Dr. Breen\'s Practice
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DR. BREEN'S PRACTICE.
By William Dean Howells
1881
I.
Near the verge of a bold promontory stands the hotel, and looks
southeastward over a sweep of sea unbroken to the horizon. Behind it
stretches the vast forest, which after two hundred years has resumed the
sterile coast wrested from it by the first Pilgrims, and has begun to
efface the evidences of the inroad made in recent years by the bold
speculator for whom Jocelyn's is named. The young birches and spruces are
breast high in the drives and avenues at Jocelyn's; the low blackberry
vines and the sweet fern cover the carefully-graded sidewalks, and
obscure the divisions of the lots; the children of the boarders have
found squawberries in the public square on the spot where the band-stand
was to have been. The notion of a sea-side resort at this point was
courageously conceived, and to a certain extent it was generously
realized. Except for its remoteness from the railroad, a drawback which
future enterprise might be expected to remedy in some way, the place has
many natural advantages. The broad plateau is cooled by a breeze from the
vast forests behind it, which comes laden with health and freshness from
the young pines; the sea at its feet is warmed by the Gulf Stream to a
temperature delicious for bathing. There are certainly mosquitoes from
the woods; but there are mosquitoes everywhere, and the report that
people have been driven away by them is manifestly untrue, for whoever
comes to Jocelyn's remains. The beach at the foot of the bluff is almost
a mile at its curve, and it is so smooth and hard that it glistens like
polished marble when newly washed by the tide. It is true that you reach
it from the top by a flight of eighty steps, but it was intended to have
an elevator, like those near the Whirlpool at Niagara. In the mean time
it is easy enough to go down, and the ladies go down every day, taking
their novels or their needle-work with them. They have various notions of
a bath: some conceive that it is bathing to sit in the edge of the water,
and emit shrieks as the surge sweeps against them; others run boldly in,
and after a moment of poignant hesitation jump up and down half-a-dozen
times, and run out; yet others imagine it better to remain immersed to
the chin for a given space, looking toward the shore with lips tightly
shut and the breath held. But after the bath they are all of one mind;
they lay their shawls on the warm sand, and, spreading out their hair to
dry, they doze in the sun, in such coils and masses as the unconscious
figure lends itself to. When they rise from their beds, they sit in the
shelter of the cliff and knit or sew, while one of them reads aloud, and
another stands watch to announce the coming of the seals, which frequent
a reef near the shore in great numbers. It has been said at rival points
on the coast that the ladies linger there in despair of ever being able
to remount to the hotel. A young man who clambered along the shore from
one of those points reported finding day after day the same young lady
stretched out on the same shawl, drying the same yellow hair, who had
apparently never gone upstairs since the season began. But the recurrence
of this phenomenon in this spot at the very moment when the young man
came by might have been accounted for upon other theories. Jocelyn's was
so secluded that she could not have expected any one to find her there
twice, and if she had expected this she would not have permitted it.
Probably he saw a different young lady each time.
Many of the same boarders come year after year, and these tremble at the
suggestion of a change for the better in Jocelyn's. The landlord has
always believed that Jocelyn's would come up, some day, when times got
better. He believes that the narrow-gauge railroad from New Leyden
--arrested on paper at the disastrous moment when the fortunes of
Jocelyn's felt the general crash--will be pushed through yet; and every
summer he promises that next summer they are going to have a steam-launch
running twice a day from Leyden Harbor. But at present his house is
visited once a day by a barge, as the New England coast-folks call the
vehicle in which they convey city boarders to and from the station, and
the old frequenters of the place hope that the station will never be
nearer Jocelyn's than at present. Some of them are rich enough to afford
a sojourn at more fashionable resorts; but most of them are not, though
they are often people of polite tastes and of aesthetic employments. They
talk with slight of the large watering-places, and probably they would
not like them, though it is really economy that inspires their passion
for Jocelyn's with most of them, and they know of the splendid weariness
of Newport mostly by hearsay. New arrivals are not favored, but there are
not often new arrivals at Jocelyn's. The chief business of the barge is
to bring fresh meat for the table and the gaunt bag which contains the
mail; for in the first flush of the enterprise the place was made a
post-office, and the landlord is postmaster; he has the help of the
lady-boarders in his official duties.
