Stories by American Authors Volume VIII Part 10

No other word was spoken. They landed in silence. In silence, and somewhat weakly, the negro pulled the dory high upon the beach. The four pa.s.sengers stood for a moment upon the hot, white sands, moved toward one another, before they separated, by a blind sense of human fellowship. Even Remane found himself touching his hat. Dr. Frank asked Dr. Dare if he could serve her in any way; but she thanked him, and, holding out her firm, white hand, said, "Good-bye."

This was, perhaps, the first moment when the consciousness of her s.e.x had made itself oppressive to her since she ventured upon this undertaking. She would have minded presenting herself to the Relief Committee of Calhoun, accompanied by gentlemen upon whom she had no claim. She walked on alone, in her gray dress and white straw hat, with her luggage in her own sufficient hand.

The reticent pa.s.senger had fallen behind with the negro boatman, with whom he walked slowly, closing the line.

After a few moments, he advanced and hesitatingly joined the lady, beginning to say:

"May I ask you--"

"Ah," interrupted Dr. Dare, cordially, "it is you."

"Will you tell me, madam, the best way of going to work to offer myself as a fever nurse in this place? I want the _best_ way. I want real work."

"Yes, yes," she said, nodding; "I knew you would do it."

"I came from the North for this purpose, but I meant to go on to Savannah."

"Yes, I know. This is better; they need _everything_ in this place."

She looked toward the gasping little town through the relentless noon.

Her merciful blue eyes filled, but the man's look followed with a dry, exultant light.

"There is no porter," he said, abruptly, glancing at her heavy bag and shawl-strap. "Would you permit me to help you?"

"Oh, thank you!" replied Dr. Dare, heartily, relinquishing her burden.

Plainly, this poor fellow was not a gentleman. The lady could afford to be kind to him.

"I know nothing how we shall find it," she chatted, affably, "but I go to work to-night. I presume I shall need nurses before morning. I'll have your address."

She took from her gray sacque pocket a physician's note-book, and stood, pencil in hand.

"My name," he said, "is Hope--Zerviah Hope."

She wrote without comment, walking as she wrote; he made no other attempt to converse with her. The two physicians followed, exchanging now and then a subdued word. The negro dragged himself wearily over the scorching sand, and thus the little procession of pity entered the town of Calhoun.

My story does not deal with love or ladies. I have to relate no tender pa.s.sages between the fever-physicians, volunteers from New York, for the afflicted region of Calhoun. Dr. Marian Dare came South to do a brave work, and I have no doubt she did it bravely, as a woman should.

She came in pursuit of science, and I have no doubt she found it, as a woman will. Our chief interest in her at this time lies in the fact that certain missing fragments in the history of the person known as Zerviah Hope we owe to her. She hovers over the tale with a distant and beautiful influence, pervading as womanly compa.s.sion and alert as a woman's eye.

I have nothing further to say about the story before I tell it, except that it is true.

That night, after the physicians had gone about their business, Zerviah Hope wandered, a little forlornly, through the wretched town.

Scip, the negro boatman, found him a corner to spend the night. It was a pa.s.sable place, but Hope could not sleep; he had already seen too much. His soul was parched with the thirst of sympathy. He walked his hot attic till the dawn came. As it grew brighter he grew calmer; and, when the unkindly sun burst burning upon the land, he knelt by his window and looked over the doomed town, and watched the dead-carts slinking away toward the everglades in the splendid color of the sky and air, and thought his own thoughts in his own way about this which he had come to do. We should not suppose that they were remarkable thoughts; he had not the look of a remarkable man. Yet, as he knelt there,--a sleepless, haggard figure blotted against the sunrise, with folded hands and moving lips,--an artist, with a high type of imagination and capable of spiritual discernment, would have found in him a design for a lofty subject, to which perhaps he would have given the name of "Consecration" rather than of "Renunciation," or of "Exultance" rather than of "Dread."

A common observer would have simply said: "I should not have taken him for a praying man."

He was still upon his knees when Dr. Dare's order came, "Nurse wanted for a bad case!" and he went from his prayer to his first patient. The day was already deep, and a reflection, not of the sunrise, moved with him as light moves.

Doctor Dare, in her gray dress, herself a little pale, met him with keen eyes. She said:

"It is a _very_ bad case. An old man--much neglected. No one will go.

Are you willing?"

The nurse answered:

"I am glad."

She watched him as he walked away--a plain, clean, common man, with unheroic carriage. The physician's fine eyes fired.

To Doctor Frank, who had happened in, she said:

"He will do the work of ten."

"His strength was as the strength of ten, Because his heart was pure,"

quoted the young man, laughing lightly. "I don't know that I should have thought it, in this case. You've taken a fancy to the fellow."

"I always respect an unmixed motive when I see it," she replied, shortly. "But I've been in practice too long to take sudden fancies.

There is no profession like ours, Doctor, for putting the sympathies under double picket guard."

She stiffened a little in her manner. She did not like to be thought an over-enthusiastic woman--womanish, unused to the world.

