The White Linen Nurse / Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell, 1872-1958

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Title: The White Linen Nurse

Author: Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Release Date: December 29, 2004 [EBook #14506]

Language: English

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                          The White Linen Nurse

                       By Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

    Author of "Molly Make-Believe," "The Sick-a-Bed Lady," etc., etc.

                                  1913




TO MAURICE HOWE RICHARDSON

WHO LOVED ROMANCE ALMOST AS MUCH AS HE LOVED SURGERY, THIS LITTLE STORY
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED IN TOKEN OF TWO PERSONS' UNFADING MEMORIES




THE WHITE LINEN NURSE




CHAPTER I


The White Linen Nurse was so tired that her noble expression ached.

Incidentally her head ached and her shoulders ached and her lungs ached
and the ankle-bones of both feet ached quite excruciatingly. But nothing
of her felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression. Like
a strip of lip-colored lead suspended from her poor little nose by two
tugging wire-gray wrinkles her persistently conscientious sickroom smile
seemed to be whanging aimlessly against her front teeth. The sensation
certainly was very unpleasant.

Looking back thus on the three spine-curving, chest-cramping,
foot-twinging, ether-scented years of her hospital training, it dawned
on the White Linen Nurse very suddenly that nothing of her ever had
felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression!

Impulsively she sprang for the prim white mirror that capped her prim
white bureau and stood staring up into her own entrancing,
bright-colored Novia Scotian reflection with tense and unwonted
interest.

Except for the unmistakable smirk which fatigue had clawed into her
plastic young mouth-lines there was certainly nothing special the matter
with what she saw.

"Perfectly good face!" she attested judicially with no more than common
courtesy to her progenitors. "Perfectly good and tidy looking face! If
only--if only--" her breath caught a trifle. "If only--it didn't look so
disgustingly noble and--hygienic--and dollish!"

All along the back of her neck little sharp prickly pains began suddenly
to sting and burn.

"Silly--simpering--pink and white puppet!" she scolded squintingly,
"I'll teach you how to look like a real girl!"

Very threateningly she raised herself to her tiptoes and thrust her
glowing, corporeal face right up into the moulten, elusive,
quick-silver face in the mirror. Pink for pink, blue for blue, gold for
gold, dollish smirk for dollish smirk, the mirror mocked her seething
inner fretfulness.

"Why--darn you!" she gasped. "Why--darn you! Why, you looked more human
than that when you left the Annapolis Valley three years ago! There were
at least--tears in your face then, and--cinders, and--your mother's best
advice, and the worry about the mortgage, and--and--the blush of Joe
Hazeltine's kiss!"

Furtively with the tip of her index-finger she started to search her
imperturbable pink cheek for the spot where Joe Hazeltine's kiss had
formerly flamed.

"My hands are all right, anyway!" she acknowledged with infinite relief.
Triumphantly she raised both strong, stub-fingered, exaggeratedly
executive hands to the level of her childish blue eyes and stood
surveying the mirrored effect with ineffable satisfaction. "Why my hands
are--dandy!" she gloated. "Why they're perfectly--dandy! Why they're
wonderful! Why they're--." Then suddenly and fearfully she gave a
shrill little scream. "But they don't go with my silly doll-face!" she
cried. "Why, they don't! They don't! They go with the Senior Surgeon's
scowling Heidelberg eyes! They go with the Senior Surgeon's grim gray
jaw! They go with the--! Oh! what shall I do? What shall I do?"

Dizzily, with her stubby finger-tips prodded deep into every jaded
facial muscle that she could compass, she staggered towards the air, and
dropping down into the first friendly chair that bumped against her
knees, sat staring blankly out across the monotonous city roofs that
flanked her open window,--trying very, very hard for the first time in
her life, to consider the General-Phenomenon-of-Being-a-Trained-Nurse.

All around and about her, inexorable as anesthesia, horrid as the hush
of tomb or public library, lurked the painfully unmistakable sense of
institutional restraint. Mournfully to her ear from some remote kitcheny
region of pots and pans a browsing spoon tinkled forth from time to time
with soft-muffled resonance. Up and down every clammy white corridor
innumerable young feet, born to prance and stamp, were creeping
stealthily to and fro in rubber-heeled whispers. Along the somber
fire-escape just below her windowsill, like a covey of snubbed doves,
six or eight of her classmates were cooing and crooning together with
excessive caution concerning the imminent graduation exercises that were
to take place at eight o'clock that very evening. Beyond her dreariest
ken of muffled voices, beyond her dingiest vista of slate and brick, on
a far faint hillside, a far faint streak of April green went roaming
jocundly skyward. Altogether sluggishly, as though her nostrils were
plugged with warm velvet, the smell of spring and ether and scorched
mutton-chops filtered in and out, in and out, in and out, of her
abnormally jaded senses.

Taken all in all it was not a propitious afternoon for any girl as tired
and as pretty as the White Linen Nurse to be considering the general
phenomenon of anything--except April!

In the real country, they tell me, where the Young Spring runs wild and
bare as a nymph through every dull brown wood and hay-gray meadow, the
blasé farmer-lad will not even lift his eyes from the plow to watch the
pinkness of her passing. But here in the prudish brick-minded city where
the Young Spring at her friskiest is nothing more audacious than a
sweltering, winter-swathed madcap, who has impishly essayed some fine
morning to tiptoe down street in her soft, sloozily, green,
silk-stockinged feet, the whole hob-nailed population reels back aghast
and agrin before the most innocent flash of the rogue's green-veiled
toes. And then, suddenly snatching off its own cumbersome winter
foot-habits, goes chasing madly after her, in its own prankish,
vari-colored socks.

Now the White Linen Nurse's socks were black, and cotton at that, a
combination incontestably sedate. And the White Linen Nurse had waded
barefoot through too many posied country pastures to experience any
ordinary city thrill over the sight of a single blade of grass pushing
scarily through a crack in the pavement, or puny, concrete-strangled
maple tree flushing wanly to the smoky sky. Indeed for three hustling,
square-toed, rubber-heeled city years the White Linen Nurse had never
even stopped to notice whether the season was flavored with frost or
thunder. But now, unexplainably, just at the end of it all, sitting
innocently there at her own prim little bed-room window, staring
innocently out across indomitable roof-tops,--with the crackle of glory
and diplomas already ringing in her ears,--she heard, instead, for the
first time in her life, the gaily dare-devil voice of the spring, a
hoydenish challenge flung back at her, leaf-green, from the crest of a
winter-scarred hill.

"Hello, White Linen Nurse!" screamed the saucy city spring. "Hello,
White Linen Nurse! Take off your homely starched collar! Or your silly
candy-box cap! Or any other thing that feels maddeningly artificial! And
come out! And be very wild!"

Like a puppy dog cocking its head towards some strange, unfamiliar
sound, the White Linen Nurse cocked her head towards the lure of the
green-crested hill. Still wrestling conscientiously with the
General-Phenomenon-of-Being-a-Trained-Nurse she found her collar
suddenly very tight, the tiny cap inexpressibly heavy and vexatious.
Timidly she removed the collar--and found that the removal did not rest
her in the slightest. Equally timidly she removed the cap--and found
that even that removal did not rest her in the slightest. Then very,
very slowly, but very, very permeatingly and completely, it dawned on
the White Linen Nurse that never while eyes were blue, and hair gold,
and lips red, would she ever find rest again until she had removed her
noble expression!

With a jerk that started the pulses in her temples throbbing like two
toothaches she straightened up in her chair. All along the back of her
neck the little blonde curls began to crisp very ticklingly at their
roots.

Still staring worriedly out over the old city's slate-gray head to that
inciting prance of green across the farthest horizon she felt her whole
being kindle to an indescribable passion of revolt against all Hushed
Places. Seething with fatigue, smoldering with ennui, she experienced
suddenly a wild, almost incontrollable impulse to sing, to shout, to
scream from the housetops, to mock somebody, to defy everybody, to break
laws, dishes, heads,--anything in fact that would break with a crash!
And then at last, over the hills and far away, with all the outraged
world at her heels, to run! And run! And run! And run! And run! And
laugh! Till her feet raveled out! And her lungs burst! And there was
nothing more left of her at all,--ever--ever--any more!

Discordantly into this rapturously pagan vision of pranks and posies
broke one of her room-mates all awhiff with ether, awhirr with starch.

Instantly with the first creak of the door-handle the White Linen Nurse
was on her feet, breathless, resentful, grotesquely defiant.

"Get out of here, Zillah Forsyth!" she cried furiously. "Get out of
here--quick!--and leave me alone! I want to think!"

Perfectly serenely the newcomer advanced into the room. With her pale,
ivory-tinted cheeks, her great limpid brown eyes, her soft dark hair
parted madonna-like across her beautiful brow, her whole face was like
some exquisite, composite picture of all the saints of history. Her
voice also was amazingly tranquil.

"Oh, Fudge!" she drawled. "What's eating you, Rae Malgregor? I won't
either get out! It's my room just as much as it is yours! And Helene's
just as much as it is ours! And besides," she added more briskly, "it's
four o'clock now, and with graduation at eight and the dance afterwards,
if we don't get our stuff packed up now, when in thunder shall we get it
done?" Quite irrelevantly she began to laugh. Her laugh was perceptibly
shriller than her speaking voice. "Say, Rae!" she confided. "That
minister I nursed through pneumonia last winter wants me to pose as
'Sanctity' for a stained-glass window in his new church! Isn't he the
softie?"

"Shall--you--do--it?" quizzed Rae Malgregor a trifle tensely.

"Shall I do it?" mocked the newcomer. "Well, you just watch me! Four
mornings a week in June--at full week's wages? Fresh Easter lilies every
day? White silk angel-robes? All the high-souls and high-paints
kowtowing around me? Why it would be more fun than a box of monkeys!
Sure I'll do it!"

Expeditiously as she spoke the newcomer reached up for the framed motto
over her own ample mirror and yanking it down with one single tug began
to busy herself adroitly with a snarl in the picture-cord. Like a withe
of willow yearning over a brook her slender figure curved to the task.
Very scintillatingly the afternoon light seemed to brighten suddenly
across her lap. _You'll Be a Long Time Dead!_ glinted the motto through
its sun-dazzled glass.

Still panting with excitement, still bristling with resentment, Rae
Malgregor stood surveying the intrusion and the intruder. A dozen
impertinent speeches were rioting in her mind. Twice her mouth opened
and shut before she finally achieved the particular opprobrium that
completely satisfied her.

"Bah! You look like a--Trained Nurse!" she blurted forth at last with
hysterical triumph.

"So do you!" said the newcomer amiably.

With a little gasp of dismay Rae Malgregor sprang suddenly forward. Her
eyes were flooded with tears.

"Why, that's just exactly what's the matter with me!" she cried. "My
face is all worn out trying to look like a Trained Nurse! Oh, Zillah,
how do you know you were meant to be a Trained Nurse? How does anybody
know? Oh, Zillah! Save me! Save me!"

Languorously Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work, and laughed. Her
laugh was like the accidental tinkle of sleighbells in mid-summer,
vaguely disquieting, a shiver of frost across the face of a lily.

"Save you from what, you great big overgrown, tow-headed doll-baby?" she
questioned blandly. "For Heaven's sake, the only thing you need is to go
back to whatever toy-shop you came from and get a new head. What in
Creation's the matter with you lately, anyway? Oh, of course, you've had
rotten luck this past month, but what of it? That's the trouble with you
country girls. You haven't got any stamina."

With slow, shuffling-footed astonishment Rae Malgregor stepped out into
the center of the room. "Country girls," she repeated blankly. "Why,
you're a country girl yourself!"

"I _am_ not!" snapped Zillah Forsyth. "I'll have you understand that
there are nine thousand people in the town I come from--and not a rube
among them. Why I tended soda fountain in the swellest drug-store there
a whole year before I even thought of taking up nursing. And I wasn't as
green--when I was six months old--as you are now!"

Slowly with a soft-snuggling sigh of contentment she raised her slim
white fingers to coax her dusky hair a little looser, a little farther
down, a little more madonna-like across her sweet, mild forehead, then
snatching out abruptly at a convenient shirt-waist began with
extraordinary skill to apply its dangly lace sleeves as a protective
bandage for the delicate glass-faced motto still in her lap, placed the
completed parcel with inordinate scientific precision in the exact
corner of her packing-box, and then went on very diligently, very
zealously, to strip the men's photographs from the mirror on her bureau.
There were twenty-seven photographs in all, and for each one she had
already cut and prepared a small square of perfectly fresh, perfectly
immaculate white tissue wrapping-paper. No one so transcendently
fastidious, so exquisitely neat, in all her personal habits had ever
trained in that particular hospital before.

Very soberly the doll-faced girl stood watching the men's pleasant
paper countenances smooth away one by one into their chaste white
veilings, until at last quite without warning she poked an accusing,
inquisitive finger directly across Zillah Forsyth's shoulder.

"Zillah!" she demanded peremptorily. "All the year I've wanted to know!
All the year every other girl in our class has wanted to know! Where did
you ever get that picture of the Senior Surgeon? He never gave it to you
in the world! He didn't! He didn't! He's not that kind!"

Deeply into Zillah Forsyth's pale, ascetic cheek dawned a most amazing
dimple. "Sort of jarred you girls some, didn't it," she queried, "to see
me strutting round with a photo of the Senior Surgeon?" The little cleft
in her chin showed suddenly with almost startling distinctness. "Well,
seeing it's you," she grinned, "and the year's all over, and there's
nobody left that I can worry about it any more, I don't mind telling you
in the least that I--bought it out of a photographer's show-case!
There! Are you satisfied now?"

With easy nonchalance she picked up the picture in question and
scrutinized it shrewdly.

"Lord! What a face!" she attested. "Nothing but granite! Hack him with a
knife and he wouldn't bleed but just chip off into pebbles!" With
exaggerated contempt she shrugged her supple shoulders. "Bah! How I hate
a man like that! There's no fun in him!" A little abruptly she turned
and thrust the photograph into Rae Malgregor's hand. "You can have it if
you want to," she said. "I'll trade it to you for that lace corset-cover
of yours!"