Scattered about among the young birches there are several of those pine
frames known as shells, within easy walk of the hotel, where their
inmates board. They are picturesque interiors, and are on informal terms
with the public as to many domestic details. The lady of the house, doing
her back hair at her dressing-room glass, is divided from her husband,
smoking at the parlor fire-place, only by a partition of unlathed
studding. The arrest of development in these shells is characteristic of
everything about the place. None of the improvements invented since the
hard times began have been added to Jocelyn's; lawntennis is still
unknown there; but there is a croquet-ground before the hotel, where the
short, tough grass is kept in tolerable order. The wickets are pretty
rusty, and it is usually the children who play; but toward the close of a
certain, afternoon a young lady was pushing the balls about there. She
seemed to be going over a game just played, and trying to trace the cause
of her failure. She made bad shots, and laughed at her blunders. Another
young lady drooped languidly on a bench at the side of the
croquet-ground, and followed her movements with indifference.
"I don't see how you did it, Louise," panted the player; "it's
astonishing how you beat me."
The lady on the bench made as if to answer, but ended by coughing
hoarsely.
"Oh, dear child!" cried the first, dropping her mallet, and running to
her. "You ought to have put on your shawl!" She lifted the knit shawl
lying beside her on the bench, and laid it across the other's shoulders,
and drew it close about her neck.
"Oh, don't!" said the other. "It chokes me to be bundled up so tight."
She shrugged the shawl down to her shoulders with a pretty petulance. "If
my chest's protected, that's all that's necessary." But she made no
motion to drape the outline which her neatly-fitted dress displayed, and
she did not move from her place, or look up at her anxious friend.
"Oh, but don't sit here, Louise," the latter pleaded, lingering near her.
"I was wrong to let you sit down at all after you had got heated."
"Well, Grace, I had to," said she who was called Louise. "I was so tired
out. I'm not going to take more cold. I can always tell when I am. I'll
put on the shawl in half a minute; or else I'll go in."
"I'm sure there's nothing to keep me out. That's the worst of these
lonely places: my mind preys upon itself. That's what Dr. Nixon always
said: he said it was no use in air so long as my mind preyed upon itself.
He said that I ought to divert my mind all I could, and keep it from
preying upon itself; that it was worth all the medicine in the world."
"That's perfectly true."
"Then you ought n't to keep reminding me all the time that I'm sick.
That's what starts my mind to preying upon itself; and when it gets going
once I can't stop it. I ought to treat myself just like a well person;
that's what the doctor said."
The other stood looking at the speaker in frowning perplexity. She was a
serious-faced girl, and now when she frowned her black brows met sternly
above her gray eyes. But she controlled any impulse she had to severity,
and asked gently, "Shall I send Bella to you?"
"Oh, no! I can't make society out of a child the whole time. I'll just
sit here till the barge comes in. I suppose it will be as empty as a
gourd, as usual." She added, with a sick and weary negligence, "I don't
even know where Bella is. She's run off, somewhere."
"It's quite time she should be looked up, for tea. I'll wander out that
way and look for her." She indicated the wilderness generally.
"Thanks," said Louise. She now gratefully drew her shawl up over her
shoulders, and faced about on the bench so as to command an easy view of
the arriving barge. The other met it on her way to the place in the woods
where the children usually played, and found it as empty as her friend
had foreboded. But the driver stopped his horses, and leaned out of the
side of the wagon with a little package in his hand. He read the
superscription, and then glanced consciously at the girl. "You're Miss
Breen, ain't you?"
"Yes," she said, with lady-like sweetness and a sort of business-like
alertness.
"Well," suggested the driver, "this is for Miss Grace Breen, M. D."
"For me, thank you," said the young lady. "I'm Dr. Breen." She put out
her hand for the little package from the homoeopathic pharmacy in Boston;
and the driver yielded it with a blush that reddened him to his hair.
"Well," he said slowly, staring at the handsome girl, who did not visibly
share his embarrassment, "they told me you was the one; but I could n't
seem to get it through me. I thought it must be the old lady."
"My mother is Mrs. Breen," the young lady briefly explained, and walked
rapidly away, leaving the driver stuck in the heavy sand of Sea-Glimpse
Avenue.
