asleep. From its unconscious, heaving bosom, I lifted my tired eyelids to see, on every hand, a scene steeped in hashheesh, over which a lotus branch seemed to have been waved. The color of sky and river and shore was dyed with warm richness of tone ; but so stilly was Nature's great heart, beating there in that forgotten stream of Nepenthe, that the land- scape melted into a water-color study; and nry soul paused, too, to dream and to lie still. Only the green leaves of the water-lilies dared to break the universal placidity, as the little waves from the boat touched them ; and even they lifted their heads wearily, and let them fall over upon the bosom of the river, as a half-awakened child falls back into sleep. ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. 35 Now, in my canopied bed, I was repeating, subjectively, that experience. But then, my pilot was Pleasure; now, his twin brother, Pain, bore me down the Lost River. And this was all that I wanted ; I said to my pilot : " Give me long rest or death — Dark death or dreamful ease." V. LEES OF WINE. V. LEES OF WINE. " Do not stir too deeply ; for there is a little mud at the bottom of even- thing." — De Guerin. Apparently, my small world of friends were distressed for me, thus to be shattered, for they kept my room redolent with flowers ; and inco- herent love notes, which I hardly read, collected under my pillow. But, if they imagined me un- happy they were far of the truth. To one, spent as I was from a fevered life, there is no yearning like the y earning for subsidence ; no god like Morpheus; no heaven like Nirvana. " The heart asks pleasure first, And theu, excuse from paiu ; Aud theu, those little auodyn.es That deaden suffering ; And then — to go- to sleep." I could not die ; I lacked the energy for an act so pompous ; but I had ceased. (39) 4-0 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE . Life was laid away on a back shelf. I merely breathed from day to day — flinched under pain — sighed when the torture dulled — and turned, to sleep. Every thought had fretted itself to sleep — " And my heart was a handful of dust." The intricate relations of my brilliant, blun- dering career filled me with weariness and dis- gust. Like Solomon, I asked to be stayed with flagons and comforted with apples, for I was sick of love. Cui bono ? These incessant protestations ! Enough that I had fenced well. Was that such a purpose to strive for? Power is good ; nay, it is delicious. But my power had cost me a cruel price, since every nerve was feeling the drain of the expenditure. So I muttered; and, borne away in the sweep of a terrible reaction, I struck a rockbed of in- difference. There, the hermit soul within me came unto its own ; and I turned my face to the wall, to confront an ego which was all that was left in my bitter cup. VI. BOOK -BOUND. VI. BOOK-BOUND. " Away, away ! For thou speakest to me of that which, in all my endless life. I have not found, and shall not find." —Jean Paul Richter. I used to look pathetically at my books, writ- ten now in an almost unknown tongue. There they stood on their shelves, waiting, patient and eloquent, for me. They had mam* things to give me. but I could not bear their gifts now. Often I had to barricade my eyes from them with the pillows, so keenry did their suggestion of forbidden vitality affront, and their muteness of importunity hurt me. •' Not now — Oh. not tonight ! Too clear on midnight's deep Come voice and hand and touch ; The heart aches overmuch. Hush sounds ! shut out the light ! A little — I must sleep." One book alone I could not rest without. It was a volume of essays by Robert Louis Steven- . (43) 44 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. son. I slept with it under my head ; stole sips of sentences from it in quiet intervals, if the nurse was not looking ; and, when the pressure against my brain blurred its meaning, would, lie quite still for hours with my cheek pressed close to its open face, and extract the essence of con- solation from its leaves. . . . Sometimes I wet its dear face with my tears. But nobody but Stevenson saw this. VII. A VOICE. VII. A VOICE. " What is it iu me that makes me tremble so at voices? " Surely, whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow, as the water follows the moon, with fluid steps, any- where around the globe." — Walt Whitman. One day a young man came to inquire about me of mamma, and I happened to overhear their conversation in an adjoining room. He was what I must, for want of a better name, call an ex-dear. I had preferred him, in that other life, which now had become a chapter of ancient history. Today his voice sounded like a different thing. I apprehended it for the first time. Those ca- dences of an unbridled temper, — what a disso- nance they made on the air ! The critical faculty arose in me pitilessly, and would not acquit him, for all his evident fondness for me. I buried my face in the pillow, and drew the coverlid over my head, to shut his voice out. From this day 4 8 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. I dehumanized him into a Lost Illusion, and wrapped myself up in superb forgetfulness. Was that cruel ? No matter. It was also hon- est. Emerson's thought came to justify me : " Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protes- tations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on the harness and aspires to vast and uni- versal aims." VIII. RHYTHM. 