Like water dripping through a sieve the photograph slid through Rae
Malgregor's frightened fingers. With nervous apology she stooped and
picked it up again and held it gingerly by one remotest corner. Her eyes
were quite wide with horror.

"Oh, of course I'd like the--picture, well enough," she stammered. "But
it wouldn't seem--exactly respectful to--to trade it for a
corset-cover."

"Oh, very well," drawled Zillah Forsyth. "Tear it up then!"

Expeditiously with frank, non-sentimental fingers Rae Malgregor tore the
tough cardboard across, and again across, and once again across, and
threw the conglomerate fragments into the waste-basket. And her
expression all the time was no more, no less, than the expression of a
person who would infinitely rather execute his own pet dog or cat than
risk the possible bungling of an outsider. Then like a small child
trotting with infinite relief to its own doll-house she trotted over to
her bureau, extracted the lace corset-cover, and came back with it in
her hand to lean across Zillah Forsyth's shoulder again and watch the
men's faces go slipping off into oblivion. Once again, abruptly without
warning, she halted the process with a breathless exclamation.

"Oh, of course this waist is the only one I've got with ribbons in it,"
she asserted irrelevantly. "But I'm perfectly willing to trade it for
that picture!" she pointed out with unmistakably explicit finger-tip.

Chucklingly Zillah Forsyth withdrew the special photograph from its
half-completed wrappings.

"Oh! Him?" she said. "Oh, that's a chap I met on the train last summer.
He's a brakeman or something. He's a--"

Perfectly unreluctantly Rae Malgregor dropped the fluff of lace and
ribbons into Zillah's lap and reached out with cheerful voraciousness to
annex the young man's picture to her somewhat bleak possessions. "Oh, I
don't care a rap who he is," she interrupted briskly. "But he's sort of
cute-looking, and I've got an empty frame at home just that odd size,
and Mother's crazy for a new picture to stick up over the kitchen
mantelpiece. She gets so tired of seeing nothing but the faces of people
she knows all about."

Sharply Zillah Forsyth turned and stared up into the younger girl's
face, and found no guile to whet her stare against.

"Well of all the ridiculous--unmitigated greenhorns!" she began.
"Well--is that all you wanted him for? Why, I supposed you wanted to
write to him! Why, I supposed--"

For the first time an expression not altogether dollish darkened across
Rae Malgregor's garishly juvenile blondeness.

"Maybe I'm not quite as green as you think I am!" she flared up
stormily. With this sharp flaring-up every single individual pulse in
her body seemed to jerk itself suddenly into conscious activity again
like the soft, plushy pound-pound-pound of a whole stocking-footed
regiment of pain descending single file upon her for her hysterical
undoing. "Maybe I've had a good deal more experience than you give me
credit for!" she hastened excitedly to explain. "I tell you--I tell you
I've been engaged!" she blurted forth with a bitter sort of triumph.

With a palpable flicker of interest Zillah Forsyth looked back across
her shoulder. "Engaged? How many times?" she asked quite bluntly.

As though the whole monogamous groundwork of civilization was threatened
by the question, Rae Malgregor's hands went clutching at her breast.
"Why, once!" she gasped. "Why, once!"

Convulsively Zillah Forsyth began to rock herself to and fro. "Oh
Lordy!" she chuckled. "Oh Lordy, Lordy! Why I've been engaged four times
just this past year!" In a sudden passion of fastidiousness she bent
down over the particular photograph in her hand and snatching at a
handkerchief began to rub diligently at a small smouch of dust in one
corner of the cardboard. Something in the effort of rubbing seemed to
jerk her small round chin into almost angular prominence. "And before
I'm through," she added, at least two notes below her usual alto tones,
"And before I'm through--I'm going to get engaged to--every profession
that there is on the surface of the globe!" Quite helplessly the thin
paper skin of the photograph peeled off in company with the smouch of
dust. "And when I marry," she ejaculated fiercely, "and when I
marry--I'm going to marry a man who will take me to every place that
there is--on the surface of the globe! And after that--!"

"After what?" interrogated a brand new voice from the doorway.




CHAPTER II


It was the other room-mate this time. The only real aristocrat in
the whole graduating class, high-browed, high-cheekboned,--eyes like
some far-sighted young prophet,--mouth even yet faintly arrogant
with the ineradicable consciousness of caste,--a plain, eager,
stripped-for-a-long-journey type of face,--this was Helene Churchill.
There was certainly no innocuous bloom of country hills and pastures in
this girl's face, nor any seething small-town passion pounding
indiscriminately at all the doors of experience. The men and women who
had bred Helene Churchill had been the breeders also of brick and
granite cities since the world was new.

Like one infinitely more accustomed to treading on Persian carpets than
on painted floors she came forward into the room.

"Hello, children!" she said casually, and began at once without further
parleying to take down the motto that graced her own bureau-top.

It was the era when almost everybody in the world had a motto over his
bureau. Helene Churchill's motto was: _Inasmuch As Ye Have Done It Unto
One Of The Least Of These Ye Have Done It Unto Me_. On a scroll of
almost priceless parchment the text was illuminated with inimitable
Florentine skill and color. A little carelessly, after the manner of
people quite accustomed to priceless things, she proceeded now to roll
the parchment into its smallest possible circumference, humming
exclusively to herself all the while an intricate little air from an
Italian opera.

So the three faces foiled each other, sober city girl, pert town girl,
bucolic country girl,--a hundred fundamental differences rampant between
them, yet each fervid, adolescent young mouth tamed to the same
monotonous, drolly exaggerated expression of complacency that
characterizes the faces of all people who, in a distinctive uniform, for
a reasonably satisfactory living wage, make an actual profession of
righteous deeds.

Indeed among all the thirty or more varieties of noble expression which
an indomitable Superintendent had finally succeeded in inculcating into
her graduating class, no other physiognomies had responded more
plastically perhaps than these three to the merciless imprint of the
great _hospital machine_ which, in pursuance of its one repetitive
design, _discipline_, had coaxed Zillah Forsyth into the semblance of a
lady, snubbed Helene Churchill into the substance of plain womanhood,
and, still uncertain just what to do with Rae Malgregor's rollicking
rural immaturity, had frozen her face temporarily into the smugly
dimpled likeness of a fancy French doll rigged out as a nurse for some
gilt-edged hospital fair.

With characteristic desire to keep up in every way with her more mature,
better educated classmates, to do everything, in fact, so fast, so well,
that no one should possibly guess that she hadn't yet figured out just
why she was doing it at all, Rae Malgregor now with quickly readjusted
cap and collar began to hurl herself into the task of her own packing.
From her open bureau drawer, with a sudden impish impulse towards
worldly wisdom, she extracted first of all the photograph of the young
brakeman.

"See, Helene! My new beau!" she giggled experimentally.

In mild-eyed surprise Helene Churchill glanced up from her work. "_Your_
beau?" she corrected. "Why, that's Zillah's picture."

"Well, it's mine now!" snapped Rae Malgregor with unexpected edginess.
"It's mine now all right. Zillah said I could have him! Zillah said I
could--write to him--if I wanted to!" she finished a bit breathlessly.

Wider and wider Helene Churchill's eyes dilated. "Write to a man--whom
you don't know?" she gasped. "Why, Rae! Why, it isn't even--very
nice--to have a picture of a man you don't know!"

Mockingly to the edge of her strong white teeth Rae Malgregor's tongue
crept out in pink derision. "Bah!" she taunted. "What's 'nice'? That's
the whole matter with you, Helene Churchill! You never stop to consider
whether anything's fun or not; all you care is whether it's 'nice'!"
Excitedly she turned to meet the cheap little wink from Zillah's
sainted eyes. "Bah! What's 'nice'?" she persisted a little lamely. Then
suddenly all the pertness within her crumbled into nothingness.
"That's--the--whole trouble with you, Zillah Forsyth!" she stammered.
"You never give a hang whether anything's nice or not; all you care is
whether it's fun!" Quite helplessly she began to wring her hands. "Oh,
how do I know which one of you girls to follow?" she demanded wildly.
"How do I know anything? How does anybody know anything?"

Like a smoldering fuse the rambling query crept back into the inner
recesses of her brain and fired once more the one great question that
lay dormant there. Impetuously she ran forward and stared into Helene
Churchill's face. "How do you know you were meant to be a Trained Nurse,
Helene Churchill?" she began all over again. "How does anybody know she
was really meant to be one? How can anybody, I mean, be perfectly sure?"
Like a drowning man clutching out at the proverbial straw, she clutched
at the parchment in Helene Churchill's hand. "I mean--where did you get
your motto, Helene Churchill?" she persisted with increasing
irritability. "If--you don't tell me--I'll tear the whole thing to
pieces!"

With a startled frown Helene Churchill jerked back out of reach. "What's
the matter with you, Rae?" she quizzed sharply, and then turning round
quite casually to her book-case began to draw from the shelves one by one
her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, Robert Browning. "Oh, I did so
want to go to China," she confided irrelevantly. "But my family have
just written me that they won't stand for it. So I suppose I'll have to
go into tenement work here in the city instead." With a visible effort
she jerked her mind back again to the feverish question in Rae
Malgregor's eyes. "Oh, you want to know where I got my motto?" she
asked. A flash of intuition brightened suddenly across her
absent-mindedness. "Oh!" she smiled, "you mean you want to know--just
what the incident was that first made me decide to--devote my life
to--to humanity?"

"Yes!" snapped Rae Malgregor.

A little shyly Helene Churchill picked up her copy of Marcus Aurelius
and cuddled her cheek against its tender Morocco cover. "Really?" she
questioned with palpable hesitation. "Really you want to know? Why,
why--it's rather a--sacred little story to me. I wouldn't exactly want
to have anybody--laugh about it."

"I'll laugh if I want to!" attested Zillah Forsyth forcibly from the
other side of the room.

Like a pugnacious boy, Rae Malgregor's fluent fingers doubled up into
two firm fists.

"I'll punch her if she even looks as though she wanted to!" she signaled
surreptitiously to Helene.

Shrewdly for an instant the city girl's narrowing eyes challenged and
appraised the country girl's desperate sincerity. Then quite abruptly
she began her little story.

"Why, it was on an Easter Sunday--Oh, ages and ages ago," she faltered.
"Why, I couldn't have been more than nine years old at the time." A
trifle self-consciously she turned her face away from Zillah Forsyth's
supercilious smile. "And I was coming home from a Sunday school festival
in my best white muslin dress with a big pot of purple pansies in my
hand," she hastened somewhat nervously to explain. "And just at the edge
of the gutter there was a dreadful drunken man lying in the mud with a
great crowd of cruel people teasing and tormenting him. And,
because--because I couldn't think of anything else to do about it,
I--I walked right up to the poor old creature,--scared as I could
be--and--and I presented him with my pot of purple pansies. And
everybody of course began to laugh, to scream, I mean, and shout with
amusement. And I, of course, began to cry. And the old drunken man
straightened up very oddly for an instant, with his battered hat in one
hand and the pot of pansies in the other,--and he raised the pot of
pansies very high, as though it had been a glass of rarest wine--and
bowed to me as--reverently as though he had been toasting me at my
father's table at some very grand dinner. And 'Inasmuch!' he said. Just
that,--'Inasmuch!' So that's how I happened to go into nursing!" she
finished as abruptly as she had begun. Like some wonderful
phosphorescent manifestation her whole shining soul seemed to flare
forth suddenly through her plain face.

With honest perplexity Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work.

"So that's--how you happened to go into nursing?" she quizzed
impatiently. Her long, straight nose was all puckered tight with
interrogation. Her dove-like eyes were fairly dilated with slow-dawning
astonishment. "You--don't--mean?" she gasped. "You don't mean that--just
for that--?" Incredulously she jumped to her feet and stood staring
blankly into the city girl's strangely illuminated features.

"Well, if I were a swell--like you!" she scoffed, "it would take a heap
sight more than a drunken man munching pansies and rum and Bible-texts
to--to jolt me out of my limousines and steam yachts and Adirondack
bungalows!"

Quite against all intention Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often
laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth's clashed
together in the irremediable antagonism of caste,--the Plebeian's
scornful impatience with the Aristocrat, equaled only by the
Aristocrat's condescending patience with the Plebeian.

It was no more than right that the Aristocrat should recover her
self-possession first. "Never mind about your understanding. Zillah
dear," she said softly. "Your hair is the most beautiful thing I ever
saw in my life!"

Along Zillah Forsyth's ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red
began to show. With much more nonchalance than was really necessary she
pointed towards her half-packed trunk.

"It wasn't--Sunday school--I was coming home from--when I got my motto!"
she remarked dryly, with a wink at no one in particular. "And, so far as
I know," she proceeded with increasing sarcasm, "the man who inspired my
noble life was not in any way--particularly addicted to the use of
alcoholic beverages!" As though her collar was suddenly too tight she
rammed her finger down between her stiff white neck-band and her soft
white throat. "He was a--New York doctor!" she hastened somewhat airily
to explain. "Gee! But he was a swell! And he was spending his summer
holiday up in the same Maine town where I was tending soda fountain.
And he used to drop into the drug-store, nights, after cigars and
things. And he used to tell me stories about the drugs and things,
sitting up there on the counter swinging his legs and pointing out this
and that,--quinine, ipecac, opium, hasheesh,--all the silly patent
medicines, every sloppy soothing syrup! Lordy! He knew 'em as though
they were people! Where they come from! Where they're going to! Yarns
about the tropics that would kink the hair along the nape of your neck!
Jokes about your own town's soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you
yell for joy! Gee! But the things that man had seen and known! Gee! But
the things that man could make you see and know! And he had an
automobile," she confided proudly. "It was one of those billion dollar
French cars. And I lived just round the corner from the drug-store. But
we used to ride home by way of--New Hampshire!"

Almost imperceptibly her breath began to quicken. "Gee! Those nights!"
she muttered. "Rain or shine, moon or thunder,--tearing down those
country roads at forty miles an hour, singing, hollering, whispering!
It was him that taught me to do my hair like this--instead of all the
cheap rats and pompadours every other kid in town was wearing," she
asserted, quite irrelevantly; then stopped with a quick, furtive glance
of suspicion towards both her listeners and mouthed her way delicately
back to the beginning of her sentence again. "It was _he_ that taught me
to do my hair like this," she repeated with the faintest possible
suggestion of hauteur.