"Why, get up!" he shouted to his horses. "Goin' to stay here all day?" He
craned his neck round the side of the wagon for a sight of her. "Well,
dumm 'f I don't wish I was sick! Steps along," he mused, watching the
swirl and ripple of her skirt, "like--I dunno what."
With her face turned from him Dr. Breen blushed, too; she was not yet so
used to her quality of physician that she could coldly bear the confusion
to which her being a doctor put men. She laughed a little to herself at
the helplessness of the driver, confronted probably for the first time
with a graduate of the New York homoeopathic school; but she believed
that she had reasons for taking herself seriously in every way, and she
had not entered upon this career without definite purposes. When she was
not yet out of her teens, she had an unhappy love affair, which was
always darkly referred to as a disappointment by people who knew of it at
the time. Though the particulars of the case do not directly concern this
story, it may be stated that the recreant lover afterwards married her
dearest girl-friend, whom he had first met in her company. It was cruel
enough, and the hurt went deep; but it neither crushed nor hardened her.
It benumbed her for a time; she sank out of sight; but when she returned
to the knowledge of the world she showed no mark of the blow except what
was thought a strange eccentricity in a girl such as she had been. The
world which had known her--it was that of an inland New England
city--heard of her definitely after several years as a student of
medicine in New York. Those who had more of her intimacy understood that
she had chosen this work with the intention of giving her life to it, in
the spirit in which other women enter convents, or go out to heathen
lands; but probably this conception had its exaggerations. What was
certain was that she was rich enough to have no need of her profession as
a means of support, and that its study had cost her more than the usual
suffering that it brings to persons of sensitive nerves. Some details
were almost insuperably repugnant; but in schooling herself to them she
believed that she was preparing to encounter anything in the application
of her science.
Her first intention had been to go back to her own town after her
graduation, and begin the practice of her profession among those who had
always known her, and whose scrutiny and criticism would be hardest to
bear, and therefore, as she fancied, the most useful to her in the
formation of character. But afterwards she relinquished her purpose in
favor of a design which she thought would be more useful to others: she
planned going to one of the great factory towns, and beginning practice
there, in company with an older physician, among the children of the
operatives. Pending the completion of this arrangement, which was waiting
upon the decision of the other lady, she had come to Jocelyn's with her
mother, and with Mrs. Maynard, who had arrived from the West, aimlessly
sick and unfriended, just as they were about leaving home. There was no
resource but to invite her with them, and Dr. Breen was finding her first
patient in this unexpected guest. She did not wholly regret the accident;
this, too, was useful work, though not that she would have chosen; but
her mother, after a fortnight, openly repined, and could not mention Mrs.
Maynard without some rebellious murmur. She was an old lady, who had once
kept a very vigilant conscience for herself; but after making her life
unhappy with it for some threescore years, she now applied it entirely to
the exasperation and condemnation of others. She especially devoted it to
fretting a New England girl's naturally morbid sense of duty in her
daughter, and keeping it in the irritation of perpetual self-question.
She had never actively opposed her studying medicine; that ambition had
harmonized very well with certain radical tendencies of her own, and it
was at least not marriage, which she had found tolerable only in its
modified form of widowhood; but at every step after the decisive step was
taken she was beset with misgivings lest Grace was not fully alive to the
grave responsibilities of her office, which she accumulated upon the girl
in proportion as she flung off all responsibilities of her own. She was
doubtless deceived by that show of calm which sometimes deceived Grace
herself, who, in tutoring her soul to bear what it had to bear, mistook
her tense effort for spiritual repose, and scarcely realized through her
tingling nerves the strain she was undergoing. In spite of the bitter
experience of her life, she was still very ardent in her hopes of
usefulness, very scornful of distress or discomfort to herself, and a
little inclined to exact the heroism she was ready to show. She had a
child's severe morality, and she had hardly learned to understand that
there is much evil in the world that does not characterize the
perpetrators: she held herself as strictly to account for every word and
deed as she held others, and she had an almost passionate desire to meet
the consequence of her errors; till that was felt, an intolerable doom
hung over her. She tried not to be impulsive; that was criminal in one of
her calling; and she struggled for patience with an endeavor that was
largely successful.
