“But,” said Margaret, “consider her total inexperience of the world, and her frail1 health. Can such a slight little body endure the ordeal2 of the preparation for, or the strain of, the practice of the profession?”
“Did thee ever think, Margaret, whether, she can endure being thwarted3 in an object on which she has so set her heart, as she has on this? Thee has trained her thyself at home, in her enfeebled childhood, and thee knows how strong her will is, and what she has been able to accomplish in self-culture by the simple force of her determination. She never will be satisfied until she has tried her own strength.”
“I wish,” said Margaret, with an inconsequence that is not exclusively feminine, “that she were in the way to fall in love and marry by and by. I think that would cure her of some of her notions. I am not sure but if she went away, to some distant school, into an entirely4 new life, her thoughts would be diverted.”
Eli Bolton almost laughed as he regarded his wife, with eyes that never looked at her except fondly, and replied,
“Perhaps thee remembers that thee had notions also, before we were married, and before thee became a member of Meeting. I think Ruth comes honestly by certain tendencies which thee has hidden under the Friend’s dress.”
Margaret could not say no to this, and while she paused, it was evident that memory was busy with suggestions to shake her present opinions.
“Why not let Ruth try the study for a time,” suggested Eli; “there is a fair beginning of a Woman’s Medical College in the city. Quite likely she will soon find that she needs first a more general culture, and fall in with thy wish that she should see more of the world at some large school.”
There really seemed to be nothing else to be done, and Margaret consented at length without approving. And it was agreed that Ruth, in order to spare her fatigue5, should take lodgings6 with friends near the college and make a trial in the pursuit of that science to which we all owe our lives, and sometimes as by a miracle of escape.
That day Mr. Bolton brought home a stranger to dinner, Mr. Bigler of the great firm of Pennybacker, Bigler & Small, railroad contractors7. He was always bringing home somebody, who had a scheme; to build a road, or open a mine, or plant a swamp with cane9 to grow paper-stock, or found a hospital, or invest in a patent shad-bone separator, or start a college somewhere on the frontier, contiguous to a land speculation10.
The Bolton house was a sort of hotel for this kind of people. They were always coming. Ruth had known them from childhood, and she used to say that her father attracted them as naturally as a sugar hogshead does flies. Ruth had an idea that a large portion of the world lived by getting the rest of the world into schemes. Mr. Bolton never could say “no” to any of them, not even, said Ruth again, to the society for stamping oyster11 shells with scripture12 texts before they were sold at retail13.
Mr. Bigler’s plan this time, about which he talked loudly, with his mouth full, all dinner time, was the building of the Tunkhannock, Rattlesnake and Youngwomans Town Railroad, which would not only be a great highway to the west, but would open to market inexhaustible coal-fields and untold14 millions of lumber15. The plan of operations was very simple.
“We’ll buy the lands,” explained he, “on long time, backed by the notes of good men; and then mortgage them for money enough to get the road well on. Then get the towns on the line to issue their bonds for stock, and sell their bonds for enough to complete the road, and partly stock it, especially if we mortgage each section as we complete it. We can then sell the rest of the stock on the prospect16 of the business of the road through an improved country, and also sell the lands at a big advance, on the strength of the road. All we want,” continued Mr. Bigler in his frank manner, “is a few thousand dollars to start the surveys, and arrange things in the legislature. There is some parties will have to be seen, who might make us trouble.”
“It will take a good deal of money to start the enterprise,” remarked Mr. Bolton, who knew very well what “seeing” a Pennsylvania Legislature meant, but was too polite to tell Mr. Bigler what he thought of him, while he was his guest; “what security would one have for it?”
Mr. Bigler smiled a hard kind of smile, and said, “You’d be inside, Mr. Bolton, and you’d have the first chance in the deal.”
This was rather unintelligible17 to Ruth, who was nevertheless somewhat amused by the study of a type of character she had seen before. At length she interrupted the conversation by asking,
“You’d sell the stock, I suppose, Mr. Bigler, to anybody who was attracted by the prospectus18?”
“O, certainly, serve all alike,” said Mr. Bigler, now noticing Ruth for the first time, and a little puzzled by the serene19, intelligent face that was turned towards him.
“Well, what would become of the poor people who had been led to put their little money into the speculation, when you got out of it and left it half way?”