For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her
cheek a narrow streak of red began to show again.

"And he went away very sudden at the last," she finished hurriedly. "It
seems he was married all the time." Blandly she turned her wonderful
face to the caressing light. "And--I hope he goes to Hell!" she added
perfectly simply.

With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene
Churchill reached out an immediate conscientious hand to her.

"Oh, Zillah!" she began. "Oh, poor Zillah dear! I'm so--sorry! I'm so--"

Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah
Forsyth ignored the proffered hand.

"I don't know what particular call you've got to be sorry for me, Helene
Churchill," she drawled languidly. "I've got my character, same as
you've got yours. And just about nine times as many good looks. And when
it comes to nursing--" Like an alto song pierced suddenly by one shrill
treble note, the girl's immobile face sharpened transiently with a
single jagged flash of emotion. "And when it comes to nursing? Ha!
Helene Churchill! You can lead your class all you want to with your
silk-lined manners and your fuddy-duddy book-talk! But when genteel
people like you are moping round all ready to fold your patients' hands
on their breasts and murmur 'Thy will be done,'--why, that's the time
that little 'yours truly' is just beginning to roll up her sleeves and
get to work!"

With real passion her slender fingers went clutching again at her harsh
linen collar. "It isn't you, Helene Churchill," she taunted, "that's
ever been to the Superintendent on your bended knees and begged for the
rabies cases--and the small-pox! Gee! You like nursing because you
think it's pious to like it! But I like it--_because I like it!"_ From
brow to chin as though fairly stricken with sincerity her whole bland
face furrowed startlingly with crude expressiveness. "The smell of
ether!" she stammered. "It's like wine to me! The clang of the ambulance
gong? I'd rather hear it than fire-engines! I'd crawl on my hands and
knees a hundred miles to watch a major operation! I wish there was a
war! I'd give my life to see a cholera epidemic!"

Abruptly as it came the passion faded from her face, leaving every
feature tranquil again, demure, exaggeratedly innocent. With saccharine
sweetness she turned to Rae Malgregor.

"Now, Little One," she mocked, "tell us the story of your lovely life.
Having heard me coyly confess that I went into nursing because I had
such a crush on this world,--and Helene here brazenly affirm that she
went into nursing because she had such a crush on the world to
come,--it's up to you now to confide to us just how you happened to take
up so noble an endeavor! Had you seen some of the young house doctors'
beautiful, smiling faces depicted in the hospital catalogue? Or was it
for the sake of the Senior Surgeon's grim, gray mug that you jilted your
poor plow-boy lover way up in the Annapolis Valley?"

"Why, Zillah!" gasped the country girl. "Why, I think you 're perfectly
awful! Why, Zillah Forsyth! Don't you ever say a thing like that again!
You can joke all you want to about the flirty young Internes. They're
nothing but fellows. But it isn't--it isn't respectful--for you to talk
like that about the Senior Surgeon. He's too--too terrifying!" she
finished in an utter panic of consternation.

"Oh, now I know it was the Senior Surgeon that made you jilt your
country beau!" taunted Zillah Forsyth with soft alto sarcasm.

"I didn't, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine!" stormed Rae Malgregor
explosively. Backed up against her bureau, eyes flaming, breast heaving,
little candy-box cap all tossed askew over her left ear, she stood
defying her tormentor. "I didn't, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine!" she
reasserted passionately. "It was Joe Hazeltine that jilted me! And we
'd been going together since we were kids! And now he's married the
dominie's daughter and they've got a kid of their own most as old as he
and I were when we first began courting each other. And it's all because
I insisted on being a trained nurse," she finished shrilly.

With an expression of real shock Helene Churchill peered up from her
lowly seat on the floor.

"You mean?" she asked a bit breathlessly. "You mean that he didn't want
you to be a trained nurse? You mean that he wasn't big enough,--wasn't
fine enough to appreciate the nobility of the profession?"

"Nobility nothing!" snapped Rae Malgregor. "It was me scrubbing strange
men with alcohol that he couldn't stand for! And I don't know as I
exactly blame him," she added huskily. "It certainly is a good deal of a
liberty when you stop to think about it."

Quite incongruously her big, childish, blue eyes narrowed suddenly into
two dark, calculating slits. "It's comic," she mused, "how there isn't a
man in the world who would stand letting his wife or daughter or sister
have a male nurse. But look at the jobs we girls get sent out on! It's
very confusing!"

With sincere appeal she turned to Zillah Forsyth. "And yet--and yet,"
she stammered. "And yet--when everything scary that's in you has once
been scared out of you,--why, there's nothing left in you to be scared
_with_ any more, is there?"

"What? What?" pleaded Helene Churchill. "Say it again! What?"

"That's what Joe and I quarreled about my first vacation home!"
persisted Rae Malgregor. "It was a traveling salesman's thigh. It was
broken bad. Somebody had to take care of it. So I did! Joe thought it
wasn't modest to be so willing." With a perplexed sort of defiance she
raised her square little chin. "But you see I was willing!" she said.
"I was perfectly willing. Just one single solitary year of hospital
training had made me perfectly willing. And you can't _un_-willing a
willing--even to please your beau, no matter how hard you try!" With a
droll admixture of shyness and disdain she tossed her curly blonde head
a trifle higher. "Shucks!" she attested. "What's a traveling salesman's
thigh?"

"Shucks yourself!" scoffed Zillah Forsyth. "What's a silly beau or two
up in Nova Scotia to a girl with looks like you? You could have married
that typhoid case a dozen times last winter if you'd crooked your little
finger! Why, the fellow was crazy about you. And he was richer than
Croesus. What queered it?" she demanded bluntly. "Did his mother hate
you?"

Like one fairly cramped with astonishment Rae Malgregor doubled up very
suddenly at the waist-line, and thrusting her neck oddly forward after
the manner of a startled crane, stood peering sharply round the corner
of the rocking-chair at Zillah Forsyth.

"Did his mother hate me?" she gasped. "Did--his--mother--hate--me? Well,
what do you think? With me who never even saw plumbing till I came down
here, setting out to explain to her with twenty tiled bathrooms how to
be hygienic though rich? Did his mother hate me? Well, what do you
think? With her who bore him, her who _bore_ him, mind you, kept
waiting down stairs in the hospital ante-room--half an hour every
day--on the raw edge of a rattan chair--waiting--worrying--all old and
gray and scared--while little young, perky, pink and white _me_ is
upstairs--brushing her own son's hair and washing her own son's
face--and altogether getting her own son ready to see his own mother!
And then me obliged to turn her out again in ten minutes, flip as you
please, for fear she'd stayed too long,--while I stay on the rest of the
night? _Did his mother hate me!"_

Stealthily as an assassin she crept around the corner of the
rocking-chair and grabbed Zillah Forsyth by her astonished linen
shoulder.

"Did his mother hate me?" she persisted mockingly. "Did his mother hate
me? Well rather! Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn't
hate us? Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn't look upon
a trained nurse as her natural born enemy? I don't blame 'em!" she added
chokingly. "Look at the impudent jobs we get sent out on! Quarantined
upstairs for weeks at a time with their inflammable, diphtheritic
bridegrooms--while they sit down stairs--brooding over their wedding
teaspoons! Hiked off indefinitely to Atlantic City with their gouty
bachelor uncles! Hearing their own innocent little sisters'
blood-curdling deathbed deliriums! Snatching their own new-born babies
away from their breasts and showing them, virgin-handed, how to nurse
them better! The impudence of it, I say! The disgusting, confounded
impudence! Doing things perfectly--flippantly--_right_--for twenty-five
dollars a week--and washing--that all the achin' love in the world don't
know how to do right--just for love!"

Furiously she began to jerk her victim's shoulder. "I tell you it's
awful, Zillah Forsyth!" she insisted. "I tell you I just won't stand
it!"

With muscles like steel wire Zillah Forsyth scrambled to her feet, and
pushed Rae Malgregor back against the bureau.

"For Heaven's sake, Rae, shut up!" she said. "What in Creation's the
matter with you to-day? I never saw you act so before!" With real
concern she stared into the girl's turbid eyes. "If you feel like that
about it, what in thunder did you go into nursing for?" she demanded not
unkindly.

Very slowly Helene Churchill rose from her lowly seat by her precious
book-case and came round and looked at Rae Malgregor rather oddly.
"Yes," faltered Helene Churchill. "What did you go into nursing for?"
The faintest possible taint of asperity was in her voice.

Quite dumbly for an instant Rae Malgregor's natural timidity stood
battling the almost fanatic professional fervor in Helene Churchill's
frankly open face, the raw, scientific passion, of very different
caliber, but no less intensity, hidden so craftily behind Zillah
Forsyth's plastic features. Then suddenly her own hands went clutching
back at the bureau for support, and all the flaming, raging red went
ebbing out of her cheeks, leaving her lips with hardly blood enough left
to work them.

"I went into nursing," she mumbled, "and it's God's own truth,--I went
into nursing because--because I thought the uniforms were so cute."

Furiously, the instant the words were gone from her mouth, she turned
and snarled at Zillah's hooting laughter.

"Well, I had to do something!" she attested. The defense was like a flat
blade slapping the air.

Desperately she turned to Helene Churchill's goading, faintly
supercilious smile, and her voice edged suddenly like a twisted sword.
"Well, the uniforms _are_ cute!" she parried. "They are! They are! I bet
you there's more than one girl standing high in the graduating class
to-day who never would have stuck out her first year's bossin' and slops
and worry and death--if she'd had to stick it out in the unimportant
looking clothes she came from home in! Even you, Helene Churchill, with
all your pious talk,--the day they put your coachman's son in as new
Interne and you got called down from the office for failing to stand
when Mr. Young Coachman came into the room, you bawled all night,--you
did,--and swore you'd chuck your whole job and go home the next day--if
it wasn't that you'd just had a life-size photo taken in full nursing
costume to send to your brother's chum at Yale! So there!"

With a gasp of ineffable satisfaction she turned from Helene Churchill.

"Sure the uniforms are cute!" she slashed back at Zillah
Forsyth. "That's the whole trouble with 'em. They're so
awfully--masqueradishly--cute! Sure, I could have got engaged to the
Typhoid Boy. It would have been as easy as robbing a babe! But lots of
girls, I notice, get engaged in their uniforms, feeding a patient
perfectly scientifically out of his own silver spoon, who don't seem
to stay engaged so especially long in their own street clothes, bungling
just plain naturally with their own knives and forks! Even you, Zillah
Forsyth," she hacked, "even you who trot round like the Lord's Anointed
in your pure white togs, you're just as Dutchy looking as anybody else,
come to put you in a red hat and a tan coat and a blue skirt!"

Mechanically she raised her hands to her head as though with some silly
thought of keeping the horrid pain in her temples from slipping to her
throat, her breast, her feet.

"Sure the uniforms are cute," she persisted a bit thickly. "Sure the
Typhoid Boy was crazy about me! He called me his 'Holy Chorus Girl,' I
heard him--raving in his sleep. Lord save us! What are we to any man but
just that?" she questioned hotly with renewed venom. "Parson, actor,
young sinner, old saint--I ask you frankly, girls, on your word of
honor, was there ever more than one man in ten went through your hands
who didn't turn out soft somewhere before you were through with him?
Mawking about your 'sweet eyes' while you're wrecking your optic nerves
trying to decipher the dose on a poison bottle! Mooning over your
wonderful likeness to the lovely young sister they--never had! Trying to
kiss your finger tips when you're struggling to brush their teeth!
Teasin' you to smoke cigarettes with 'em--when they know it would cost
you your job!"

Impishly, without any warning, she crooked her knee and pointed at one
homely square-toed shoe in a mincy dancing step. Hoydenishly she threw
out her arms and tried to gather Helene and Zillah both into their
compass.

"Oh, you Holy Chorus Girls!" she chuckled with maniacal delight.
"Everybody, all together, now! Kick your little kicks! Smile your little
smiles! Tinkle your little thermometers! Steady,--there!
One--two--three--One--two--three!"

Laughingly Zillah Forsyth slipped from the grasp. "Don't you dare 'holy'
me!" she threatened.

In real irritation Helene released herself. "I'm no chorus girl," she
said coldly.

With a little shrill scream of pain Rae Malgregor's hands went flying
back to her temples. Like a person giving orders in a great panic she
turned authoritatively to her two room-mates, her fingers all the while
boring frenziedly into her temples.

"Now, girls," she warned, "stand well back! If my head bursts, you know,
it's going to burst all to slivers and splinters--like a boiler!"

"Rae, you're crazy!" hooted Zillah.

"Just plain vulgar--looney," faltered Helene.

Both girls reached out simultaneously to push her aside.

Somewhere in the dusty, indifferent street a bird's note rang out in
one wild, delirious ecstasy of untrammeled springtime. To all intents
and purposes the sound might have been the one final signal that Rae
Malgregor's jangled nerves were waiting for.

"Oh, I _am_ crazy, am I?" she cried with a new, fierce joy. "Oh, I _am_
crazy, am I? Well, I'll go ask the Superintendent and see if I am! Oh,
surely they wouldn't try and make me graduate if I really was crazy!"

Madly she bolted for her bureau, and snatching her own motto down,
crumpled its face securely against her skirt and started for the door.
Just what the motto was no one but herself knew. Sprawling in
paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown
wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face
down to the wall for three tantalizing years.

"No you don't!" cried Zillah now, as she saw the mystery threatening so
meanly to escape her.

"No you don't!" cried Helene. "You've seen our mottoes--and now we're
going to see yours!"

Almost crazed with new terror Rae Malgregor went dodging to the
right,--to the left,--to the right again,--cleared the rocking-chair,--a
scuffle with padded hands,--climbed the trunk,--a race with padded
feet,--reached the door-handle at last, yanked the door open, and with
lungs and temper fairly bursting with momentum, shot down the
hall,--down some stairs,--down some more hall,--down some more stairs,
to the Superintendent's office where, with her precious motto still
clutched securely in one hand, she broke upon that dignitary's startled,
near-sighted vision like a young whirl-wind of linen and starch and
flapping brown paper. Breathlessly, without prelude or preamble, she
hurled her grievance into the older woman's grievance-dulled ears.