As to the effect of her career outside of herself, and of those whom her
skill was to benefit, she tried to think neither arrogantly nor meanly.
She would not entertain the vanity that she was serving what is called
the cause of woman, and she would not assume any duties or
responsibilities toward it. She thought men were as good as women; at
least one man had been no worse than one woman; and it was in no
representative or exemplary character that she had chosen her course. At
the same time that she held these sane opinions, she believed that she
had put away the hopes with the pleasures that might once have taken her
as a young girl. In regard to what had changed the current of her life,
she mentally asserted her mere nullity, her absolute non-existence. The
thought of it no longer rankled, and that interest could never be hers
again. If it had not been so much like affectation, and so counter to her
strong aesthetic instinct, she might have made her dress somehow
significant of her complete abeyance in such matters; but as it was she
only studied simplicity, and as we have seen from the impression of the
barge-driver she did not finally escape distinction in dress and manner.
In fact, she could not have escaped that effect if she would; and it was
one of the indomitable contradictions of her nature that she would not.
When she came back to the croquet-ground, leading the little girl by the
hand, she found Mrs. Maynard no longer alone and no longer sad. She was
chatting and laughing with a slim young fellow, whose gay blue eyes
looked out of a sunburnt face, and whose straw hat, carried in his hand,
exposed a closely shaven head. He wore a suit of gray flannel, and Mrs.
Maynard explained that he was camping on the beach at Birkman's Cove, and
had come over in the steamer with her when she returned from Europe. She
introduced him as Mr. Libby, and said, "Oh, Bella, you dirty little
thing!"
Mr. Libby bowed anxiously to Grace, and turned for refuge to the little
girl. "Hello, Bella!" "Hello!" said the child. "Remember me?" The child
put her left hand on that of Grace holding her right, and prettily
pressed her head against the girl's arm in bashful silence. Grace said
some coldly civil words to the young man: without looking at Mrs.
Maynard, and passed on into the house.
"You don't mean that's your doctor?" he scarcely more than whispered.
"Yes, I do," answered Mrs. Maynard. "Is n't she too lovely? And she's
just as good! She used to stand up at school for me, when all the girls
were down on me because I was Western. And when I came East, this time, I
just went right straight to her house. I knew she could tell me exactly
what to do. And that's the reason I'm here. I shall always recommend this
air to anybody with lung difficulties. It's the greatest thing! I'm
almost another person. Oh, you need n't look after her, Mr. Libby!
There's nothing flirtatious about Grace," said Mrs. Maynard.
The young man recovered himself from his absentminded stare in the
direction Grace had taken, with a frank laugh. "So much the better for a
fellow, I should say!"
Grace handed the little girl over to her nurse, and went to her own room,
where she found her mother waiting to go down to tea.
"Where is Mrs. Maynard?" asked Mrs. Breen.
"Out on the croquet-ground," answered the daughter.
"I should think it would be damp," suggested Mrs. Green.
"She will come in when the tea-bell rings. She wouldn't come in now, if I
told her."
"Well," said the elder lady, "for a person who lets her doctor pay her
board, I think 'she's very independent."
"I wish you would n't speak of that, mother," said the girl.
"I can't help it, Grace. It's ridiculous,--that's what it is; it's
ridiculous."
"I don't see anything ridiculous in it. A physician need not charge
anything unless he chooses, or she; and if I choose to make Louise my
guest here it's quite the same as if she were my guest at home."
"I don't like you to have such a guest," said Mrs. Green. "I don't see
what claim she has upon your hospitality."
"She has a double claim upon it," Grace answered, with a flush. "She is
in sickness and in trouble. I don't see how she could have a better
claim. Even if she were quite well I should consider the way she had been
treated by her husband sufficient, and I should want to do everything I
could for her."
"I should want her to behave herself," said Mrs. Breen dryly.
"How behave herself? What do you mean?" demanded Grace, with guilty heat.
"You know what I mean, Grace. A woman in her position ought to be more
circumspect than any other woman, if she wants people to believe that her
husband treated her badly."
"We ought n't to blame her for trying to forget her troubles. It's
essential to her recovery for her to be as cheerful as she can be. I know
that she's impulsive, and she's free in her manners with strangers; but I
suppose that's her Westernism. She's almost distracted. She was crying
half the night, with her troubles, and kept Bella and me both awake."
