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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Love Stories, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Love Stories
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Release Date: March 26, 2005 [EBook #15473]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       THE WORKS OF
+   MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
+
+
+       LOVE STORIES
+
+
+
+THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY
+Publishers           NEW YORK
+
+
+PUBLISHED BY ARRANGEMENT
+WITH GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY.
+
+Copyright, 1919, By George H. Doran Company
+
+Copyright, 1912, 1913, 1916, by the Curtis Publishing Company
+Copyright, 1912, by The McClure Publications, Inc.
+Copyright, 1917, by The Metropolitan Magazine Co.
+
+
+
+
+   CONTENTS
+
+
+   I
+   TWENTY-TWO
+
+   II
+   JANE
+
+   III
+   IN THE PAVILION
+
+   IV
+   GOD'S FOOL
+
+   V
+   THE MIRACLE
+
+   VI
+   "ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!"
+
+   VII
+   THE GAME
+
+
+
+
+LOVE STORIES
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-TWO
+
+
+I
+
+The Probationer's name was really Nella Jane Brown, but she was
+entered in the training school as N. Jane Brown. However, she meant
+when she was accepted to be plain Jane Brown. Not, of course, that
+she could ever be really plain.
+
+People on the outside of hospitals have a curious theory about
+nurses, especially if they are under twenty. They believe that they
+have been disappointed in love. They never think that they may
+intend to study medicine later on, or that they may think nursing is
+a good and honourable career, or that they may really like to care
+for the sick.
+
+The man in this story had the theory very hard.
+
+When he opened his eyes after the wall of the warehouse dropped, N.
+Jane Brown was sitting beside him. She had been practising counting
+pulses on him, and her eyes were slightly upturned and very earnest.
+
+There was a strong odour of burnt rags in the air, and the man
+sniffed. Then he put a hand to his upper lip--the right hand. She
+was holding his left.
+
+"Did I lose anything besides this?" he inquired. His little
+moustache was almost entirely gone. A gust of fire had accompanied
+the wall.
+
+"Your eyebrows," said Jane Brown.
+
+The man--he was as young for a man as Jane Brown was for a
+nurse--the man lay quite still for a moment. Then:
+
+"I'm sorry to undeceive you," he said. "But my right leg is off."
+
+He said it lightly, because that is the way he took things. But he
+had a strange singing in his ears.
+
+"I'm afraid it's broken. But you still have it." She smiled. She had
+a very friendly smile. "Have you any pain anywhere?"
+
+He was terribly afraid she would go away and leave him, so, although
+he was quite comfortable, owing to a hypodermic he had had, he
+groaned slightly. He was, at that time, not particularly interested
+in Jane Brown, but he did not want to be alone. He closed his eyes
+and said feebly:
+
+"Water!"
+
+She gave him a teaspoonful, bending over him and being careful not
+to spill it down his neck. Her uniform crackled when she moved. It
+had rather too much starch in it.
+
+The man, whose name was Middleton, closed his eyes. Owing to the
+morphia, he had at least a hundred things he wished to discuss. The
+trouble was to fix on one out of the lot.
+
+"I feel like a bit of conversation," he observed. "How about you?"
+
+Then he saw that she was busy again. She held an old-fashioned
+hunting-case watch in her hand, and her eyes were fixed on his
+chest. At each rise and fall of the coverlet her lips moved. Mr.
+Middleton, who was feeling wonderful, experimented. He drew four
+very rapid breaths, and four very slow ones. He was rewarded by
+seeing her rush to a table and write something on a sheet of yellow
+paper.
+
+"Resparation, very iregular," was what she wrote. She was not a
+particularly good speller.
+
+After that Mr. Middleton slept for what he felt was a day and a
+night. It was really ten minutes by the hunting-case watch. Just
+long enough for the Senior Surgical Interne, known in the school as
+the S.S.I., to wander in, feel his pulse, approve of Jane Brown, and
+go out.
+
+Jane Brown had risen nervously when he came in, and had proffered
+him the order book and a clean towel, as she had been instructed. He
+had, however, required neither. He glanced over the record, changed
+the spelling of "resparation," arranged his tie at the mirror, took
+another look at Jane Brown, and went out. He had not spoken.
+
+It was when his white-linen clad figure went out that Middleton
+wakened and found it was the same day. He felt at once like
+conversation, and he began immediately. But the morphia did a
+curious thing to him. He was never afterward able to explain it. It
+made him create. He lay there and invented for Jane Brown a
+fictitious person, who was himself. This person, he said, was a
+newspaper reporter, who had been sent to report the warehouse fire.
+He had got too close, and a wall had come down on him. He invented
+the newspaper, too, but, as Jane Brown had come from somewhere else,
+she did not notice this.
+
+In fact, after a time he felt that she was not as really interested
+as she might have been, so he introduced a love element. He was, as
+has been said, of those who believe that nurses go into hospitals
+because of being blighted. So he introduced a Mabel, suppressing her
+other name, and boasted, in a way he afterward remembered with
+horror, that Mabel was in love with him. She was, he related,
+something or other on his paper.
+
+At the end of two hours of babbling, a businesslike person in a
+cap--the Probationer wears no cap--relieved Jane Brown, and spilled
+some beef tea down his neck.