"Give me back my own face!" she demanded peremptorily. "Give me back my
own face, I say! And my own hands! I tell you I want my own hands!
Helene and Zillah say I'm insane! And I want to go home!"




CHAPTER III


Like a short-necked animal elongated suddenly to the cervical
proportions of a giraffe, the Superintendent of Nurses reared up
from her stoop-shouldered desk-work and stared forth in speechless
astonishment across the top of her spectacles.

Exuberantly impertinent, ecstatically self-conscious, Rae Malgregor
repeated her demand. To her parched mouth the very taste of her own
babbling impudence refreshed her like the shock and prickle of cracked
ice.

"I tell you I want my own face again! And my own hands!" she reiterated
glibly. "I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders--and
the other human expressions!" she explained. "And the nice grubby
country hands that go with that sort of a face!"

Very accusingly she raised her finger and shook it at the
Superintendent's perfectly livid countenance.

"Oh, of course I know I wasn't very much to look at. But at least I
matched! What my hands knew, I mean, my face knew! Pies or plowing or
May-baskets, what my hands knew my face knew! That's the way hands and
faces ought to work together! But you? you with all your rules and your
bossing and your everlasting 'S--sh! S--sh!' you've snubbed all the
know-anything out of my face--and made my hands nothing but two
disconnected machines--for somebody else to run! And I hate you! You're
a Monster! You're a ----, everybody hates you!"

Mutely then she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and waited for the
Superintendent to smite her dead. The smite she felt quite sure would be
a noisy one. First of all, she reasoned it would fracture her skull.
Naturally then of course it would splinter her spine. Later in all
probability it would telescope her knee-joints. And never indeed now
that she came to think of it had the arches of her feet felt less
capable of resisting so terrible an impact. Quite unconsciously she
groped out a little with one hand to steady herself against the edge of
the desk.

But the blow when it came was nothing but a cool finger tapping her
pulse.

"There! There!" crooned the Superintendent's voice with a most amazing
tolerance.

"But I won't 'there--there'!" snapped Rae Malgregor. Her eyes were wide
open again now, and extravagantly dilated.

The cool fingers on her pulse seemed to tighten a little. "S--sh!
S--sh!" admonished the Superintendent's mumbling lips.

"But I won't 'S--sh--S--sh'!" stormed Rae Malgregor. Never before in
her three years' hospital training had she seen her arch-enemy, the
Superintendent, so utterly disarmed of irascible temper and arrogant
dignity, and the sight perplexed and maddened her at one and the same
moment. "But I won't 'S--sh--S--sh'!" Desperately she jerked her curly
blonde head in the direction of the clock on the wall. "Here it's four
o'clock now!" she cried. "And in less than four hours you're going to
try and make me graduate--and go out into the world--God knows
where--and charge innocent people twenty-five dollars a week and
washing, likelier than not, mind you, for these hands," she gestured,
"that don't co-ordinate at all with this face," she grimaced, "but with
the face of one of the House Doctors--or the Senior Surgeon--or even
you--who may be way off in Kamchatka--when I need him most!" she
finished with a confused jumble of accusation and despair.

Still with unexplainable amiability the Superintendent whirled back into
place in her pivot-chair and with her left hand which had all this time
been rummaging busily in a lower desk drawer proffered Rae Malgregor a
small fold of paper.

"Here, my dear," she said. "Here's a sedative for you. Take it at once.
It will quiet you perfectly. We all know you've had very hard luck this
past month, but you mustn't worry so about the future." The slightest
possible tinge of purely professional manner crept back into the older
woman's voice. "Certainly, Miss Malgregor, with your judgment--"

"With my judgment?" cried Rae Malgregor. The phrase was like a red rag
to her. "With my judgment? Great Heavens! That's the whole trouble! I
haven't got any judgment! I've never been allowed to have any judgment!
All I've ever been allowed to have is the judgment of some flirty young
medical student--or the House Doctor!--or the Senior Surgeon!--or you!"

Her eyes were fairly piteous with terror.

"Don't you see that my face doesn't know anything?" she faltered,
"except just to smile and smile and smile and say 'Yes, sir--No,
sir--Yes, sir'?" From curly blonde head to square-toed, commonsense
shoes her little body began to quiver suddenly like the advent of a
chill. "Oh, what am I going to do," she begged, "when I'm way off
alone--somewhere--in the mountains--or a tenement--or a palace--and
something happens--and there isn't any judgment round to tell me what
I ought to do?"

Abruptly in the doorway as though summoned by some purely casual flicker
of the Superintendent's thin fingers another nurse appeared.

"Yes, I rang," said the Superintendent. "Go and ask the Senior Surgeon
if he can come to me here a moment, immediately."

"The Senior Surgeon?" gasped Rae Malgregor. "The Senior Surgeon?" With
her hands clutching at her throat she reeled back against the wall for
support. Like a shore bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree
stripped in one second of its leafage, she stood there, utterly stricken
of temper or passion or any animating human emotion whatsoever.

"Oh, now I'm going to be expelled! Oh, now I know I'm going to
be--expelled!" she moaned listlessly.

Very vaguely into the farthest radiation of her vision she sensed the
approach of a man. Gray-haired, gray-bearded, gray-suited, grayly
dogmatic as a block of granite, the Senior Surgeon loomed up at last in
the doorway.

"I'm in a hurry," he growled. "What's the matter?"

Precipitously Rae Malgregor collapsed into the breach.

"Oh, there's--nothing at all the matter, sir," she stammered. "It's
only--it's only that I've just decided that I don't want to be a trained
nurse."

With a gesture of ill-concealed impatience the Superintendent shrugged
the absurd speech aside.

"Dr. Faber," she said, "won't you just please assure Miss Malgregor once
more that the little Italian boy's death last week was in no conceivable
way her fault,--that nobody blames her in the slightest, or holds her in
any possible way responsible."

"Why, what nonsense!" snapped the Senior Surgeon. "What--!"

"And the Portuguese woman the week before that," interrupted Rae
Malgregor dully.

"Stuff and nonsense!" said the Senior Surgeon. "It's nothing but
coincidence! Pure coincidence! It might have happened to anybody!"

"And she hasn't slept for almost a fortnight." the Superintendent
confided, "nor touched a drop of food or drink, as far as I can make
out, except just black coffee. I've been expecting this break-down for
some days."

"And-the-young-drug-store-clerk-the-week-before-that," Rae Malgregor
resumed with sing-song monotony.

Brusquely the Senior Surgeon stepped forward and taking the girl by her
shoulders, jerked her sharply round to the light, and, with firm,
authoritative fingers, rolled one of her eyelids deftly back from its
inordinately dilated pupil. Equally brusquely he turned away again.

"Nothing but moonshine!" he muttered. "Nothing in the world but too much
coffee dope taken on an empty stomach,--'empty brain,' I'd better have
said! When will you girls ever learn any sense?" With searchlight
shrewdness his eyes flashed back for an instant over the haggard gray
lines that slashed along the corners of her quivering, childish mouth. A
bit temperishly he began to put on his gloves. "Next time you set out to
have a 'brain-storm,' Miss Malgregor," he suggested satirically, "try to
have it about something more sensible than imagining that anybody is
trying to hold you personally responsible for the existence of death in
the world. Bah!" he ejaculated fiercely. "If you are going to fuss like
this over cases hopelessly moribund from the start, what in thunder are
you going to do some fine day when out of a perfectly clear and clean
sky Security itself turns septic and you lose the President of the
United States--or a mother of nine children--with a hang-nail?"

"But I wasn't fussing, sir!" protested Rae Malgregor with a timid sort
of dignity. "Why, it never had occurred to me for a moment that anybody
blamed me for--anything!" Just from sheer astonishment her hands took a
new clutch into the torn flapping corner of the motto that she still
clung desperately to even at this moment.

"For Heaven's sake stop crackling that brown paper!" stormed the Senior
Surgeon.

"But I wasn't crackling the brown paper, sir! It's crackling itself,"
persisted Rae Malgregor very softly. The great blue eyes that lifted to
his were brimming full of misery. "Oh, can't I make you understand,
sir?" she stammered. Appealingly she turned to the Superintendent. "Oh,
can't I make anybody understand? All I was trying to say,--all I was
trying to explain, was--that I _don't want to be a trained nurse--after
all_!"

"Why not?" demanded the Senior Surgeon with a rather noisy click of his
glove fasteners.

"Because--my--face--is--tired," said the girl quite simply.

The explosive wrath on the Senior Surgeon's countenance seemed to be
directed suddenly at the Superintendent.

"Is this an afternoon tea?" he asked tartly. "With six major operations
this morning and a probable meningitis diagnosis ahead of me this
afternoon I think I might be spared the babblings of an hysterical
nurse!" Casually over his shoulder he nodded at the girl. "You're a
fool!" he said, and started for the door.

Just on the threshold he turned abruptly and looked back. His forehead
was furrowed like a corduroy road and the one rampant question in his
mind at the moment seemed to be mired hopelessly between his bushy
eyebrows.

"Lord!" he exclaimed a bit flounderingly. "Are _you_ the nurse that
helped me last week on that fractured skull?"

"Yes, sir," said Rae Malgregor.

Jerkily the Senior Surgeon retraced his footsteps into the office and
stood facing her as though with some really terrible accusation.

"And the freak abdominal?" he quizzed sharply. "Was it _you_ who
threaded that needle for me so blamed slowly--and calmly--and surely,
while all the rest of us were jumping up and down and cursing you--for
no brighter reason than that we couldn't have threaded it ourselves if
we'd had all eternity before us and--all creation bleeding to death?"

"Y-e-s, sir," said Rae Malgregor.

Quite bluntly the Senior Surgeon reached out and lifted one of her hands
to his scowling professional scrutiny.

"Gad!" he attested. "What a hand! You're a wonder! Under proper
direction you're a wonder! It was like myself working with twenty
fingers and no thumbs! I never saw anything like it!"

Almost boyishly the embarrassed flush mounted to his cheeks as he jerked
away again. "Excuse me for not recognizing you," he apologized gruffly.
"But you girls all look so much alike!"

As though the eloquence of Heaven itself had suddenly descended upon a
person hitherto hopelessly tongue-tied, Rae Malgregor lifted an utterly
transfigured face to the Senior Surgeon's grimly astonished gaze.

"Yes! Yes, sir!" she cried joyously. "That's just exactly what the
trouble is! That's just exactly what I was trying to express, sir! My
face is all worn out trying to 'look alike'! My cheeks are almost sprung
with artificial smiles! My eyes are fairly bulging with unshed tears! My
nose aches like a toothache trying never to turn up at anything! I'm
smothered with the discipline of it! I'm choked with the affectation! I
tell you--I just can't breathe through a trained nurse's face any more!
I tell you, sir, I'm sick to death of being nothing but a type. I want
to look like _myself_! I want to see what Life could do to a silly face
like mine--if it ever got a chance! When other women are crying, I want
the fun of crying! When other women look scared to death, I want the fun
of looking scared to death!" Hysterically again with shrewish emphasis
she began to repeat: "I won't be a nurse! I tell you, I won't! I
_won't_!"

"Pray what brought you so suddenly to this remarkable decision?"
scoffed the Senior Surgeon.

"A letter from my father, sir," she confided more quietly. "A letter
about some dogs."

"Dogs?" hooted the Senior Surgeon.

"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse. A trifle speculatively for an
instant she glanced at the Superintendent's face and then back again to
the Senior Surgeon's. "Yes, sir," she repeated with increasing
confidence. "Up in Nova Scotia my father raises hunting-dogs. Oh, no
special fancy kind, sir," she hastened in all honesty to explain. "Just
dogs, you know,--just mixed dogs,--pointers with curly tails,--and
shaggy-coated hounds,--and brindled spaniels, and all that sort of
thing,--just mongrels, you know, but very clever; and people, sir, come
all the way from Boston to buy dogs of him, and once a man came way from
London to learn the secret of his training."

"Well, what is the secret of his training?" quizzed the Senior Surgeon
with the sudden eager interest of a sportsman. "I should think it would
be pretty hard," he acknowledged, "in a mixed gang like that to decide
just which particular dog was suited to what particular game!"

"Yes, that's just it, sir," beamed the White Linen Nurse. "A dog, of
course, will chase anything that runs,--that's just dog,--but when a dog
really begins to _care_ for what he's chasing he--wags! That's hunting!
Father doesn't calculate, he says, on training a dog on anything he
doesn't wag on!"

"Yes, but what's that got to do with you?" asked the Senior Surgeon a
bit impatiently.

With ill-concealed dismay the White Linen Nurse stood staring blankly at
the Senior Surgeon's gross stupidity.

"Why, don't you see?" she faltered. "I've been chasing this nursing job
three whole years now--and there's no wag to it!"

"Oh Hell!" said the Senior Surgeon. If he hadn't said "Oh Hell!" he
would have grinned. And it hadn't been a grinning day, and he certainly
didn't intend to begin grinning at any such late hour as that in the
afternoon. With his dignity once reassured he relaxed then a trifle.
"For Heaven's sake, what _do_ you want to be?" he asked not unkindly.

With an abrupt effort at self-control Rae Malgregor jerked her head into
at least the outer semblance of a person lost in almost fathomless
thought.

"Why I'm sure I don't know, sir," she acknowledged worriedly. "But it
would be a great pity, I suppose, to waste all the grand training that's
gone into my hands." With sudden conviction her limp shoulders stiffened
a trifle. "My oldest sister," she stammered, "bosses the laundry in one
of the big hotels in Halifax, and my youngest sister teaches school in
Moncton. But I'm so strong, you know, and I like to move things round
so,--and everything,--maybe--I could get a position somewhere as general
housework girl."

With a roar of amusement as astonishing to himself as to his listeners,
the Senior Surgeon's chin jerked suddenly upward.

"You're crazy as a loon!" he confided cordially. "Great Scott! If you
can work up a condition like this on coffee,--what would you do on," he
hesitated grimly, "malted milk?" As unheralded as his amusement, gross
irritability overtook him again. "Will--you--stop--rattling that brown
paper?" he thundered at her.

