Читать книгу How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told by Themselves - Orison Swett Marden - Страница 24

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The late Admiral Philip, he of the “Texas” in the Santiago fight, regarded Miss Gould as an angel, and the sailors of the Brooklyn navy yard fairly worship her. A hustling Y. M. C. A. chap, Frank Smith by name, started a little club-house for “Jack Ashore,” near the Brooklyn navy yard. Miss Gould heard of this club, and visited it. At a glance she grasped the meaning, and, on her return home she wrote a letter and a check for fifty thousand dollars, and there sprang from that letter and check, a handsome building in which there are sixty beds, a library, a pipe organ, a smoking-room, and a restaurant. Do you wonder that the “Jackies” adore her, and that the gale that sweeps over the ship out in the open sea is often freighted with the melody of her name?

“When I visited Cuba and Porto Rico,” says Congressman Charles B. Landis, of Indiana,—to whom I am greatly indebted in preparing this article,—“I talked with officers and privates everywhere along the journey, visited camps and hospitals in cities and isolated towns, and everywhere it seemed that the sickness and suffering and heart yearning of the American soldier had been anticipated by Helen Gould. Voices that quivered and eyes that moistened at the mention of the name of this young American girl were one continuous tribute to her heart and work. She cannot fully realize how far-reaching have been her efforts.”

A business man looks for results. What impressed me most with Miss Gould’s work was the visible, tangible results. Every dollar spent by her seemed to go, straight as a cannon-ball, to some mark. Miss Gould has a business head, and is not hysterical in her work. She gives, but follows the gift and sees that it goes to the spot. She has studied results and knows which charity pays a premium in smiles, and tears, and joy, and better life, and very little of her money will be wasted in impracticable schemes. She has a happy faculty of getting in actual touch with conditions, realizing that she cannot hit an object near at hand by aiming at a star.

Miss Gould’s practical business sense was beautifully exemplified at Montauk Point. Hundreds of soldiers from the hospitals in Cuba and Porto Rico were suddenly unloaded there. Elsewhere were government supplies—tents and cots and rations,—but there the sick soldiers were without shelter, were hungry, had no medicine, and were sleeping on the ground.

Why? Because of red tape. This young lady appeared in person and amazed the strutters in shoulder-straps and the slaves to discipline by having the sick soldier boys made comfortable on army cots, placed in army tents, and fed on army rations,—and this, too, without any “requisition.” She grasped a situation, cut the ropes of theory and introduced practice. From her own purse she provided nurses and dainties, and bundled up scores of soldier boys and sent them to her beautiful villa on the Hudson.

The camp rang with this refrain:—

You’re the angel of the camp,

Helen Gould,

In the sun-rays, in the damp,

On the weary, weary tramp,

To our darkness you’re a lamp,

Helen Gould.

Thoughts of home and gentle things,

Helen Gould,

To the camp your coming brings;

All the place with music rings

At the rustle of your wings,

Helen Gould.