Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of NervousnessCarroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Science
Our Nervous Friends — Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness
Carroll, Robert S. (Robert Sproul)
Nervous system -- Hygiene
Dave was accepting his need for the bitter medicine which was being
administered. He had forgiven Adelaide who sided with his father and,
for the first time, had written, acknowledging some of his past
failures. He wanted some books. He needed clothes. The orders given
the doctor had been rigid as to spending-money and diversions. The
determined father disapproved the expense account. Another man was
sent to relieve the doctor-companion-a man who could be depended upon
to carry out the letter of the father's law. Rebellion, fierce--and it
seemed, righteous--flamed forth in Dave Scott's soul. He was doing his
best. He was working as he never had worked before. He had seen his
need--he had the vision of self-mastery. All this, and more he had
seriously confided to the man his father, through the court, had
placed over him. Without a word of explanation he was again to be
turned over to the custody of a stranger. Was he a child or a chattel?
Was he mentally irresponsible that he should be thus transferred from
one hand to another without a hearing? He wired his protests, and
received in return an assurance that he would accept his new custodian
or be cut off without a cent. In that hour the real character of David
Scott was born. He consulted an attorney and learned the limited power
of his guardians. Outside of Ohio he was legally free. He pawned some
of his few belongings. Adelaide and the child were financially cared
for. Over night he left the State. He would be a man, penniless,
rather than the chattel-son of a millionaire!
The United States had just entered the Great War. The Marines were
being recruited everywhere for "early over-seas service," and Dave
Scott, the aesthetic, volunteered as a "buck-private." Few got over as
fast as they wished. It was six months for Dave at Paris Island. There
were few in the ranks of his mental ability, and physically he became
as hard as the toughest. He was soon a corporal and later a sergeant.
And he worked. He met the roughest of camp duties, at first with set
jaw and revolting senses, later with a grim smile; finally, and then
the emancipation, with a sense of the closeness of man to man in
mankind's work. And the men began turning to him, and as he sweated
with them he learned to discern the manliness in the crudest of them.
He went across at the end of six months, to France. He was a
replacement in the Sixth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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