4 VIII. RHYTHM. " The quaking earth did quake in rhyme. Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime." It interested me to watch the rhythm of sick- ness, its musical intervals of mood, its action and reaction. The beautiful laws can be studied in a sick room as well as out under the antiseptic sky. I observed that — Half an hour after break- fast every morning, I waxed cheerful. Half an hour before dark every afternoon, I waned sad. In the morning I thought — What a handsome and amiable world ! How succulent with nitro- genous food ! And. as another invalid once said, my bones felt sweeter to me. In the after- noon I thought — How difficult it is to live ! How sad are the inexorable conditions of this, our life, feeding, as it does, upon toil and pain and death ! And then my bones would grate. 52 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. The morning point of view was due to the mellowing processes of digestion ; while that of the afternoon came when the nerves were worn with the friction of the day. A sentimentalist would consider these peri- odic moods inspirations and presentiments. I called them symptoms. THE SECRET OF LIFE. IX. THE SECRET OF LIFE. " For we know that the whole creation grroaneth. ' — St. Paul. Suffering is demoralizing oftener than the man of platitudes would believe ; and especially when it comes through sickness it engulfs the whole being, conscience and memory, will and heart. Nothing can save the invalid from idle- ness and introspection. The faculty of objective perception, which in health keeps us wholesomely in touch with the world, fades, during prolonged illness, into a torturing analysis of our subjectiv- ity. The sense of proportion gives way ; values are tangled, and a vast egoism feeds at the core of consciousness. In my mind, after my first dream of rest down the Lost River was over, there existed but three verities: Me. My Sensations, and My Doctor; cause, effect, and cure. (55) 56 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. I was satisfied that the sun rose each morning to celebrate my illness ; that the stars leaned out of heaven at night to watch over my troubled dreams; that the solar system, in fine, revolved around my bed, with my quivering nerves for radii, running out from this center to the furthest confines of space. I had shrunk to the dimen- sions of this focal bed, which was but little wider than a grave. Some excuse should be made for a head gone so far wrong from having ached too much. Em- ily Dickinson apologized for me when she said : " Pain has au element of blank, It can not recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not ; It has no future but itself." And yet in spite of this distortion of the ego, the education I received under my tutelage of suffering was a veritable benefit. I learned, pri- marity, to differentiate almost every gradation of my diseased physical sensations, and to describe these imps, if not scientifically, at least with con- siderable rhetoric. The subsidiary ills I bore with serenity, inasmuch as I could see beyond ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. 57 them. Greater pangs I could not see beyond, but I brightened even these by making sport of them to myself. Thus I would devise a chro- matic scale of pain color, including all my shades of discomfort. There was the scarlet pain, a red- hot agony ; steel-blue pain, which was incisive like a knife ; gray pain, a leaden ache ; black pain, that stood for a bruised feeling; green pain, a deathly sensation ; indigo pain, which I pre- sume must have been the blues, collected to the region of the spine ; violet pain, or an exquisite tenderness to touch; irridescent pain, felt in the changeful nutter of the heart. Ever}' thing is relative ; and these ridiculous chromatics, practiced upon a vibrating nervous system, gave me more stimulus than mam- a wearying pleasure. Moreover, there is, in a cer- tain degree or class of pain, a wonderful intoxi- cation to thought. Many a time, in "the wee sma' hours,"- when graveyards yawn (and I could not!) have I spun out, under the excite- ment of a headache, thoughts which painted themselves as with fire upon the black vacuity of the night ; thoughts so palpitant with life that 58 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. they would have hurried me to fame, if I could have recorded or recalled them, — or