It would be no more true to say of Mr. Bigler that he was or could be embarrassed, than to say that a brass20 counterfeit21 dollar-piece would change color when refused; the question annoyed him a little, in Mr. Bolton’s presence.
“Why, yes, Miss, of course, in a great enterprise for the benefit of the community there will little things occur, which, which—and, of course, the poor ought to be looked to; I tell my wife, that the poor must be looked to; if you can tell who are poor—there’s so many impostors. And then, there’s so many poor in the legislature to be looked after,” said the contractor8 with a sort of a chuckle22, “isn’t that so, Mr. Bolton?”
Eli Bolton replied that he never had much to do with the legislature.
“Yes,” continued this public benefactor23, “an uncommon24 poor lot this year, uncommon. Consequently an expensive lot. The fact is, Mr. Bolton, that the price is raised so high on United States Senator now, that it affects the whole market; you can’t get any public improvement through on reasonable terms. Simony is what I call it, Simony,” repeated Mr. Bigler, as if he had said a good thing.
Mr. Bigler went on and gave some very interesting details of the intimate connection between railroads and politics, and thoroughly25 entertained himself all dinner time, and as much disgusted Ruth, who asked no more questions, and her father who replied in monosyllables:
“I wish,” said Ruth to her father, after the guest had gone, “that you wouldn’t bring home any more such horrid26 men. Do all men who wear big diamond breast-pins, flourish their knives at table, and use bad grammar, and cheat?”
“O, child, thee mustn’t be too observing. Mr. Bigler is one of the most important men in the state; nobody has more influence at Harrisburg. I don’t like him any more than thee does, but I’d better lend him a little money than to have his ill will.”
“Father, I think thee’d better have his ill-will than his company. Is it true that he gave money to help build the pretty little church of St. James the Less, and that he is, one of the vestrymen?”
“Yes. He is not such a bad fellow. One of the men in Third street asked him the other day, whether his was a high church or a low church? Bigler said he didn’t know; he’d been in it once, and he could touch the ceiling in the side aisle27 with his hand.”
“I think he’s just horrid,” was Ruth’s final summary of him, after the manner of the swift judgment28 of women, with no consideration of the extenuating29 circumstances. Mr. Bigler had no idea that he had not made a good impression on the whole family; he certainly intended to be agreeable. Margaret agreed with her daughter, and though she never said anything to such people, she was grateful to Ruth for sticking at least one pin into him.
Such was the serenity30 of the Bolton household that a stranger in it would never have suspected there was any opposition31 to Ruth’s going to the Medical School. And she went quietly to take her residence in town, and began her attendance of the lectures, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She did not heed32, if she heard, the busy and wondering gossip of relations and acquaintances, gossip that has no less currency among the Friends than elsewhere because it is whispered slyly and creeps about in an undertone.
Ruth was absorbed, and for the first time in her life thoroughly happy; happy in the freedom of her life, and in the keen enjoyment33 of the investigation34 that broadened its field day by day. She was in high spirits when she came home to spend First Days; the house was full of her gaiety and her merry laugh, and the children wished that Ruth would never go away again. But her mother noticed, with a little anxiety, the sometimes flushed face, and the sign of an eager spirit in the kindling35 eyes, and, as well, the serious air of determination and endurance in her face at unguarded moments.
The college was a small one and it sustained itself not without difficulty in this city, which is so conservative, and is yet the origin of so many radical36 movements. There were not more than a dozen attendants on the lectures all together, so that the enterprise had the air of an experiment, and the fascination37 of pioneering for those engaged in it. There was one woman physician driving about town in her carriage, attacking the most violent diseases in all quarters with persistent38 courage, like a modern Bellona in her war chariot, who was popularly supposed to gather in fees to the amount ten to twenty thousand dollars a year. Perhaps some of these students looked forward to the near day when they would support such a practice and a husband besides, but it is unknown that any of them ever went further than practice in hospitals and in their own nurseries, and it is feared that some of them were quite as ready as their sisters, in emergencies, to “call a man.”
If Ruth had any exaggerated expectations of a professional life, she kept them to herself, and was known to her fellows of the class simply as a cheerful, sincere student, eager in her investigations39, and never impatient at anything, except an insinuation that women had not as much mental capacity for science as men.
