Part 5

To whom do you tell your troubles-- the agile wit, or the bromide-minded, solid, respectable Philistine, your uncle, with the shoestring tie? No, no; oh, no, my friend, you can’t be too quick on the comic trigger, if you would have the Educated Heart!

There is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh,” said the Preacher; the Educated Heart knows well how to control his mirth.

YOU call once or twice at the hospital. Do you ever call again? Not unless you have the Educated Heart. Yet the patient is still perhaps quite as ill. The plain truth is, if you must know it, most people really dislike illness. It bores them. It interferes with their happiness and convenience. It thrusts upon them, too, a disagreeable burden of sympathy.

But, one there was--d’you remember? will you ever forget?--who used to bring that cute scrapbook, every morning, pasted in with funny newspaper items of the day’s news. One there was who wrote you letters every day. One who rescued the clock that always had something in front of it, so you couldn’t see the time, who was careful never to hit the bed, who talked to you, yes, to poor sick you, instead of to the distinguished caller who happened to be present.

But still I insist I don’t mean mere kindness. Others were kind to you. They bought you things. But such acts as these required more thought and invention than the others spent, when they sent the jelly and champagne.

And oh, what do these Uneducated Hearts do at your first brave smile (though the effort kills you), at your first would-be, will-be cheerful letter, or at your first timorous step on crutches? They beam. Oh, how they beam! “Oh, you’re all right now, aren’t you!”

It may pain you for months to breathe, you may limp on that broken ankle to your grave--but it’s much more convenient for them to have you well again.

And so, isn’t it lovely you’re cured!

ASK any invalid. Ask poor Luraine. “I’m afraid I’ll have to wear glasses,” wept poor Luraine, after that accident when her eye was injured. “Well, my dear,” said her would-be comforter, “I do hope you’ll get some of those smart tortoiseshell goggles--they’re so becoming!” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what often passes for sympathy.

Ask any partially deaf person who is the cruellest of her would-be friends. Isn’t it that kind and thoughtless one who says, so sweetly: “Why, I think you get along awfully well, you know. Really no one would ever know you can’t hear!” No one but the Educated Heart ever knows or cares for the tearful nights of wild revolt, the days and years of stoic suffering that remain, just the same. Yes, just the same.

BUT let’s pass, now, to the last cage in our menagerie. Here’s a dangerous galravaging beast--one of those terrible creatures who “mean well,” even while they rend you. One historic remark of this emotional reptile there is, that in the annals of mental torture, surpasses in heartlessness all other expressions of good intent. Oh, I have said it--you have, too, I suppose. May God forgive us both, for there are those who never, never will!

Galna it was who has dramatized it for me best. A dreadful suicide it was, no horror lacking. Galna, alone in the house--alone, save for her maid and that shocking wreck of one she had loved. And in her anguish, her despair, her bewilderment, the telephone bell rang. Lo, Mrs. Spick, kind, effusive Mrs. Spick, had rung her up to coo conventional condolence.

“And now, if there is anything I can do, Galna,” she concluded, “be sure and let me know!”

Ah, my friend, sometime you, too, must have suffered--suffered and known not where to turn; and, as sure as most hearts, alas, are ignorant, sometime you, too, must have heard that frightful phrase-- that mockery of friendship. The very epitaph it is upon the grave of affection: “If there is anything I can do, be sure and let me know!”

But as Galna, dazed, lonely, aching, staggered back to her room, behold, upon her bed she saw an unfamiliar thing. Tear-blinded, she groped for it. A hundred-dollar bill!

“Why, where did this come from?” she asked, wondering.

“Oh, Miss Felice left it there,” said her maid, “she thought perhaps you might happen to be short of money.”

“Felice?”

“Yes, she’s downstairs now, helping wash the dishes and putting the parlor to rights, and sending telegrams.”

Ah, Felice needed no one to “let her know” what to do. She had imagination. She had the Educated Heart.

For the Educated Heart always knows. “He seeth with his heart.” The language of suffering, ordinarily, can no more be learned without experience than can the language of Mars; but upon some blessed few, in this world, thank God, has fallen the Gift of Tongues.

TRULY, as Sadie said, nothing is so rare as the Educated Heart. And if you wonder why, just show a kodak group picture--a banquet photograph--a photograph of a class. What does every one of us first look at, talk about? Ourself. And that’s the reason why most hearts are so unlearned in kindness. Yet none of us likes himself to be forgotten or neglected. Almost any wife, I verily believe, would prefer actual rudeness to having a husband pass over her wedding anniversary unnoticed. Even a blow would prove that she was of some importance in his life.

So it isn’t always the big, climactic misfortune that we suffer from most. We can rally, after we’re stunned, and go on, somehow. But it’s the little stings that we can’t forget. It’s because of the Uneducated Heart that love-mad women kill.

“Why don’t you get a smart hat like Carrie’s, dear? She’s always so well-dressed!”

Yes, and because of the Uneducated Hearts of their wives, husbands grow seedy, silly and old.

Why, one can tell, almost, by the looks of a man--his posture, his very clothes--whether or not his wife truly loves him. For many a wife, dubbed by his undiscerning friends a shrew, a harridan, has proved her real interest in him by so ballyragging him for his faults that he has, despite himself, improved to meet her criticism, become ambitious, become persevering and successful--while as many others have been slowly kissed and praised into an intellectual apathy; most affectionately murdered by the Uneducated Heart. Ah, ’tis not only cats and lap dogs that are killed with kindness!

There is another side to the Mary and Martha story. I know them well, those two sisters. Mary loves Martha well, she will tell you, and be shocked at your question. But dear Martha is, before her time, an old woman, round-shouldered, bowed down by caring for others. In the years, has Mary ever said, “Straighten up, dear! You are growing crooked.”

Not once. Her own head high, she walks beside a sister almost deformed--whom, with an Educated Heart, she could have saved from ugliness.