even pos- sessed them. At other times pain awakened the sensibili- ties of the heart, and I would feel myself dissolv- ing with compassion toward others who suffered. I heard the march of the great army of pain- bearers sounding down Time ; and my heart warmed to my comrades with an almost cosmic sympathy. They, like me, had accepted the order of life. They and I knew, at last, that the secret of all things is Pain. X. RAIN ON THE ROOF. X. RAIN ON THE ROOF. " The human soul is a louely thing." —Kipling The long rains of winter had now .set in, and, for three months, a ceaseless patter npon the roof kept time to the wearing reiteration of thought beating inwardly upon my brain. Every channel connected with the outer world was cut off, and my tired self and I were left alone to find each other out. Violence of pain was gone; the Buddhist's heaven, lent by opiates, had been taken away from me, and there followed an infinity of de- pression, from the sheer memory of which flesh and blood shrink. The rainy days I lived through were saturated with unshed tears. In- stinctive emotions controlled kept down any ex- pression of despair. I did not even complain. I (61) 62 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. could not trust my voice to speak ; but, under this Spartan silence, the bandages had slipped and my heart bled. There was no use denying it, my feelings were badly hurt thus to have fal- len in the first flush of the fight. A mortal sen- sitiveness about my condition took possession of me. It was as if the outer kryers of cuticle had been removed and the nerves exposed. (In nerves, I was so rich ! In nerve, so poor ! ) Every companion seemed to have forsaken me ; every hope to have frozen and died of cold. A sense of unmitigated loss bore down like the rain, blotting color out of every thing. Henley has reproduced this concomitant of disease with marvelous discrimination in his hospital poems. I enacted his poems. I was become, like him, one of those pitiers of themselves , for whom Em- erson felt such sturdy scorn. The ceaseless processes of thought grew to be a rack, to which I was bound hand and foot. No array of terms can express my brain-weariness, under the pressure and perpetuity of these thoughts, which I lacked the muscular resistance to hold in abeyance. ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. 63 One physical sensation daily oppressed me — that of sinking through the bed. Down — down, I felt myself lowered, as a coffin, into a grave. XL THE GREAT RELEASE. 5 XI. THE GREAT RELEASE. ' The earth would be no longer earth for me. The life out of all life was gone from me. There are blind ways provided, the foredone Heart-weary player in this pageant world Drops out b}-, letting the main masque defile By the conspicuous portal. I am through — just through !" — Robert Browning . Inevitable that a young invalid, cursed as I was, with the artistic temperament, should brood over the idea of death. I was, indeed, altogether accustomed to spinning my shroud, for I was born ancient and sad. As a child, I had been literally haunted by my own ghost. No one ever knew how man} T tears of an unavailing sor- row I shed prematurely over my grave. "Poor little one!" I said to myself, "that must die before she has begun to live.' ; For then I passionately desired to live. But now I thought of death with more long- (67) 68 ANNAIyS OF AN IN VKRTEBR ATK . ing than fear or dismay. To cease upon the midnight, without pain, seemed to me as beauti- ful as to the ravished soul of Keats. Too beau- tiful to be true. I knew better than to suppose the end of me had come. I knew, as the un- happy Byron knew of himself, that there was that within me which should " tire Torture and Time." The curse of Tithonus was laid upon the tense cords beneath my temples : " Me only cruel immortality consumes. I wither here at the quiet limit of the world." No sign escaped me of this impotent hunger for release. They said I was patient. Not at all. It was on^ that in some former state of existence (as we like to call it) I had lived in Asia, and had been such a good Buddhist that, throughout metemsychosis, the acceptance of the inevitable, in which the Old World religion is steeped, remained a structural part of my soul. XII. A MONSTROSITY. XII. A MONSTROSITY. Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do." — Si. Luke. The philosophy by which I accounted for this theosophic trait did not shield me from bruises at every turn, as you will see. One day, when I had been fighting harder than usual with hypersesthesia, a neighbor who had come to see me was admitted, by some mis- chance of a servant, into my room. She was bulky, angular, and heavy-footed. Her voice showed neither the texture of silk nor of velvet ; her intuition, neither purple nor fine linen. She was homespun, through and through, and would not, under any circumstances, have been a victim of nervous prostration. She re- minded me of that woman in the Vicar of Wakefield who carried on the conversation but not the argument. After talking about her own (71) 72 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. affairs until I fain would have shrieked, she rose to go. Turning to me, she said : " Why, you look just as well as I do ! You had better get out of that bed and open these shutters ! I be- lieve you are just lying there in pink cotton, bleaching and cuddling yourself ! If you had as much work to do as I have, you would be flying around right now like other folks," etc., etc. I looked through her, in silence. My dog and my horse could have taught her sympathy. But then, I reflected, she was probably some prehis- toric mammal, capable of brutality on an impres- sive scale ! Nearly everybody vexed me, saying I looked well. So I did, owing to the peculiarity of my illness, and to the half-light, filtered through red curtains, which emphasized certain lines of my face, while it concealed others. Moreover, I knew it to be a fictitious beauty, which half an hour of exertion would have shattered. I re- sented the necessity of wasting protoplasm in useless good looks. How could that bring me surcease of desolation ? A wounded soldier does not need ammunition. XIII. METAMORPHOSIS. XIII. METAMORPHOSIS. '• My desolation does begin to make a better life.'' — Shakespeare. " Thou shalt renounce, abstain, refrain ! " — Goethe. A wounded soldier does not need ammunition. But he needs courage. ' ' The best use of fate is to teach us a fatal courage." Out of the niop- ings of these many months, out of the anguish, out of the fatigue, my character began, slowly, to cool and solidify. I had reached a crisis in the evolution of spirit. During the '"long, regretful leisure" of the days, my life, in detail and as an entirety, passed like a panorama before the aching, vivisecting intelligence. Memory became preternaturally quickened. Forgotten episodes of childhood, old sights, dead sounds, and withered odors, crowded my consciousness. Especially did my 76 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. late social life gall me. Scintillant as it had been, it was nevertheless a prolonged outrage against Nature and my Good Angel. And, when all is said and done, what is la vie de Boheme — but inflammation? My relentless mind stood apart in infinite disdain from these intensities, and wrote upon the door-post, Tekel ! I saw clearly enough now, in my present detachment, that the causes of my broken health lay hidden, deep down, in the temperament and will. Congenital defects as they were, for which I was in no sense responsible, I was to do battle with them, henceforth. Recovery depended, in the last analysis, upon my inherent potency. It was to be wrought there — not otherwhere. It meant almost a chemical change of atoms. Calm and Vigilance must supersede the old stress and strain. Invalids commonly have to give up a sport, an excess, a traveling trip, or a cup of coffee. I had to renounce everything in the world toward which my nature turned. Excite- ment had been bread and drink to me. I was now to learn how to starve ; and starving, smile. ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. 77 The task of remaking my life looked so heavy and difficult, that I shrank away from it like a person coming out of a deep sorrow. I was in veritable mourning, for I had lost my former self. That young girl who used to float through gaities as if her body were filled with ether ; whose nature was so mistaken in its ignorance, so rife with life's desire, so unequipped for its exigency — she, who called herself me — a fair impostor ! — was as dead as anything in matter can be. With- out vanity, now she was no more, I could idealize her. She seemed like a little dead sister ; and, at first, when her spirit hovered OA^er my bed, I would turn my face to the wall and weep softfy over her pitiable suicide. As time wore on, however, this extravagance of subjective sympathy changed, and I com- menced the process of hardening into steel. I was making, at last, an hourly effort to cauterize my nerves. I longed to brutalize myself, to eat, sleep, laugh and act more, to think and feel less, to take things sluggishly, and trample out, if it might be possible, the sensitiveness of fibre which made me impressionable as iodine to light. , 78 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. Like the noble Walt Whitman, I envied the animals their aplomb, their placidity, and their elemental nearness to Nature. XIV. DIVINATIONS. XIV. DIVINATIONS. When thou dost return On the wave's circulation, Beholding the shimmer. The wild dissipation, And, out of endeavor To change and to flood, The gas becomes solid, And phantoms and nothings Return to be things, And endless imbroglio Is law and the world. Then first shalt thou know. That in the wild turmoil. Horsed on the proteus, Thou ridest