"Is Bella with her now?"
"No," Grace admitted. "Jane's getting her ready to go down with us.
Louise is talking with a gentleman who came over on the steamer with her;
he's camping on the beach near here. I didn't wait to hear particulars."
When the nurse brought the little girl to their door, Mrs. Green took one
hand and Grace the other, and they led her down to tea. Mrs. Maynard was
already at table, and told them all about meeting Mr. Libby abroad.
Until the present time she and Grace had not seen each other since they
were at school together in Southington, where the girl used to hear so
much to the disadvantage of her native section that she would hardly have
owned to it if her accent had not found her out. It would have been
pleasanter to befriend another person, but the little Westerner suffered
a veritable persecution, and that was enough to make Grace her friend.
Shortly after she returned home from school she married, in that casual
and tentative fashion in which so many marriages seem made. Grace had
heard of her as travelling in Europe with her husband, from whom she was
now separated. She reported that he had known Mr. Libby in his bachelor
days, and that Mr. Libby had travelled with them. Mr. Maynard appeared to
have left to Mr. Libby the arrangement of his wife's pleasures, the
supervision of her shopping, and the direction of their common journeys
and sojourns; and it seemed to have been indifferent to him whether his
friend was smoking and telling stories with him, or going with his wife
to the opera, or upon such excursions as he had no taste for. She gave
the details of the triangular intimacy with a frank unconsciousness; and
after nine o'clock she returned from a moonlight walk on the beach with
Mr. Libby.
Grace sat waiting for her at the little one's bedside, for Bella had been
afraid to go to sleep alone.
"How good you are!" cried Louise, in a grateful under-tone, as she came
in. She kissed Grace, and choked down a cough with her hand over her
mouth.
"Louise," said Grace sternly, "this is shameful! You forget that you are
married, and ill, too."
"Oh, I'm ever so much better, to-night. The air's just as dry! And you
needn't mind Mr. Libby. He's such an old friend! Besides, I'm sure to
gain the case."
"No matter. Even as a divorced woman, you oughtn't to go on in this way."
"Well, I would n't, with every one. But it's quite different with Mr.
Libby. And, besides, I have to keep my mind from preying on itself
somehow."
II.
Mrs. Maynard sat in the sun on the seaward-looking piazza of the hotel,
and coughed in the warm air. She told the ladies, as they came out from
breakfast, that she was ever so much better generally, but that she
seemed to have more of that tickling in her throat. Each of them advised
her for good, and suggested this specific and that; and they all asked
her what Miss Breen was doing for her cough. Mrs. Maynard replied,
between the paroxysms, that she did not know: it was some kind of
powders. Then they said they would think she would want to try something
active; even those among them who were homoeopathists insinuated a fine
distrust of a physician of their own sex. "Oh, it's nothing serious,"
Mrs. Maynard explained. "It's just bronchial. The air will do me more
good than anything. I'm keeping out in it all I can."
After they were gone, a queer, gaunt man came and glanced from the
doorway at her. He had one eye in unnatural fixity, and the other set at
that abnormal slant which is said to qualify the owner for looking round
a corner before he gets to it. A droll twist of his mouth seemed partly
physical, but: there is no doubt that he had often a humorous intention.
It was Barlow, the man-of-all-work, who killed and plucked the poultry,
peeled the potatoes and picked the peas, pulled the sweet-corn and the
tomatoes, kindled the kitchen fire, harnessed the old splayfooted mare,
--safe for ladies and children, and intolerable for all others, which
formed the entire stud of the Jocelyn House stables,--dug the clams,
rowed and sailed the boat, looked after the bath-houses, and came in
contact with the guests at so many points that he was on easy terms with
them all. This ease tended to an intimacy which he was himself powerless
to repress, and which, from time to time, required their intervention. He
now wore a simple costume of shirt and trousers, the latter terminated by
a pair of broken shoes, and sustained by what he called a single gallows;
his broad-brimmed straw hat scooped down upon his shoulders behind, and
in front added to his congenital difficulty of getting people in focus.
"How do you do, this morning, Mrs. Maynard?" he said.
"Oh, I'm first-rate, Mr. Barlow. What sort of day do you think it's going
to be for a sail?"