Innocently as a child she rebuffed the accusation and ignored the
temper.

"But I'm not rattling it, sir!" she protested. "I'm simply trying to
hide what's on the other side of it."

"What is on the other side of it?" demanded the Senior Surgeon bluntly.

With unquestioning docility the girl turned the paper around.

From behind her desk the austere Superintendent twisted her
neck most informally to decipher the scrawling hieroglyphics.
"_Don't--Ever--Be_--_bumptious_!" she read forth jerkily with a
questioning, incredulous sort of emphasis.

"Don't ever be bumptious?" squinted the Senior Surgeon perplexedly
through his glasses.

"Yes," said Rae Malgregor very timidly. "It's my--motto."

"Your motto?" sniffed the Superintendent.

"Your motto?" chuckled the Senior Surgeon.

"Yes, my motto," repeated Rae Malgregor with the slightest perceptible
tinge of resentment. "And it's a perfectly good motto, too! Only, of
course, it hasn't got any style to it. That's why I didn't want the
girls to see it," she confided a bit drearily. Then palpably before
their eyes they saw her spirit leap into ineffable pride. "My Father
gave it to me," she announced briskly. "And my Father said that, when
I came home in June, if I could honestly say that I'd never once been
bumptious--all my three years here,--he'd give me a--heifer! And--"

"Well I guess you've lost your heifer!" said the Senior Surgeon bluntly.

"Lost my heifer?" gasped the girl. Big-eyed and incredulous she stood
for an instant staring back and forth from the Superintendent's face to
the Senior Surgeon's. "You mean?" she stammered, "you mean--that
I've--been--bumptious--just now? You mean--that after all these years
of--meachin' meekness--I've lost--?"

Plainly even to the Senior Surgeon and the Superintendent the bones in
her knees weakened suddenly like knots of tissue paper. No power on
earth could have made her break discipline by taking a chair while the
Senior Surgeon stood, so she sank limply down to the floor instead, with
two great solemn tears welling slowly through the fingers with which she
tried vainly to cover her face.

"And the heifer was brown, with one white ear; it was awful cunning,"
she confided mumblingly. "And it ate from my hand--all warm and sticky,
like--loving sandpaper." There was no protest in her voice, nor any
whine of complaint, but merely the abject submission to Fate of one who
from earliest infancy had seen other crops blighted by other frosts.
Then tremulously with the air of one who, just as a matter of spiritual
tidiness, would purge her soul of all sad secrets, she lifted her
entrancing, tear-flushed face from her strong, sturdy, utterly
unemotional fingers and stared with amazing blueness, amazing blandness
into the Senior Surgeon's scowling scrutiny.

"And I'd named her--for you!" she said. "I'd named her--Patience--for
you!"

Instantly then she scrambled to her knees to try and assuage by some
miraculous apology the horrible shock which she read in the Senior
Surgeon's face.

"Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn't scientific!" she pleaded
desperately. "Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn't scientific at all! But
up where I live, you know, instead of praying for anybody, we--we name a
young animal--for the virtue that that person--seems to need the most.
And if you tend the young animal carefully--and train it right--!
Why--it's just a superstition, of course, but--Oh, sir!" she floundered
hopelessly, "the virtue you needed most in your business was what I
meant! Oh, really, sir, I never thought of criticizing your character!"

Gruffly the Senior Surgeon laughed. Embarrassment was in the laugh, and
anger, and a fierce, fiery sort of resentment against both the
embarrassment and the anger,--but no possible trace of amusement.
Impatiently he glanced up at the fast speeding clock.

"Good Lord!" he exclaimed, "I'm an hour late now!" Scowling like a
pirate he clicked the cover of his watch open and shut for an uncertain
instant. Then suddenly he laughed again, and there was nothing
whatsoever in his laugh this time except just amusement.

"See here, Miss--Bossy Tamer," he said. "If the Superintendent is
willing, go get your hat and coat, and I'll take you out on that
meningitis case with me. It's a thirty mile run if it's a block, and I
guess if you sit on the front seat it will blow the cobwebs out of your
brain--if anything will," he finished not unkindly.

Like a white hen sensing the approach of some utterly unseen danger the
Superintendent seemed to bristle suddenly in every direction.

"It's a bit--irregular," she protested in her most even tone.

"Bah! So are some of the most useful of the French verbs!" snapped the
Senior Surgeon. In the midst of authority his voice could be inestimably
soft and reassuring, but sometimes on the brink of asserting said
authority he had a tone that was distinctly unpleasant.

"Oh, very well," conceded the Superintendent with some waspishness.

Hazily for an instant Rae Malgregor stood staring into the
Superintendent's uncordial face. "I'd--I'd apologize," she faltered,
"but I--don't even know what I said. It just blew up!"

Perfectly coldly and perfectly civilly the Superintendent received the
overture. "It was quite evident, Miss Malgregor, that you were not
altogether responsible at the moment," she conceded in common justice.

Heavily then, like a person walking in her sleep the girl trailed out of
the room to get her coat and hat.

Slamming one desk-drawer after another the Superintendent drowned the
sluggish sound of her retreating footsteps.

"There goes my best nurse!" she said grimly. "My very best nurse! Oh no,
not the most brilliant one, I didn't mean that, but the most reliable!
The most nearly perfect human machine that it has ever been my privilege
to see turned out,--the one girl that week in, week out, month after
month, and year after year, has always done what she's told,--when she
was told,--and the exact way she was told,--without questioning
anything, without protesting anything, without supplementing anything
with some disastrous original conviction of her own--_and look at her
now_!" Tragically the Superintendent rubbed her hand across her worried
brow. "Coffee, you said it was?" she asked skeptically. "Are there any
special antidotes for coffee?"

With a queer little quirk to his mouth the gruff Senior Surgeon jerked
his glance back from the open window where with the gleam of a slim
torn-boyish ankle the frisky young Spring went scurrying through the
tree-tops.

"What's that you asked?" he quizzed sharply. "Any antidotes for coffee?
Yes. Dozens of them. But none for Spring."

"Spring?" sniffed the Superintendent. A little shiveringly she reached
out and gathered a white knitted shawl around her shoulders. "Spring? I
don't see what Spring's got to do with Rae Malgregor or any other young
outlaw in my graduating class. If graduation came in November it would
be just the same! They're a set of ingrates, every one of them!"
Vehemently she turned aside to her card-index of names and slapped the
cards through one by one without finding one single soothing exception.
"Yes, sir, a set of ingrates!" she repeated accusingly. "Spend your life
trying to teach them what to do and how to do it! Cram ideas into those
that haven't got any, and yank ideas out of those who have got too many!
Refine them, toughen them, scold them, coax them, everlastingly drill
and discipline them! And then, just as you get them to a place where
they move like clock-work, and you actually believe you can trust them,
then graduation day comes round, and they think they're all safe,--and
every single individual member of the class breaks out and runs a-muck
with the one dare-devil deed she's been itching to do every day the past
three years! Why this very morning I caught the President of the Senior
Class with a breakfast tray in her hands--stealing the cherry out of her
patient's grape fruit. And three of the girls reported for duty as bold
as brass with their hair frizzed tight as a nigger doll's. And the girl
who's going into a convent next week was trying on the laundryman's
derby hat as I came up from lunch. And now, now--" the Superintendent's
voice went suddenly a little hoarse, "and now--here's Miss
Malgregor--intriguing--to get an automobile ride with--_you!_"

"Eh?" cried the Senior Surgeon with a jump. "What? Is this an Insane
Asylum? Is it a Nervine?" Madly he started for the door. "Order a ton of
bromides!" he called back over his shoulder. "Order a car-load of them!
Saturate the whole place with them! Drown the whole damned place!"

Half way down the lower hall, all his nerves on edge, all his unwonted
boyish impulsiveness quenched noxiously like a candle flame, he met and
passed Rae Malgregor without a sign of recognition.

"God! How I hate women!" he kept mumbling to himself as he struggled
clumsily all alone into the torn sleeve lining of his thousand dollar
mink coat.




CHAPTER IV


Like a train-traveler coming out of a long, smoky, smothery tunnel
Into the clean-tasting light, the White Linen Nurse came out of the
prudish-smelling hospital into the riotous mud-and-posie promise of the
young April afternoon.

The God of Hysteria had certainly not deserted her! In all the full
effervescent reaction of her brain-storm,--fairly bubbling with
dimples, fairly foaming with curls,--light-footed, light-hearted, most
ecstatically light-headed, she tripped down into the sunshine as though
the great, harsh, granite steps that marked her descent were nothing
more nor less than a gigantic, old, horny-fingered hand passing her
blithely out to some deliciously unknown Lilliputian adventure.

As she pranced across the soggy April sidewalk to what she supposed was
the Senior Surgeon's perfectly empty automobile she became conscious
suddenly that the rear seat of the car was already occupied.

Out from an unseasonable snuggle of sable furs and flaming red hair a
small, peevish face peered forth at her with frank curiosity.

"Why, hello!" beamed the White Linen Nurse. "Who are you?"

With unmistakable hostility the haughty little face retreated into its
furs and its red hair. "Hush!" commanded a shrill childish voice. "Hush,
I say! I'm a cripple--and very bad-tempered. Don't speak to me!"

"Oh, my Glory!" gasped the White Linen Nurse. "Oh my Glory, Glory,
Glory!" Without any warning whatsoever she felt suddenly like
Nothing-At-All, rigged out in an exceedingly shabby old ulster and an
excessively homely black slouch hat. In a desperate attempt at tangible
tom-boyish nonchalance she tossed her head and thrust her hands down
deep into her big ulster pockets. That the bleak hat reflected no decent
featherish consciousness of being tossed, that the big threadbare
pockets had no bottoms to them, merely completed her startled sense of
having been in some way blotted right out of existence.

Behind her back the Senior Surgeon's huge fur-coated approach dawned
blissfully like the thud of a rescue party.

But if the Senior Surgeon's blunt, wholesome invitation to ride had been
perfectly sweet when he prescribed it for her in the Superintendent's
office, the invitation had certainly soured most amazingly in the
succeeding ten minutes. Abruptly now, without any greeting, he reached
out and opened the rear door of the car, and nodded curtly for her to
enter there.

Instantly across the face of the little crippled girl already ensconced
in the tonneau a single flash of light went zig-zagging crookedly from
brow to chin,--and was gone again. "Hello, Fat Father!" piped the shrill
little voice. "Hello,--Fat Father!" Yet so subtly was the phrase
mouthed, to save your soul you could not have proved just where the
greeting ended and the taunt began.

There was nothing subtle however about the way in which the Senior
Surgeon's hand shot out and slammed the tonneau door bang-bang again on
its original passenger. His face was crimson with anger. Brusquely he
pointed to the front seat.

"You may sit in there, with me, Miss Malgregor!" he thundered.

"Yes, sir," crooned the White Linen Nurse.

Meek as an oiled machine she scuttled to her appointed place. Once
More in smothered giggle and unprotesting acquiescence she sensed the
resumption of eternal discipline. Already in just this trice of time
she felt her rampant young mouth resettle tamely into lines of smug,
determinate serenity. Already across her idle lap she felt her clasped
fingers begin to frost and tingle again like a cheerfully non-concerned
bunch of live wires waiting the one authoritative signal to connect
somebody,--anybody,--with this world or the next. Already the facile tip
of her tongue seemed fairly loaded and cocked like a revolver with all
the approximate "Yes, sirs," "No, sirs," that she thought she should
probably need.

But the only immediate remarks that the Senior Surgeon addressed to any
one were addressed distinctly to the crank of his automobile.

"Damn having a chauffeur who gets drunk the one day of the year when
you need him most!" he muttered under his breath, as with the same
exquisitely sensitive fingers that could have dissected like a caress
the nervous system of a humming bird, or re-set unbruisingly the broken
wing of a butterfly, he hurled his hundred and eighty pounds of
infuriate brute-strength against the calm, chronic, mechanical
stubbornness of that auto crank. "Damn!" he swore on the upward pull.
"Damn!" he gasped on the downward push. "Damn!" he cursed and sputtered
and spluttered. Purple with effort, bulging-eyed with strain, reeking
with sweat, his frenzied outburst would have terrorized the entire
hospital staff.

With an odd little twinge of homesickness, the White Linen Nurse slid
cautiously out to the edge of her seat so that she might watch the
struggle better. For thus, with dripping foreheads and knotted
neck-muscles and breaking backs and rankly tempestuous language, did
the untutored men-folk of her own beloved home-land hurl their great
strength against bulls and boulders and refractory forest trees. Very
startlingly as she watched, a brand new thought went zig-zagging through
her consciousness. Was it possible,--was it even so much as remotely
possible--that the great Senior Surgeon,--the great, wonderful,
altogether formidable, altogether unapproachable Senior Surgeon,--was
just a--was just a--? Stripped ruthlessly of all his social
superiority,--of all his professional halo,--of all his scientific
achievement, the Senior Surgeon stood suddenly forth before her--a mere
man--just like other men! _Just exactly_ like other men? Like the sick
drug-clerk? Like the new-born millionaire baby? Like the doddering old
Dutch gaffer? The very delicacy of such a thought drove the blood
panic-stricken from her face. It was the indelicacy of the thought that
brought the blood surging back again to brow, to cheeks, to lips, even
to the tips of her ears.

Glancing up casually from the roar and rumble of his abruptly repentant
engine the Senior Surgeon swore once more under his breath to think that
any female sitting perfectly idle and non-concerned in a seven thousand
dollar car should have the nerve to flaunt such a furiously strenuous
color.

Bristling with resentment and mink furs he strode around the fender and
stumbled with increasing irritation across the White Linen Nurse's knees
to his seat. Just for an instant his famous fingers seemed to flash with
apparent inconsequence towards one bit of mechanism and another. Then
like a huge, portentous pill floated on smoothest syrup the car slid
down the yawning street into the congested city.

Altogether monotonously in terms of pain and dirt and drug and disease
the city wafted itself in and out of the White Linen Nurse's
well-grooved consciousness. From every filthy street corner sodden age
or starved babyhood reached out its fluttering pulse to her. Then,
suddenly sweet as a draught through a fever-tainted room, the squalid
city freshened into jocund, luxuriant suburbs with rollicking tennis
courts, and flaming yellow forsythia blossoms, and green velvet lawns
prematurely posied with pale exotic hyacinths and great scarlet
splotches of lusty tulips.