to power And to endurance." — Rmerson. And so, keeping all these thoughts in my heart, Great Ideas and Beautiful Insights poured in upon me. Facts were revealed to me as if by clairvoyance, and I began to see things in their large relations. The revelation of the Physical Basis underlying all things, moods, mentality, manners and morals was in itself well worth six 6 (81) 82 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. months on a " mattress-grave." Then the Law of Particles, so difficult to bring home to an excessive temperament, grew luminous and com- fortable to me. I came to analyze (as I also illus- trated) the Apathy of Will, seen in the victims of abstraction and subjectivity. Another verity which fascinated me long was that Sadness is an essential element of Beaut} 7 . My pulses were beginning to keep time to the Rythm of the Cos- mos. I suppose I was stumbling into the domain of Spencer, ignorantly, and quite unaware of the great man's theories. And every thought that came to my bedside, with its veiled face and silent benediction, urged me to one focal conviction about life — the con- viction that the need of man, at the end of the nine- teenth century, is to grope back to primordial and simplified Nature. In the study of, and reverence for, Her wise Laws rested religion enough for me. The prayer of Socrates should be my resolve : " May it be mine to keep the. Unwritten Laws! " While this epoch of sickness was progressing my eyes took on a phosphorescent and Asiatic expression, as though the soul lighting them were ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. 83 time-worn with experience. Stevenson has de- scribed the look when he speaks of the " occuli putres — or eyes rancid with expression," such as belong to the ancient races, and to some dogs. XV. XV. BASIC. I am not to speak to you : I am to think of you When I sit alone. Or wake at night, alone, I am to wait. I am to see to it that I do not lose you." — Walt Whitman. It has appeared that I was out of tune with individuals, the thought of whom tired or hurt, or revolted me. To this morbid deadness there was a notable exception in my friendship for one woman. I say friendship because no language furnishes an adequate term for such a relation. But it was more than ordinary friendship. And better, I came to look upon it, after the fire-proof of suf- fering to which it had been subjected, as a predi- lection, innate and congenital. In the dead of night, when the house was (87) 88 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. asleep, and even the street pavements hushed and drowsed, I used to re-live, with a choking throat, the involved and tragic part I had played in her destiny, and she, by reflex action, in mine. How could I do otherwise than turn toward her personality, so responsive and so superior in taste and quality to my own? We hear so much of the attraction of oppo- sites. The law is to be admitted as a physiologi- cal exigency. But, upon the highest and most attenuated plane of sympathy, there must be identity and consent before there can be commu- nion. To my Elect I belong, and most of all to Her, the Queen of nry Elect. Shelley spoke for me to her in that tiny madigral, beginning: " One name is too often profaned For me to profane it." And recapitulating this firm and steadfast rela- tion, I perceived, to my surprise, that whatever of willfulness might be my limitation in matters of love, I was at least predestined to the genius of friendship. XVI. XVI. SOLSTICE. "Our reliance upon the physician. is a kind of despair of our- selves." — Emerson. Valuable as my friend was to me, I was never- theless insulated from her, as from every other influence save that of my physician. This chron- icle would be incomplete without a record of his daily visit, and its effect upon the patient. It made the one event of my days. Toward it I rose; from it I ebbed ; engrossed by it, all of me stood still. It was my solstice. So infantile a dependence upon the physician is proof enough of neurasthenia. But my Doctor deserved the tribute, for the gods had called him to be a neu- rologist, and not only by virtue of resource, intui- tion, despatch and decision, but because he min- istered unto the mind as well as the body. In his character the traits of generalship and gentleness were in equipoise, so that his presence (90 92 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. in a sick-room was equally a tonic and a solace. When he entered the door an atmosphere seemed to come in with him as of noble power, controlled to the pitch of perfect quietude; and as he ap- proached my bedside, and concentrated his atten- tion upon my face, the look of his eyes and the tone of his voice, which otherwise were domi- nant, instantly carried healing to my quivering nerves. We live, not by obvious ways, but by minute and indirect undercurrents; and it is the intangi- ble influence that tells, in the long run. I was grateful to my physician, not so much for the palpable benefit of his treatment, as for the impalpable effect upon n^ character. That was out of joint; " the immortal part," as Shakespeare put it, "needed a physician.' 