“They really say,” said one young Quaker sprig to another youth of his age, “that Ruth Bolton is really going to be a saw-bones, attends lectures, cuts up bodies, and all that. She’s cool enough for a surgeon, anyway.” He spoke40 feelingly, for he had very likely been weighed in Ruth’s calm eyes sometime, and thoroughly scared by the little laugh that accompanied a puzzling reply to one of his conversational41 nothings. Such young gentlemen, at this time, did not come very distinctly into Ruth’s horizon, except as amusing circumstances.
About the details of her student life, Ruth said very little to her friends, but they had reason to know, afterwards, that it required all her nerve and the almost complete exhaustion42 of her physical strength, to carry her through. She began her anatomical practice upon detached portions of the human frame, which were brought into the demonstrating room—dissecting43 the eye, the ear, and a small tangle44 of muscles and nerves—an occupation which had not much more savor45 of death in it than the analysis of a portion of a plant out of which the life went when it was plucked up by the roots. Custom inures46 the most sensitive persons to that which is at first most repellant; and in the late war we saw the most delicate women, who could not at home endure the sight of blood, become so used to scenes of carnage, that they walked the hospitals and the margins47 of battle-fields, amid the poor remnants of torn humanity, with as perfect self-possession as if they were strolling in a flower garden.
It happened that Ruth was one evening deep in a line of investigation which she could not finish or understand without demonstration48, and so eager was she in it, that it seemed as if she could not wait till the next day. She, therefore, persuaded a fellow student, who was reading that evening with her, to go down to the dissecting room of the college, and ascertain49 what they wanted to know by an hour’s work there. Perhaps, also, Ruth wanted to test her own nerve, and to see whether the power of association was stronger in her mind than her own will.
The janitor50 of the shabby and comfortless old building admitted the girls, not without suspicion, and gave them lighted candles, which they would need, without other remark than “there’s a new one, Miss,” as the girls went up the broad stairs.
They climbed to the third story, and paused before a door, which they unlocked, and which admitted them into a long apartment, with a row of windows on one side and one at the end. The room was without light, save from the stars and the candles the girls carried, which revealed to them dimly two long and several small tables, a few benches and chairs, a couple of skeletons hanging on the wall, a sink, and cloth-covered heaps of something upon the tables here and there.
The windows were open, and the cool night wind came in strong enough to flutter a white covering now and then, and to shake the loose casements51. But all the sweet odors of the night could not take from the room a faint suggestion of mortality.
The young ladies paused a moment. The room itself was familiar enough, but night makes almost any chamber52 eerie53, and especially such a room of detention54 as this where the mortal parts of the unburied might—almost be supposed to be, visited, on the sighing night winds, by the wandering spirits of their late tenants55.
Opposite and at some distance across the roofs of lower buildings, the girls saw a tall edifice56, the long upper story of which seemed to be a dancing hall. The windows of that were also open, and through them they heard the scream of the jiggered and tortured violin, and the pump, pump of the oboe, and saw the moving shapes of men and women in quick transition, and heard the prompter’s drawl.
“I wonder,” said Ruth, “what the girls dancing there would think if they saw us, or knew that there was such a room as this so near them.”
She did not speak very loud, and, perhaps unconsciously, the girls drew near to each other as they approached the long table in the centre of the room. A straight object lay upon it, covered with a sheet. This was doubtless “the new one” of which the janitor spoke. Ruth advanced, and with a not very steady hand lifted the white covering from the upper part of the figure and turned it down. Both the girls started. It was a negro. The black face seemed to defy the pallor of death, and asserted an ugly life-likeness that was frightful57.
Ruth was as pale as the white sheet, and her comrade whispered, “Come away, Ruth, it is awful.”
Perhaps it was the wavering light of the candles, perhaps it was only the agony from a death of pain, but the repulsive58 black face seemed to wear a scowl59 that said, “Haven’t you yet done with the outcast, persecuted60 black man, but you must now haul him from his grave, and send even your women to dismember his body?”
Who is this dead man, one of thousands who died yesterday, and will be dust anon, to protest that science shall not turn his worthless carcass to some account?
Ruth could have had no such thought, for with a pity in her sweet face, that for the moment overcame fear and disgust, she reverently61 replaced the covering, and went away to her own table, as her companion did to hers. And there for an hour they worked at their several problems, without speaking, but not without an awe62 of the presence there, “the new one,” and not without an awful sense of life itself, as they heard the pulsations of the music and the light laughter from the dancing-hall.