Beyond this hectic horticultural outburst the leisurely Spring faded out
again into April's naturally sallow colors.

Glossy and black as an endless typewriter ribbon, the narrow, tense
State Road seemed to wind itself everlastingly in--and in--and
in--on some hidden spool of the car's mysterious mechanism.
Clickety-Click-Click-Clack,--faster than any human mind could
think,--faster than any human hand could finger,--hurtling up hazardous
hills of thought,--sliding down facile valleys of fancy,--roaring with
emphasis,--shrieking with punctuation,--the great car yielded itself
perforce to Fate's dictation.

Robbed successively of the city's humanitarian pang, of the suburb's
esthetic pleasure, the White Linen Nurse found herself precipitated
suddenly into a mere blur of sight, a mere chaos of sound. In whizzing
speed and crashing breeze,--houses--fences--meadows--people--slapped
across her eyeballs like pictures on a fan. On and on and on through
kaleidoscopic yellows and rushing grays the great car sped, a purely
mechanical factor in a purely mechanical landscape.

Rigid with concentration the Senior Surgeon stared like a dead man into
the intrepid, on-coming road.

Intermittently from her green, plushy laprobes the little crippled girl
struggled to her feet, and sprawling clumsily across whose-ever shoulder
suited her best, raised a brazenly innocent voice, deliberately flatted,
in a shrill and maddeningly repetitive chant of her own making, to the
effect that

All the birds were there
With yellow feathers instead of hair,
And bumble bees crocheted in the trees--
And bumble bees crocheted in the trees--
And all the birds were there--
And--And--

Intermittently from the front seat the Senior Surgeon's wooden face
relaxed to the extent of a grim mouth twisting distractedly sideways in
one furious bellow.

"Will--you--stop--your--_noise_--and--go--back--to--your--seat!"

Nothing else happened at all until at last, out of unbroken stretches of
winter-staled stubble, a high, formal hemlock hedge and a neat, pebbled
driveway proclaimed the Senior Surgeon's ultimate destination.

Cautiously now, with an almost tender skill, the big car circled a tiny,
venturesome clump of highway violets and crept through a prancing,
leaping fluff of yellow collie dogs to the door of the big stone house.

Instantly from inestimable resources a liveried serving man appeared to
help the Surgeon from his car; another, to take the Surgeon's coat;
another, to carry his bag.

Lingering for an instant to stretch his muscles and shake his great
shoulders, the Senior Surgeon breathed into his cramped lungs a friendly
impulse as well as a scent of budding cherry trees.

"You may come in with me, if you want to, Miss Malgregor." he conceded.
"It's an extraordinary case. You will hardly see another one like it."
Palpably he lowered his already almost indistinguishable voice. "The boy
is young," he confided, "about your age, I should guess, a college
foot-ball hero, the most superbly perfect specimen of young manhood it
has ever been my privilege to behold. It will be a long case. They have
two nurses already, but would like another. The work ought not to be
hard. Now if they should happen to--fancy you!" In speechless
expressiveness his eyes swept estimatingly over sun-parlors, stables,
garages, Italian gardens, rapturous blue-shadowed mountain views--every
last intimate detail of the mansion's wonderful equipment.

Like a drowning man feeling his last floating spar wrenched away from
him, the White Linen Nurse dug her finger-nails frantically into every
reachable wrinkle and crevice of the heavily upholstered seat.

"Oh, but sir, I don't want to go in!" she protested passionately. "I
tell you, sir, I'm quite done with all that sort of thing! It would
break my heart! It would! Oh, sir, this worrying about people for whom
you've got no affection,--it's like sledding without any snow! It grits
right down on your naked nerves. It--"

Before the Senior Surgeon's glowering, incredulous stare her heart began
to plunge and pound again, but it plunged and pounded no harder, she
realized suddenly, than when in the calm, white hospital precincts she
was obliged to pass his terrifying presence in the corridor and murmur
an inaudible "Good Morning" or "Good Evening." "After all, he's nothing
but a man--nothing but a man--nothing but a mere--ordinary--two-legged
man," she reasoned over and over to herself. With a really desperate
effort she smoothed her frightened face into an expression of utter
guilelessness and peace and smiled unflinchingly right into the Senior
Surgeon's rousing anger as she had once seen an animal-trainer smile
into the snarl of a crouching tiger.

"Th--ank you very much!" she said. "But I think I won't go in,
sir,--thank you! My--my face is still pretty tired!"

"Idiot!" snapped the Senior Surgeon as he turned on his heel and started
up the steps.

From the green plushy robes on the back seat the White Linen Nurse could
have sworn that she heard a sharply ejaculated, maliciously joyful "Ha!"
piped out. But when both she and the Senior Surgeon turned sharply round
to make sure, the Little Crippled Girl, in apparently complete
absorption, sat amiably extracting tuft after tuft of fur from the thumb
of one big sable glove, to the rumbling, sing-song monotone of "He loves
me--Loves me not--Loves me--Loves me not."

Bristling with unutterable contempt for all femininity, the Senior
Surgeon proceeded up the steps between two solemn-faced lackeys.

"Father!" wailed a feeble little voice. "Father!" There was no
shrillness in the tone now, nor malice, nor any mischievous thing,--just
desolation, the impulsive, panic-stricken desolation of a little child
left suddenly alone with a stranger. "Father!" the frightened voice
ventured forth a tiny bit louder. But the unheeding Senior Surgeon had
already reached the piazza. "Fat Father!" screamed the little voice.
Barbed now like a shark-hook the phrase ripped through the Senior
Surgeon's dormant sensibilities. As one fairly yanked out of his
thoughts he whirled around in his tracks.

"What do you want?" he thundered.

Helplessly the little girl sat staring from a lackey's ill-concealed
grin to her Father's smoldering fury. Quite palpably she began to
swallow with considerable difficulty. Then quick as a flash a
diminutively crafty smile crooked across one corner of her mouth.

"Father?" she improvised dulcetly. "Father? May--may I--sit--in the
White Linen Nurse's lap?"

Just for an instant the Senior Surgeon's narrowing eyes probed
mercilessly into the reekingly false little smile. Then altogether
brutally he shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't care where in blazes you sit!" he muttered, and went on into
the house.

With an air of unalterable finality the massive oak door closed after
him. In the resonant click of its latch the great wrought-iron lock
seemed to smack its lips with ineffable satisfaction.

Wringing suddenly round with a whish of starched skirts the White Linen
Nurse knelt up in her seat and grinned at the Little Crippled Girl.

"'Ha'--yourself!" she said.

Against all possible expectancy the Little Crippled Girl burst out
laughing. The laugh was wild, ecstatic, extravagantly boisterous, yet
awkward withal, and indescribably bumpy, like the first flight of a
cage-cramped bird.

Quite abruptly the White Linen Nurse sat down again, and commenced
nervously with the wrist of her chamois glove to polish the slightly
tarnished brass lamp at her elbow. Equally abruptly after a minute she
stopped polishing and looked back at the Little Crippled Girl.

"Would--you--like--to sit in my lap?" she queried conscientiously.

Insolent with astonishment the Little Girl parried the question. "Why in
blazes--should I want to sit in your lap?" she quizzed harshly. Every
accent of her voice, every remotest intonation, was like the Senior
Surgeon's at his worst. The suddenly forked eyebrow, the snarling twitch
of the upper lip, turned the whole delicate little face into a grotesque
but desperately unconscious caricature of the grim-jawed father.

As though the father himself had snubbed her for some unimaginable
familiarity the White Linen Nurse winced back in hopeless confusion.
Just for sheer shock, short-circuited with fatigue, a big tear rolled
slowly down one pink cheek.

Instantly to the edge of her seat the Little Girl jerked herself
forward. "Don't cry, Pretty!" she whispered. "Don't cry! It's my legs.
I've got fat iron braces on my legs. And people don't like to hold me!"

Half the professional smile came flashing back to the White Linen
Nurse's mouth.

"Oh, I just adore holding people with iron braces on their legs," she
affirmed, and, leaning over the back of the seat, proceeded with
absolutely perfect mechanical tenderness to gather the poor, puny,
surprised little body into her own strong, shapely arms. Then dutifully
snuggling her shoulder to meet the stubborn little shoulder that refused
to snuggle, to it, and dutifully easing her knees to suit the stubborn
little knees that refused to be eased, she settled down resignedly in
her seat again to await the return of the Senior Surgeon. "There! There!
There!" she began quite instinctively to croon and pat.

"Don't say 'There! There!'" wailed the Little Girl peevishly. Her body
was suddenly stiff as a ram-rod. "Don't say 'There! There!' If you've
got to make any noise at all, say 'Here! Here!'"

"Here! Here!" droned the White Linen Nurse. "Here! Here! Here! Here!" On
and on and interminably on, "Here! Here! Here! Here!"

At the end of about the three-hundred-and-forty-seventh "Here!" the
Little Girl's body relaxed, and she reached up two fragile fingers to
close the White Linen Nurse's mouth. "There! That will do," she sighed
contentedly. "I feel better now. Father does tire me so."

"Father tires--_you_?" gasped the White Linen Nurse. The giggle that
followed the gasp was not in the remotest degree professional. "Father
tires _you_?" she repeated accusingly. "Why, you silly Little Girl!
Can't you see it's you that makes Father so everlastingly tired?"
Impulsively with her one free hand she turned the Little Girl's listless
face to the light. "What makes you call your nice father 'Fat Father'?"
she asked with real curiosity. "What makes you? He isn't fat at all.
He's just big. Why, what ever possesses you to call him 'Fat Father,' I
say? Can't you see how mad it makes him?"

"Why, of course it made him mad!" said the Little Girl with plainly
reviving interest. Thrilled with astonishment at the White Linen Nurse's
apparent stupidity she straightened up perkily with inordinately
sparkling eyes. "Why, of course it makes him mad!" she explained
briskly. "That's why I do it! Why, my Parpa--never even looks at
me--unless I make him mad!"

"S--sh!" said the White Linen Nurse. "Why, you mustn't ever say a thing
like that! Why, your Marma wouldn't like you to say a thing like that!"

Jerking bumpily back against the White Linen Nurse's unprepared shoulder
the Little Girl prodded a pallid finger-tip into the White Linen Nurse's
vivid cheek. "Silly--Pink and White--Nursie!" she chuckled, "Don't you
know there _isn't_ any Marma?" Cackling with delight over her own
superior knowledge she folded her little arms and began to rock herself
convulsively to and fro.

"Why, stop!" cried the White Linen Nurse. "Now you stop! Why, you wicked
little creature laughing like that about your poor dead mother! Why,
just think how bad it would make your poor Parpa feel!"

With instant sobriety the Little Girl stopped rocking, and stared
perplexedly into the White Linen Nurse's shocked eyes. Her own little
face was all wrinkled up with earnestness.

"But the Parpa--didn't like the Marma!" she explained painstakingly.
"The Parpa--_never_ liked the Marma! That's why he doesn't like me! I
heard Cook telling the Ice Man once when I wasn't more than ten minutes
old!"

Desperately with one straining hand the White Linen Nurse stretched her
fingers across the Little Girl's babbling mouth. Equally desperately,
with the other hand, she sought to divert the Little Girl's mind by
pushing the fur cap back from her frizzly red hair, and loosening her
sumptuous coat, and jerking down vainly across two painfully obtrusive
white ruffles, the awkwardly short, hideously bright little purple
dress.

"I think your cap is too hot," she began casually, and then proceeded
with increasing vivacity and conviction to the objects that worried her
most. "And those--those ruffles," she protested, "they don't look a bit
nice being so long!" Resentfully she rubbed an edge of the purple dress
between her fingers. "And a little girl like you,--with such bright red
hair,--oughtn't to wear--purple!" she admonished with real concern.

"Now whites and blues--and little soft pussy-cat grays--"

Mumblingly through her finger-muzzled mouth the Little Girl burst into
explanations again.

"Oh, but when I wear gray," she persisted, "the Parpa--never sees me!
But when I wear purple he cares,--he cares--most awfully!" she boasted
with a bitter sort of triumph. "Why when I wear purple and frizz my hair
hard enough,--no matter who's there, or anything,--he'll stop right off
short in the middle of whatever he's doing--and rear right up so
perfectly beautiful and mad and glorious--and holler right out 'For
Heaven's sake, take that colored Sunday supplement away!'"

"Your Father's nervous," suggested the White Linen Nurse.

Almost tenderly the Little Girl reached up and drew the White Linen
Nurse's ear close down to her own snuggling lips.

"Damned nervous!" she confided laconically.

Quite against all intention the White Linen Nurse giggled. Floundering
to recover her dignity she plunged into a new error. "Poor little
dev--," she began.

"Yes," sighed the Little Girl complacently. "That's just what the Parpa
calls me." Fervidly she clasped her little hands together. "Yes, if I
can only make him mad enough daytimes," she asserted, "then at night
when he thinks I'm all asleep he comes and stands by my cribby-house
like a great black shadow-bear and shakes and shakes his most beautiful
head and says, 'Poor little devil--poor little devil.' Oh, if I can only
make him mad enough daytimes!" she cried out ecstatically.

"Why, you naughty little thing!" scolded the White Linen Nurse with an
unmistakable catch in her voice. "Why, you--naughty--naughty--little
thing!"

Like the brush of a butterfly's wing the child's hand grazed the White
Linen Nurse's cheek. "I'm a lonely little thing," she confided
wistfully. "Oh, I'm an awfully lonely little thing!" With really
shocking abruptness the old malicious smile came twittering back to her
mouth. "But I'll get even with the Parpa yet!" she threatened joyously,
reaching out with pliant fingers to count the buttons on the White
Linen Nurse's dress. "Oh, I'll get even with the Parpa yet!" In the
midst of the passionate assertion her rigid little mouth relaxed in a
most mild and innocent yawn.

"Oh, of course," she yawned, "on wash days and ironing days and every
other work day in the week he has to be away cutting up people 'cause
that's his lawful business. But Sundays, when he doesn't really need to
at all, he goes off to some kind of a green, grassy club--all day
long--and plays golf."