1 Self-mastery and cheerfulness he taught me ; and his wisdom in countless small things, I absorbed through the pores of the skin. Possi- bly he saw I was in desperate need of a firm rule; or perhaps he thought nothing about it, but unconsciously followed his own orbit. It is all one. He who can unwittingly help you to ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. 93 live is greater than he who saves your life. I entered the valley of illness a spoiled child ; I came out of it a woman. My physician's im- mortality of influence was thus accomplished in me. Nor did I ever listen to him or watch his skillful therapeutic hands, as he busied himself in my behalf, without wishing to transform un- order of mind into his own mental likeness. So much do I admire the genius of common sense, which the compounding angels forgot to put into my atoms ! Well might I envy my physician, for he possessed the effective faculty which Em- erson commemorates in his essa}* on "Power": "A man who has that presence of mind which can bring to him on the instant all he knows, is worth, for action, a dozen men who know as much, but can only bring it to light slowly. You must elect your work ; you must take what your brain can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step between knowing and doing. 'Tis a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness. Many an artist, 94 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. lacking this, lacks all ; he sees the masculine Angelo or Cellini with despair. He, too, is up to Nature and the First Cause in his thought. But the spasm to collect and swing- Ms whole bei?ig into one act, he has not." And so, from considering a particular instance, I came to meditate long upon the manifold task of the physician in general. He who, though weary, is not to show weariness; though dis- gusted with fhe bare cheapness of human nature, is to wear the perpetual livery of kindness ; whose judgment is to be like lightning, and his patience as the strength of granite; who, while yet a stranger, must take upon his shoulders the responsibility of your most intimate friend; and, not infrequently, must hold your destiny (a thing alien to him, haply,) in the hollow of his hand. XVII. BURGEONING. XVII. BURGEONING. At last the rootlets of the trees Shall find the prison where she lies." —Holmes. " Will there really be a morning? Is there such a thing as day ? Could I see it from the mountain If I were as tall as they ? O some scholar ! O some sailor ! O some wise man from the skies ! Please to tell a little pilgrim Where the place called morning lies." — Emily Dickinson. Toward the sixth month of my supineness I awoke somewhat to the small happenings about me, and began to take a fresh pleasure in objec- tive life. One afternoon the nurse opened the window blinds and a great elm, who had known me since I was a little child, looked in at me and trembled gently as he looked. Then he fell to talking to me. All the afternoon he told me the most unspeakable things. I shall not divulge what he said. Trees are reticent, like all strong 7 (97) 98 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. beings, and when reticent folks show that they trust me, I keep the faith. And then a spider on the ceiling and I became good friends. He was an excellent fellow at the right distance. My eyes followed him for hours at a time in impotent envy of his efficiency. Here was a producer; here was one who earned his salt. By special interposition I several times saved him from sudden death at the hands of the chambermaid. And there was a spray of Wandering Jew that grew so attached to me it could not die and leave me, but took root and cast anchor in a vase on my table. It had a way of stretching out its tendrils lovingly toward my bed, and I, for grat- itude, would stroke its leaves with my feeble hand. One day I found my inventive faculty busy constructing a spring dress in imitation of its shaded leaves of maroon and green. Odd for me to think of a spring dress! The elm, the spider, the vine and I had another companion — the first sunbeam of the morning. She was a bright and gracious elf. As I lay awake after dawn she would come slid- ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. 