The weather, soon after the arrival of the _Mercy_, took a terrible mood, and a prolonged drought settled upon Calhoun. The days dawned lurid and long. The nights fell dewless and deadly. Fatal and beautiful colors lurked in the swamps, and in the sifting dust, fine and hard, blown by siroccos across the glare of noon, like sands on the sh.o.r.es of the Lake of Fire. The pestilence walked in darkness, and the destruction wasted at midday. Men died, in that little town of a few thousand souls, at the rate of a score a day--black and white, poor and rich, clean and foul, saint and sinner. The quarantine laws tightened. Vessels fled by the harbor mouth under full sail, and melted like helpless compa.s.sion upon the fiery horizon. Trains upon the Sh.o.r.e Line shot through and thundered past the station; they crowded on steam; the fireman and his stoker averted their faces as they whirled by. The world turned her back upon Calhoun, and the dying town was shut in with her dead. Only, at long intervals, the _Mercy_, casting anchor far down the channel, sent up by Scip, the weak, black boatman, the signs of human fellowship--food, physician, purse, medicine--that spoke from the heart of the North to the heart of the South, and upheld her in those well-remembered days.

Zerviah Hope, volunteer nurse, became quickly enough a marked man in Calhoun. He more than verified Doctor Dare's prognosis. Where the deadliest work was to be done, this man, it was observed, asked to be sent. Where no one else would go, he went. What no one else would do, he did. He sought the neglected, and the negroes. He braved the unclean, and the unburied. With the readiness of all incisive character acting on emergencies, he stamped himself upon the place and time. He went to his task as the soldier goes to the front under raking fire, with gleaming eyes and iron muscles. The fever of the fight was on him. He seemed to wrestle with disease for his patients, and to trample death beneath his feet. He glowed over his cures with a positive physical dilation, and writhed over his dead as if he had killed them. He seemed built of endurance more than mortal. It was not known when he slept, scarcely if he ate. His weariness sat upon him like a halo. He grew thin, refined, radiant. In short, he presented an example of that rare spectacle which never fails to command spectators--a common man possessed by an uncommon enthusiasm.

What pa.s.sed with him at this time in that undiscovered sea which we call a man's inner life, it would not be easy to a.s.sert. So far as we can judge, all the currents of his nature had swelled into the great, pulsing tide of self-surrender, which swept him along. Weakness, wrong, memory, regret, fear, grief, pleasure, hope,--all the little channels of personal life,--ran dry. He was that most blessed of human creatures, a man without a past and without a future, and living in a present n.o.bler than the one could have been or the other could become.

He continued to be a silent man, speaking little, excepting to his patients, and now and then, very gently, to the lady, Dr. Dare. He was always pliable to the influence of a woman's voice or to womanly manner. He had, in the presence of women, the quick responsiveness and sudden change of color and sensitiveness of intonation which bespeak the man whose highest graces and lowest faults are likely to be owing to feminine power.

This was a quality which gave him remarkable success as a nurse. He was found to be infinitely tender, and of fine, brave patience. It was found that he shrank from no task because it was too small, as he had shrunk from no danger because it was too great. He became a favorite with the sick and with physicians. The convalescent clung to him, the dying heard of him and sent for him, the Relief Committee leaned upon him, as in such crises the leader leans upon the led. By degrees, he became greatly trusted in Calhoun; this is to say, that he became greatly loved.

I have been told that, to this day, many people personally unknown to him, whose fate it was to be imprisoned in that beleaguered town at that time, and who were familiar with the nervous figure and plain, intense countenance of the Northern nurse, as he pa.s.sed, terrible day after terrible day, to his post, cannot hear of him, even now, without that suffusion of look by which we hold back tears; and that, when his name took on, as it did, a more than local reputation, they were unable to speak it because of choking voices. I have often wished that he knew this.

It was the custom in Calhoun to pay the nurses at short, stated intervals,--I think once a week, on Sat.u.r.day nights. The first time that Hope was summoned to receive his wages, he evinced marked emotion, too genuine not to be one of surprise and repugnance.

"I had not thought,--" he began, and stood, coloring violently.

"You earn your five dollars a day, if anybody in Calhoun does," urged the official, with kindly brusqueness.

"It is not right; I do not wish to take the money," said the nurse, with agitation. "I do not wish to be paid for--saving--human life.

I did not come to the fever district to make money; I came to save life--_to save life_!" he added, in a quick whisper. He had not slept for four nights, and seemed, they noticed, more than usually nervous in his manner.

"The money is yours," insisted the treasurer.

"Very well," said Hope, after a long silence; and no more was said about it. He took his wages and walked away up the street, absorbed in thought.

One morning, he went to his lodgings to seek a little rest. It was about six o'clock, and people were already moving in the hot, thirsty streets. The apothecaries' doors were open, and their clerks were astir. The physicians drove or walked hastily, with the haggard look of men whose days and nights are too short for their work, and whose hope, and heart as well, have grown almost too small. Zerviah noticed those young Northern fellows among them, Frank and Remane, and saw how they had aged since they came South,--brave boys, both of them, and had done a man's brave deed. Through her office window, as he walked past, he caught a glimpse of Dr. Dare's gray dress and blonde, womanly head of abundant hair. She was mixing medicines, and patients stood waiting. She looked up and nodded as he went by; she was too busy to smile. At the door of the Relief Committee, gaunt groups hung, clamoring. At the telegraph office, knots of men and women gathered, duly inspiring the heroic young operator,--a slight girl,--who had not left her post for now many days and nights. Her chief had the fever last week,--was taken at the wires,--lived to get home. She was the only person alive in the town who knew how to communicate with the outer world. She had begun to teach a little brother of hers the Morse alphabet,--"That somebody may know, Bobby, if I--can't come some day."