Very palpably her eyelids began to droop. "Where was I?" she asked
sharply. "Oh, yes, 'the green, grassy club.' Well, when I die," she
faltered, "I'm going to die specially on some Sunday when there's a big
golf game,--so he'll just naturally have to give it up and stay home
and--amuse me--and help arrange the flowers. The Parpa's crazy about
flowers. So am I," she added broodingly. "I raised almost a geranium
once. But the Parpa threw it out. It was a good geranium, too. All it
did was just to drip the tiniest-teeniest bit over a book and a writing
and somebody's brains in a dish. He threw it at a cat. It was a good
cat, too. All it did was to--"

A little jerkily her drooping head bobbed forward and then back again.
Her heavy eyes were almost tight shut by this time, and after a moment's
silence her lips began moving dumbly like one at silent devotions. "I'm
making a little poem, now," she confided at last. "It's about--you and
me. It's a sort of a little prayer." Very, very softly she began to
repeat.

Now I sit me down to nap
All curled up in a Nursie's lap,
If _she_ should die before I wake--

Abruptly she stopped and stared up suspiciously into the White Linen
Nurse's eyes. "Ha!" she mocked, "you thought I was going to say 'If I
should die before I wake,'--didn't you? _Well, I'm not_!"

"It would have been more generous," acknowledged the White Linen Nurse.

Very stiffly the Little Girl pursed her lips. "It's plenty generous
enough--when it's all done!" she said severely. "And I'll thank
you,--Miss Malgregor,--not to interrupt me again!" With excessive
deliberateness she went back to the first line of her poem and began
all over again,

Now I sit me down to nap,
All curled up in a Nursie's lap,
If _she_ should die before I wake,
Give her--give her ten cents--for Jesus' sake!

"Why that's a--a cunning little prayer," yawned the White Linen Nurse.
Most certainly of course she would have smiled if the yawn hadn't caught
her first. But now in the middle of the yawn it was a great deal easier
to repeat the "very cunning" than to force her lips into any new
expression. "Very cunning--very cunning," she kept crooning
conscientiously.

Modestly like some other successful authors the Little Girl flapped her
eyelids languidly open and shut for three or four times before she
acknowledged the compliment. "Oh, cunning as any of 'em," she admitted
off-handishly. Only once again did she open either mouth or eyes, and
this time it was merely one eye and half a mouth. "Do my fat iron
braces--hurt you?" she mumbled drowsily.

"Yes, a little," conceded the White Linen Nurse.

"Ha! They hurt me--all the time!" gibed the Little Girl.

Five minutes later, the child who didn't particularly care about being
held, and the girl who didn't particularly care about holding her, were
fast asleep in each other's arms,--a naughty, nagging, restive little
hornet all hushed up and a-dream in the heart of a pink wild-rose!

Stalking out of the house in his own due time the Senior Surgeon reared
back aghast at the sight.

"Well--I'll be hanged!" he muttered. "Most everlastingly hanged! Wonder
what they think this is? A somnolent kindergarten show? Talk about
fiddling while Rome burns!"

Awkwardly, on the top step, he struggled alone into his cumbersome coat.
Every tingling nerve in his body, every shuddering sensibility, was
racked to its utmost capacity over the distressing scenes he had left
behind him in the big house. Back in that luxuriant sickroom, Youth
Incarnate lay stripped, root, branch, leaf, bud, blossom, fruit, of
All its manhood's promise. Back in that erudite library, Culture
Personified, robbed of all its fine philosophy, sat babbling illiterate
street-curses into its quivering hands. Back in that exquisite pink and
gold boudoir, Blonded Fashion, ravished for once of all its artistry,
ran stumbling round and round in interminable circles like a disheveled
hag. In shrill crescendos and discordant basses, with heartpiercing
jaggedness, with blood-curdling raspishness, each one, boy, father,
mother, meddlesome relative, competent or incompetent assistant,
indiscriminate servant, filing his separate sorrow into the Senior
Surgeon's tortured ears!

With one of those sudden revulsions to materialism which is liable
to overwhelm any man who delves too long at a time in the brutally
unconventional issues of life and death, the Senior Surgeon stepped down
into the subtle, hyacinth-scented sunshine with every latent human greed
in his body clamoring for expression--before it, too, should be hurtled
into oblivion. "Eat, you fool, and drink, you fool, and be merry,--you
fool,--for to-morrow--_even you,--Lendicott R. Faber--may have to die_!"
brawled and re-brawled through his mind like a ribald phonograph tune.

At the edge of the bottom step a precipitous lilac branch that must have
budded and bloomed in a single hour smote him stingingly across his
cheek. "Laggard!" taunted the lilac branch.

With the first crunching grit of gravel under his feet, something
transcendently naked and unashamed that was neither Brazen Sorrow nor
Brazen Pain thrilled across his startled consciousness. Over the
rolling, marshy meadow, beyond the succulent willow-hedge that hid the
winding river, up from some fluent, slim canoe, out from a chorus of
virile young tenor voices, a little passionate Love Song--divinely
tender--most incomparably innocent--came stealing palpitantly forth into
that inflammable Spring world without a single vestige of accompaniment
on it!

Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here,
And Love is Lord of you and me,
There's no bird in brake or brere,
But to his little mate sings he,
"Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here
And Love is Lord of you--and me!"

Wrenched like a sob out of his own lost youth the Senior Surgeon's
faltering college memories took up the old refrain.

As I go singing, to my dear,
"Kiss me, Sweet, the Spring is here,
And Love is Lord of you and me!"

Just for an instant a dozen long-forgotten pictures lanced themselves
poignantly into his brain,--dingy, uncontrovertible old recitation
rooms where young ideas flashed bright and futile as parade
swords,--elm-shaded slopes where lithe young bodies lolled on green
velvet grasses to expound their harshest cynicisms! Book-history,
book-science, book-economics, book-love,--all the paper passion of all
the paper poets swaggering imperiously on boyish lips that would have
died a thousand bashful deaths before the threatening imminence of a
real girl's kiss! Magic days, with Youth the one glittering, positive
treasure on the Tree of Life--and Woman still a mystery!

"Woman a mystery?" Harshly the phrase ripped through the Senior
Surgeon's brain. Croakingly in that instant all the grim gray scientific
years re-overtook him, swamped him, strangled him. "Woman a _mystery_?
Oh ye Gods! And Youth? Bah! Youth,--a mere tinsel tinkle on a rotting
Christmas tree!"

Furiously with renewed venom he turned and threw his weight again upon
the stubbornly resistant crank of his automobile.

Vaguely disturbed by the noise and vibration the White Linen Nurse
opened her big, drowsy, blue eyes upon him.

"Don't--jerk--it--so!" she admonished hazily, "You'll wake the Little
Girl!"

"Well, what about my convenience, I'd like to know?" snapped the Senior
Surgeon in some astonishment.

Heavily the White Linen Nurse's lashes shadowed down again across her
sleep-flushed cheeks.

"Oh, never mind--about--that," she mumbled non-concernedly.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake--wake up there!" bellowed the Senior Surgeon
above the sudden roar of his engine.

Adroitly for a man of his bulk he ran around the radiator and jumped
into his seat. Joggled unmercifully into wakefulness, the Little Girl
greeted his return with a generous if distinctly non-tactful
demonstration of affection. Grabbing the unwitting fingers of his
momentarily free hand she tapped them proudly against the White Linen
Nurse's plump pink cheek.

"See! I call her 'Peach'!" she boasted joyously with all the triumphant
air of one who felt assured that mental discrimination such as this
could not possibly fail to impress even a person so naturally obtuse
as--a father.

"Don't be foolish!" snarled the Senior Surgeon.

"Who? Me?" gasped the White Linen Nurse in a perfect agony of confusion.

"Yes! You!" snapped the Senior Surgeon explosively half an hour later
after interminable miles of absolute silence--and dingy yellow
field-stubble--and bare brown alder bushes.

Truly out of the ascetic habit of his daily life, "where no rain was,"
as the Bible would put it, it did seem to him distinctly foolish, not to
say careless, not to say out and out incendiary, for any girl to go
blushing her way like a fire-brand through a world so palpably populated
by young men whose heads were tow, and hearts indisputably tinder,
rather than tender.

"Yes! You!" he reasserted vehemently at the end of another silent mile.

Then plainly begrudging this second inexcusable interruption of his most
vital musings concerning Spinal Meningitis he scowled his way savagely
back again into his own grimly established trend of thought.

Excited by so much perfectly good silence that nobody seemed to be using
the Little Crippled Girl ventured gallantly forth once more into the
hazardous conversational land of grown-ups.

"Father?" she experimented cautiously with most commendable discretion.

Fathoms deep in abstraction the Senior Surgeon stared unheeding into the
whizzing black road. Pulses and temperatures and blood-pressures were
seething in his mind; and sharp sticks and jagged stones and the general
possibilities of a puncture; and murmurs of the heart and râles of the
lungs; and a most unaccountable knock-knock-knocking in the engine; and
the probable relation of middle-ear disease; and the perfectly positive
symptoms of optic neuritis; and a damned funny squeak in the steering
gear!

"Father?" the Little Girl persisted valiantly.

To add to his original concentration the Senior Surgeon's linen collar
began to chafe him maddeningly under his chin. The annoyance added two
scowls to his already blackly furrowed face, and at least ten miles an
hour to his running time; but nothing whatsoever to his conversational
ability.

"Father!" the Little Girl whimpered with faltering courage. Then
panic-stricken, as wiser people have been before her, over the dreadful
spookish remoteness of a perfectly normal human being who refuses either
to answer or even to notice your wildest efforts at communication, she
raised her waspish voice in its shrillest, harshest war-cry. "Fat
Father! _Fat Father! F-a-t F-a-t-h-e-r!_" she screeched out frenziedly
at the top of her lungs.

The gun-shot agony of a wounded rabbit was in the cry, the last gurgling
gasp of strangulation under a murderer's reeking fingers,--catastrophe
unspeakable,--disaster now irrevocable!

Clamping down his brakes with a wrench that almost tore the insides out
of his engine the Senior Surgeon brought the great car to a staggering
standstill.

"What is it?" he cried in real terror. "What is it?"

Limply the Little Girl stretched down from the White Linen Nurse's lap
till she could nick her toe against the shiniest woodwork in sight.
Altogether aimlessly her small chin began to burrow deeper and deeper
into her big fur collar.

"For Heaven's sake, what do you want?" demanded the Senior Surgeon. Even
yet along his spine the little nerves crinkled with shock and
apprehension. "For Heaven's sake what do you want?"

Helplessly the child lifted her turbid eyes to his. With unmistakable
appeal her tiny hand went clutching out at one of the big buttons on his
coat. Desperately for an instant she rummaged through her brain for some
remotely adequate answer to this most thunderous question,--and then
retreated precipitously as usual to the sacristy of her own
imagination.

"All the birds _were_ there, Father!" she confided guilelessly. "All the
birds _were_ there,--with yellow feathers instead of hair! And
bumblebees--crocheted in the trees. And--"

Short of complete annihilation there was no satisfying vengeance
whatsoever that the Senior Surgeon's exploding passion could wreak upon
his offspring. Complete annihilation being unfeasible at the moment he
merely climbed laboriously out of the car, re-cranked the engine,
climbed laboriously back into his place and started on his way once
more. All the red blustering rage was stripped completely from him.
Startlingly rigid, startlingly white, his face was like the death-mask
of a pirate.

Pleasantly excited by she-didn't-know-exactly-what, the Little Girl
resumed her beloved falsetto chant, rhythmically all the while with her
puny iron-braced legs beating the tune into the White Linen Nurse's
tender flesh.

All the birds were there
With yellow feathers instead of hair,
And bumblebees crocheted in the trees
And--and--all the birds were there,
With yellow feathers instead of hair,
And--

Frenziedly as a runaway horse trying to escape from its own pursuing
harness and carriage the Senior Surgeon poured increasing speed into
both his own pace and the pace of his tormentor. Up hill,--down
dale,--screeching through rocky echoes,--swishing through blue-green
spruce-lands,--dodging indomitable boulders,--grazing lax, treacherous
embankments,--the great car scuttled homeward. Huddled behind his
steering wheel like a warrior behind his shield, every body-muscle taut
with strain, every facial muscle diabolically calm, the Senior Surgeon
met and parried successively each fresh onslaught of yard, rod, mile.

Then suddenly in the first precipitous descent of a mighty hill the
whole earth seemed to drop out from under the car. Down-down-down with
incredible swiftness and smoothness the great machine went diving
towards abysmal space! Up-up-up with incredible bumps and bouncings,
trees, bushes, stonewalls went rushing to the sky!

Gasping surprisedly towards the Senior Surgeon the White Linen Nurse
saw his grim mouth yank round abruptly in her direction as it yanked
sometimes in the operating-room with some sharp, incisive order of life
or death. Instinctively she leaned forward for the message.

Not over-loud but strangely distinct the words slapped back into her
straining ears.

"If--it will rest your face any--to look scared--by all means--do so!
I've lost control of the machine!" called the Senior Surgeon
sardonically across the roar of the wind.

The phrase excited the White Linen Nurse but it did not remotely
frighten her. She was not in the habit of seeing the Senior Surgeon lose
control of any situation. Merely intoxicated with speed, delirious with
ozone, she snatched up the Little Girl close, to her breast.

"We're flying!" she cried. "We're dropping from a parachute! We're--!"

Swoopingly like a sled striking glare, level ice the great car swerved
from the bottom of the hill into a soft rolling meadow. Instantly from
every conceivable direction, like foes in ambush, trees, stumps, rocks
reared up in threatening defiance.

Tighter and tighter the White Linen Nurse crushed the Little Girl to her
breast. Louder and louder she called in the Little Girl's ear.

_"Scream!"_ she shouted. _"There might be a bump! Scream louder than a
bump! Scream! Scream! Scream!"_

In that first over-whelming, nerve-numbing, heart-crunching terror of
his whole life as the great car tilted up against a stone,--plowed down
into the mushy edge of a marsh,--and skidded completely round,
_crash-bang--_ into a tree, it was the last sound that the Senior
Surgeon heard,--the sound of a woman and child screeching their lungs
out in diabolical exultancy!