99 ing through the window crevice and pirouette on the wall in a radiance of good will — then break into a broad smile as she touched my black hair with her luminous finger. So full of optimism was she that she warmed my heart and filled it with the faint ecstasy of springtime. Sometimes after combing my hair, now very thin, I would spread it out over the pillow to imi- tate a well-loved picture of the dying Dora Cop- perfield. I don't know which was the child, Dora or Dora's imitator, but the bit of stage property gave me at least a taste of the luxury of woe, and helped me to forget the clock. Nature afforded me these petty diversions to compensate me for my ugly tete-d-tetes with in- somnia, for now that weakness was going, rest- lessness had come. At first the cessation of pain was delicious, but this Schopenhauer- delight changed into a tingling irritability, and I was a porcupine, a bear and a hyena. Occasionally the mood would react, and I would subside into a strain of good humor so divine, and would behave with a sweetness so distracting, that I trembled for fear I should become an angel before my time. IOO ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. If this were a piece of fiction, I should cloy the reader with the description of these angel visits. But it is history, and I am bound by the love of truth to record that they were few and far between. Out of them I would plunge into my old intolerable rancor. Fifty times a day I would spring up in bed, toss back my disheveled hair and turn over the hot, hot pillow ; then fall back, twitching, my back pulsating like an eager heart. Was the Invertebrate about to evolve ? XVIII. XVIII. REVEILLE. •' Morning waits at the end of the world, And the world is at our feet." — Kipling. " Paradise is under the shadow of swords." — Eastern Proverb. Innumerable words out of books now assailed me, and a pageant of living desires importuned the awakening consciousness. Why should I expiate an}' longer? I was consumed already with a strenuous inaction. The world was call- ing me ; I must be abroad to fulfill my destiny. A troop of purposes and predispositions that had crept aside during the grim days now stood up, clamoring to be executed by my hands, my feet, my brain, my soul. I felt powerful and tigerish in spirit, as if I could grind to a dust all impedi- ments that hindered my will. The contrast be- tween this internal electricity and my apparent feebleness of muscle struck me as humorous. (io 3 ) 104 ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. Three months previous it would have appeared piteous. Now and then I slipped from my bed and walked around the room to try my strange, new feet. My surprise was great to find that the same body which had ached so long now felt flexible, alive and sweet. I moved with a touch of that audacious suavity which Alexander Sal- vini infuses into the role of Cirullio. I was wood and steel. But no longer a violin ! No longer a dagger ! As to my mind, it was clarified and at peace. In a word, I was poised ; for the first time in my mistaken existence I was pure Greek. I deified the body. It filled me with happy ani- malit}^ to feel the blood sweeping warmly and evenly under the skin. Where was my spirituality, my nonsense, my festered egoism? What had become of my host of symptomatic vagaries? The}" had flown out of the window. I had forgotten them as com- pletely as the young Spring forgets aged Winter, to whose snow r she owes so much. Outside the open windows the sap in the trees kept time to my riotous veins, and the quickening air stirred to the beating of my heart. Spring, with her ANNALS OF AN INVERTEBRATE. 105 annual message of reincarnation, was flattering me. then, by imitation 0 How infinite Nature seemed, in recuperation ! The inherent puissance and charm of matter thrilled me through and through with its august significance. Finally — but this was after a tedious convales- cence — there came a day when I was actually done with invertebrations. I stood erect at the open window and lifted up my eyes. Every tree nodded me a cordial greet- ing. The sky was a declaration of tenderness ; the breeze a challenge and a caress. The}' knew I had come back. They remembered that I was part of the universal scheme. I threw my head back proudly, and stretching out both arms toward the world and the morning, with Napoleon's own indomitable exultance 1 cried : " The future, the future ! Is mine ! 1 ' tr EPILOGUE. EPILOGUE. " A book is a series of confidences to an ideal friend.'" — Ga ulier. Richard Mansfield has been heard to confess in a curtain speech that nothing conld induce him to go to a play like his ' ' Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde," and I, likewise, would never risk the reading of such a chronicle as this. Yet I remem- ber that a great philosopher said, that, to the phy- sician, the laws of disease were as beautiful as the laws of health : that in fact, everything was beau- tiful seen in the light of intellect, or as truth. Haply, then, this record of pain and the com- ing out of pain will find its own place in some intelligence, quick to relish experience in any form, and adequate to perceive, in the remotest gropings of the underself, the unfolding blossoms of Nature's great law of causation. (109) The End. Dulce University Perkins Library 660-5870