When, at length, they went away, and locked the dreadful room behind them, and came out into the street, where people were passing, they, for the first time, realized, in the relief they felt, what a nervous strain they had been under.
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1
frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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ordeal
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| n.苦难经历，（尤指对品格、耐力的）严峻考验 | |
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thwarted
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| 阻挠( thwart的过去式和过去分词 )； 使受挫折； 挫败； 横过 | |
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4
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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fatigue
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| n.疲劳，劳累 | |
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lodgings
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| n. 出租的房舍, 寄宿舍 | |
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contractors
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| n.（建筑、监造中的）承包人( contractor的名词复数 ) | |
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contractor
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| n.订约人，承包人，收缩肌 | |
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cane
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| n.手杖，细长的茎，藤条；v.以杖击，以藤编制的 | |
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speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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oyster
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| n.牡蛎；沉默寡言的人 | |
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12
scripture
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| n.经文，圣书，手稿；Scripture:(常用复数)《圣经》，《圣经》中的一段 | |
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13
retail
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| v./n.零售；adv.以零售价格 | |
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untold
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| adj.数不清的，无数的 | |
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lumber
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| n.木材，木料；v.以破旧东西堆满；伐木；笨重移动 | |
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16
prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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unintelligible
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| adj.无法了解的，难解的，莫明其妙的 | |
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prospectus
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| n.计划书；说明书；慕股书 | |
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serene
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| adj. 安详的，宁静的，平静的 | |
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brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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counterfeit
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| vt.伪造，仿造；adj.伪造的，假冒的 | |
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chuckle
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| vi.／n.轻声笑，咯咯笑 | |
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benefactor
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| n. 恩人，行善的人，捐助人 | |
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uncommon
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| adj.罕见的，非凡的，不平常的 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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horrid
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| adj.可怕的；令人惊恐的；恐怖的；极讨厌的 | |
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aisle
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| n.（教堂、教室、戏院等里的）过道，通道 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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extenuating
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| adj.使减轻的，情有可原的v.（用偏袒的辩解或借口）减轻( extenuate的现在分词 )；低估，藐视 | |
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serenity
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| n.宁静，沉着，晴朗 | |
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opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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heed
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| v.注意，留意；n.注意，留心 | |
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enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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kindling
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| n. 点火, 可燃物 动词kindle的现在分词形式 | |
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radical
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| n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的 | |
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fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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investigations
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| （正式的）调查( investigation的名词复数 )； 侦查； 科学研究； 学术研究 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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conversational
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| adj.对话的，会话的 | |
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42
exhaustion
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| n.耗尽枯竭，疲惫，筋疲力尽，竭尽，详尽无遗的论述 | |
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43
dissecting
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| v.解剖（动物等）( dissect的现在分词 )；仔细分析或研究 | |
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tangle
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| n.纠缠；缠结；混乱；v.(使)缠绕；变乱 | |
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45
savor
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| vt.品尝，欣赏；n.味道，风味；情趣，趣味 | |
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46
inures
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| vt.使习惯（inure的第三人称单数形式） | |
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47
margins
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| 边( margin的名词复数 )； 利润； 页边空白； 差数 | |
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demonstration
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| n.表明，示范，论证，示威 | |
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49
ascertain
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| vt.发现，确定，查明，弄清 | |
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50
janitor
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| n.看门人，管门人 | |
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51
casements
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| n.窗扉( casement的名词复数 ) | |
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52
chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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53
eerie
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| adj.怪诞的；奇异的；可怕的；胆怯的 | |
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54
detention
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| n.滞留，停留；拘留，扣留；(教育)留下 | |
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tenants
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| n.房客( tenant的名词复数 )；佃户；占用者；占有者 | |
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56
edifice
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| n.宏伟的建筑物(如宫殿，教室) | |
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frightful
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| adj.可怕的；讨厌的 | |
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repulsive
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| adj.排斥的，使人反感的 | |
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scowl
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| vi.(at)生气地皱眉，沉下脸，怒视；n.怒容 | |
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persecuted
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| （尤指宗教或政治信仰的）迫害(~sb. for sth.)( persecute的过去式和过去分词 )； 烦扰，困扰或骚扰某人 | |
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reverently
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| adv.虔诚地 | |
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awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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