CHAPTER V


When the White Linen Nurse found anything again she found herself lying
perfectly flat on her back in a reasonably comfortable nest of grass and
leaves. Staring inquisitively up into the sky she thought she noticed a
slight black and blue discoloration towards the west, but more than
that, much to her relief, the firmament did not seem to be seriously
injured. The earth, she feared had not escaped so easily. Even way off
somewhere near the tip of her fingers the ground was as sore--as
sore--as could be--under her touch. Impulsively to her dizzy eyes the
hot tears started, to think that now, tired as she was, she should have
to jump right up in another minute or two and attend to the poor earth.
Fortunately for any really strenuous emergency that might arise there
seemed to be nothing about her own body that hurt at all except a queer,
persistent little pain in her cheek. Not until the Little Crippled
Girl's dirt-smouched face intervened between her own staring eyes and
the sky did she realize that the pain in her cheek was a pinch.

"Wake up! Wake up!" scolded the Little Crippled Girl shrilly.
"Naughty--Pink and White Nursie! I wanted to hear the bump! You screamed
so loud I couldn't hear the bump!"

With excessive caution the White Linen Nurse struggled up at last to a
sitting posture, and gazed perplexedly around her.

It seemed to be a perfectly pleasant field,--acres and acres of mild old
grass tottering palsiedly down to watch some skittish young violets and
bluets frolic in and out of a giggling brook. Up the field? Up the
field? Hazily the White Linen Nurse ground her knuckles into her
incredulous eyes. Up the field, just beyond them, the great empty
automobile stood amiably at rest. From the general appearance of the
stone-wall at the top of the little grassy slope it was palpably evident
that the car had attempted certain vain acrobatic feats before its
failing momentum had forced it into the humiliating ranks of the
back-sliders.

Still grinding her knuckles into her eyes the White Linen Nurse turned
back to the Little Girl. Under the torn, twisted sable cap one little
eye was hidden completely, but the other eye loomed up rakish and
bruised as a prizefighter's. One sable sleeve was wrenched disastrously
from its arm-hole, and along the edge of the vivid little purple skirt
the ill-favored white ruffles seemed to have raveled out into hopeless
yards and yards and yards of Hamburg embroidery.

A trifle self-consciously the Little Girl began to gather herself
together.

"We--we seem to have fallen out of something!" she confided with the air
of one who halves a most precious secret.

"Yes, I know," said the White Linen Nurse. "But what has become of--your
Father?"

Worriedly for an instant the Little Girl sat scanning the remotest
corners of the field. Then abruptly with a gasp of real relief she began
to explore with cautious fingers the geographical outline of her black
eye.

"Oh, never mind about Father," she asserted cheerfully. "I guess--I
guess he got mad and went home."

"Yes--I know," mused the White Linen Nurse. "But it doesn't
seem--probable."

"Probable?" mocked the Little Girl most disagreeably. Then suddenly her
little hand went shooting out towards the stranded automobile.

"Why, there he is!" she screamed. "Under the car! Oh,
Look--Look--Lookey!"

Laboriously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her knees. Desperately
she tried to ram her fingers like a clog into the whirling dizziness
round her temples.

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God! What's the dose for anybody under a car?" she
babbled idiotically.

Then with a really herculean effort,--both mental and physical, she
staggered to her feet, and started for the automobile.

But her knees gave out, and wilting down to the grass she tried to crawl
along on all-fours, till straining wrists sent her back to her feet
again.

Whenever she tried to walk the Little Girl walked,--whenever she tried
to crawl the Little Girl crawled.

"Isn't it fun!" the shrill childish voice piped persistently. "Isn't it
just like playing ship-wreck!"

When they reached the car both woman and child were too utterly
exhausted with breathlessness to do anything except just sit down on the
ground and--stare.

Sure enough under that monstrous, immovable looking machine the Senior
Surgeon's body lay rammed face-down deep, deep into the grass.

It was the Little Girl who recovered her breath first.

"I think he's dead!" she volunteered sagely. "His legs look--awfully
dead--to me!" Only excitement was in the statement. It took a second or
two for her little mind to make any particularly personal application of
such excitement. "I hadn't--exactly--planned--on having him dead!" she
began with imperious resentment. A threat of complete emotional collapse
zig-zagged suddenly across her face. "I won't have him dead! I won't! I
_won't_!" she screamed out stormily.

In the amazing silence that ensued the White Linen Nurse gathered her
trembling knees up into the circle of her arms and sat there staring at
the Senior Surgeon's prostrate body, and rocking herself feebly to and
fro in a futile effort to collect her scattered senses.

"Oh, if some one would only tell me what to do,--I know I could do it!
Oh, I know I could do it! If some one would only tell me what to do!"
she kept repeating helplessly.

Cautiously the Little Girl crept forward on her hands and knees to the
edge of the car and peered speculatively through the great yellow
wheel-spokes. "Father!" she faltered in almost inaudible gentleness.
"Father!" she pleaded in perfectly impotent whisper.

Impetuously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her own hands and knees
and jostled the Little Girl aside.

"Fat Father!" screamed the White Linen Nurse. "Fat Father! Fat Father!
_Fat Father!"_ she gibed and taunted with the one call she knew that
had never yet failed to rouse him.

Perceptibly across the Senior Surgeon's horridly quiet shoulders a
little twitch wrinkled and was gone again.

"Oh, his heart!" gasped the White Linen Nurse. "I must find his heart!"

Throwing herself prone upon the cool meadowy ground and frantically
reaching out under the running board of the car to her full arm's length
she began to rummage awkwardly hither and yon beneath the heavy weight
of the man in the desperate hope of feeling a heart-beat.

"Ouch! You tickle me!" spluttered the Senior Surgeon weakly.

Rolling back quickly with fright and relief the White Linen Nurse burst
forth into one maddening cackle of hysterical laughter. "Ha! Ha! Ha!"
she giggled. "Hi! Hi! Titter! Titter! Titter!"

Perplexedly at first but with increasing abandon the Little Girl's voice
took up the same idiotic refrain. "Ha-Ha-Ha," she choked. And
"Hi-Hi-Hi!" And "Titter! Titter! Titter!"

With an agonizing jerk of his neck the Senior Surgeon rooted his
mud-gagged mouth a half inch further towards free and spontaneous
speech. Very laboriously, very painstakingly, he spat out one by one two
stones and a wisp of ground pine and a brackish, prickly tickle of stale
golden-rod.

"Blankety-blank-blank--BLANK!" he announced in due time,
"Blankety-blank-blank-blank--BLANK! Maybe when you
two--blankety-blank--imbeciles have got through your blankety-blank
cackling you'll have the--blankety-blank decency to save my--my
blankety-blank-blank--blank--_blank-blank_ life!"

"Ha! Ha! Ha!" persisted the poor helpless White Linen Nurse with the
tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Hi! Hi! Hi!" snickered the poor Little Girl through her hiccoughs.

Feeling hopelessly crushed under two tons and a half of car, the Senior
Surgeon closed his eyes for death. No man of his weight, he felt quite
sure, could reasonably expect to survive many minutes longer the
apoplectic, blood-red rage that pounded in his ear-drums. Through his
tight-closed eyelids very, very slowly a red glow seemed to permeate. He
thought it was the fires of Hell. Opening his eyes to meet his fate like
a man he found himself staring impudently close instead into the White
Linen Nurse's furiously flushed face that lay cuddled on one plump cheek
staring impudently close at him.

"Why--why--get out!" gasped the Senior Surgeon.

Very modestly the White Linen Nurse's face retreated a little further
into its blushes.

"Yes, I know," she protested. "But I'm all through giggling now. I'm
sorry--I'm--"

In sheer apprehensiveness the Senior Surgeon's features crinkled
wincingly from brow to chin as though struggling vainly to retreat from
the appalling proximity of the girl's face.

"Your--eyelashes--are too long," he complained querulously.

"Eh?" jerked the White Linen Nurse's face. "Is it your brain that's
hurt? Oh, sir, do you think it's your brain that's hurt?"

"It's my stomach!" snapped the Senior Surgeon. "I tell you I 'm not
hurt,--I'm just--squashed! I'm paralyzed! If I can't get this car off
me--"

"Yes, that's just it," beamed the White Linen Nurse's face. "That's just
what I crawled in here to find out,--how to get the car off you. That's
just what I want to find out. I could run for help, of course,--only I
couldn't run, 'cause my knees are so wobbly. It would take hours--and
the car might start or burn up or something while I was gone. But you
don't seem to be caught anywhere on the machinery," she added more
brightly, "it only seems to be sitting on you. So if I could only get
the car off you! But it's so heavy. I had no idea it would be so heavy.
Could I take it apart, do you think? Is there any one place where I
could begin at the beginning and take it all apart?"

"Take it apart--Hell!" groaned the Senior Surgeon.

A little twitch of defiance flickered across the White Linen Nurse's
face. "All the same," she asserted stubbornly, "if some one would only
tell me what to do--I know I could do it!"

Horridly from some unlocatable quarter of the engine an alarming little
tremor quickened suddenly and was hushed again.

"Get out of here--quick!" stormed the Senior Surgeon's ghastly face.

"I won't!" said the White Linen Nurse's face. "Until you tell me--what
to do!"

Brutally for an instant the ingenuous blue eyes and the cynical gray
eyes battled each other.

"_Can_ you do what you're told?" faltered the Senior Surgeon.

"Oh, yes," said the White Linen Nurse.

"I mean can you do exactly--what you're told?" gasped the Senior
Surgeon. "Can you follow directions, I mean? Can you follow
them--explicitly? Or are you one of those people who listens only to her
own judgment?"

"Oh, but I haven't got any--judgment," protested the White Linen Nurse.

Palpably in the Senior Surgeon's blood-shot eyes the leisurely seeming
diagnosis leaped to precipitous conclusions.

"Then get out of here--quick--for God's sake--and get to work!" he
ordered.

Cautiously the White Linen Nurse jerked herself back into freedom and
crawled around and stared at the Senior Surgeon through the wheel-spokes
again. Like one worrying out some intricate mathematical problem his
mental strain was pulsing visibly through his closed eyelids.

"Yes, sir?" prodded the White Linen Nurse.

"Keep still!" snapped the Senior Surgeon. "I've got to think," he said.
"I've got to work it out! All in a moment you've got to learn to run the
car. All in a moment! It's awful!"

"Oh, I don't mind, sir," affirmed the White Linen Nurse serenely.

Frenziedly the Senior Surgeon rooted one cheek into the mud again. "You
don't--_mind_?" he groaned. "You don't--_mind_? Why, you've got to
learn--everything! Everything--from--the very beginning!"

"Oh, that's all right, sir," crooned the White Linen Nurse.

Ominously from somewhere a horrid sound creaked again. The Senior
Surgeon did not stop to argue any further.

"Now come here," ordered the Senior Surgeon. "I'm going to--I'm going
to--" Startlingly his voice weakened,--trailed off into
nothingness,--and rallied suddenly with exaggerated bruskness. "Look
here now! For Heaven's sake use your brains! I'm going to dictate to
you--very slowly--one thing at a time--just what to do!"

Quite astonishingly the White Linen Nurse sank down on her knees and
began to grin at him. "Oh, no, sir," she said. "I couldn't do it that
way,--not 'one thing at a time.' Oh, no indeed, sir! No!" Absolute
finality was in her voice,--the inviolable stubbornness of the perfectly
good-natured person.

"You'll do it the way I tell you to!" roared the Senior Surgeon
struggling vainly to ease one shoulder or stretch one knee-joint.

"Oh, no, sir," beamed the White Linen Nurse. "Not one thing at a time!
Oh, no, I couldn't do it that way! Oh, no, sir, I won't do it that
way--one thing at a time," she persisted hurriedly. "Why, you might
faint away or something might happen--right in the middle of it--right
between one direction and another--and I wouldn't know at all--what to
turn on or off next--and it might take off one of your legs, you know,
or an arm. Oh, no,--not one thing at a time!"

"Good-by--then," croaked the Senior Surgeon. "I'm as good as dead now."
A single shudder went through him,--a last futile effort to stretch
himself.

"Good-by," said the White Linen Nurse. "Good-by, sir.--I'd heaps rather
have you die--perfectly whole--like that--of your own accord--than have
me run the risk of starting the car full-tilt and chopping you up so--or
dragging you off so--that you didn't find it convenient to tell me--how
to stop the car."

"You're a--a--a--" spluttered the Senior Surgeon indistinguishably.

"Crinkle-crackle," went that mysterious, horrid sound from somewhere in
the machinery.

"Oh my God!" surrendered the Senior Surgeon. "Do it your own--damned
way! Only--only--" His voice cracked raspingly.

"Steady! Steady there!" said the White Linen Nurse. Except for a sudden
odd pucker at the end of her nose her expression was still perfectly
serene. "Now begin at the beginning," she begged. "Quick! Tell me
everything--just the way I must do it! Quick--quick--quick!"

Twice the Senior Surgeon's lips opened and shut with a vain effort to
comply with her request.

"But you can't do it," he began all over again. "It isn't possible. You
haven't got the mind!"

"Maybe I haven't," said the White Linen Nurse. "But I've got the memory.
Hurry!"

"Creak," said the funny little something in the machinery.
"Creak--drip--bubble!"

"Oh, get in there quick!" surrendered the Senior Surgeon. "Sit down
behind the wheel!" he shouted after her flying footsteps. "Are you
there? For God's sake--are you there? Do you see those two little levers
where your right hand comes? For God's sake--don't you know what a
lever is? Quick now! Do just what I tell you!"

A little jerkily then, but very clearly, very concisely, the Senior
Surgeon called out to the White Linen Nurse just how every lever, every
pedal should be manipulated to start the car!

Absolutely accurately, absolutely indelibly the White Linen Nurse
visualized each separate detail in her abnormally retentive mind!

"But you can't--possibly remember it!" groaned the Senior Surgeon.
"You can't--possibly! And probably the damn car's _bust_ and won't
start--anyway--and--!" Abruptly the speech ended in a guttural snarl of
despair.

"Don't be a--b