+
+Now, Mr. Middleton knew no one in that city. He had been motoring
+through, and he had, on seeing the warehouse burning, abandoned his
+machine for a closer view. He had left it with the engine running,
+and, as a matter of fact, it ran for four hours, when it died of
+starvation, and was subsequently interred in a city garage. However,
+he owned a number of cars, so he wasted no thought on that one. He
+was a great deal more worried about his eyebrows, and, naturally,
+about his leg.
+
+When he had been in the hospital ten hours it occurred to him to
+notify his family. But he put it off for two reasons: first, it
+would be a lot of trouble; second, he had no reason to think they
+particularly wanted to know. They all had such a lot of things to
+do, such as bridge and opening country houses and going to the
+Springs. They were really overwhelmed, without anything new, and
+they had never been awfully interested in him anyhow.
+
+He was not at all bitter about it.
+
+That night Mr. Middleton--but he was now officially "Twenty-two," by
+that system of metonymy which designates a hospital private patient
+by the number of his room--that night "Twenty-two" had rather a bad
+time, between his leg and his conscience. Both carried on
+disgracefully. His leg stabbed, and his conscience reminded him of
+Mabel, and that if one is going to lie, there should at least be a
+reason. To lie out of the whole cloth----!
+
+However, toward morning, with what he felt was the entire
+pharmacopoeia inside him, and his tongue feeling like a tar roof, he
+made up his mind to stick to his story, at least as far as the young
+lady with the old-fashioned watch was concerned. He had a sort of
+creed, which shows how young he was, that one should never explain
+to a girl.
+
+There was another reason still. There had been a faint sparkle in
+the eyes of the young lady with the watch while he was lying to her.
+He felt that she was seeing him in heroic guise, and the thought
+pleased him. It was novel.
+
+To tell the truth, he had been getting awfully bored with himself
+since he left college. Everything he tried to do, somebody else
+could do so much better. And he comforted himself with this, that he
+would have been a journalist if he could, or at least have published
+a newspaper. He knew what was wrong with about a hundred newspapers.
+
+He decided to confess about Mabel, but to hold fast to journalism.
+Then he lay in bed and watched for the Probationer to come back.
+
+However, here things began to go wrong. He did not see Jane Brown
+again. There were day nurses and night nurses and reliefs, and
+_internes_ and Staff and the Head Nurse and the First Assistant
+and--everything but Jane Brown. And at last he inquired for her.
+
+"The first day I was in here," he said to Miss Willoughby, "there
+was a little girl here without a cap. I don't know her name. But I
+haven't seen her since."
+
+Miss Willoughby, who, if she had been disappointed in love, had
+certainly had time to forget it, Miss Willoughby reflected.
+
+"Without a cap? Then it was only one of the probationers."
+
+"You don't remember which one?"
+
+But she only observed that probationers were always coming and
+going, and it wasn't worth while learning their names until they
+were accepted. And that, anyhow, probationers should never be sent
+to private patients, who are paying a lot and want the best.
+
+"Really," she added, "I don't know what the school is coming to.
+Since this war in Europe every girl wants to wear a uniform and be
+ready to go to the front if we have trouble. All sorts of silly
+children are applying. We have one now, on this very floor, not a
+day over nineteen."
+
+"Who is she?" asked Middleton. He felt that this was the one. She
+was so exactly the sort Miss Willoughby would object to.
+
+"Jane Brown," snapped Miss Willoughby. "A little, namby-pamby,
+mush-and-milk creature, afraid of her own shadow."
+
+Now, Jane Brown, at that particular moment, was sitting in her
+little room in the dormitory, with the old watch ticking on the
+stand so she would not over-stay her off duty. She was aching with
+fatigue from her head, with its smooth and shiny hair, to her feet,
+which were in a bowl of witch hazel and hot water. And she was
+crying over a letter she was writing.
+
+Jane Brown had just come from her first death. It had taken place in
+H ward, where she daily washed window-sills, and disinfected stands,
+and carried dishes in and out. And it had not been what she had
+expected. In the first place, the man had died for hours. She had
+never heard of this. She had thought of death as coming quickly--a
+glance of farewell, closing eyes, and--rest. But for hours and hours
+the struggle had gone on, a fight for breath that all the ward could
+hear. And he had not closed his eyes at all. They were turned up,
+and staring.
+
+The Probationer had suffered horribly, and at last she had gone
+behind the screen and folded her hands and closed her eyes, and said
+very low:
+
+"Dear God--please take him quickly."
+
+He had stopped breathing almost immediately. But that may have been
+a coincidence.
+
+However, she was not writing that home. Between gasps she was
+telling the humours of visiting day in the ward, and of how kind
+every one was to her, which, if not entirely true, was not entirely
+untrue. They were kind enough when they had time to be, or when they
+remembered her. Only they did not always remember her.
+
+She ended by saying that she was quite sure they meant to accept her
+when her three months was up. It was frightfully necessary that she
+be accepted.
+
+She sent messages to all the little town, which had seen her off
+almost _en masse_. And she added that the probationers received the
+regular first-year allowance of eight dollars a month, and she could
+make it do nicely--which was quite true, unless she kept on breaking
+thermometers when she shook them down.
+
+At the end she sent her love to everybody, including even worthless
+Johnny Fraser, who cut the grass and scrubbed the porches; and, of
+course, to Doctor Willie. He was called Doctor Willie because his
+father, who had taken him into partnership long ago, was Doctor
+Will. It never had seemed odd, although Doctor Willie was now
+sixty-five, and a saintly soul.
+
+Curiously enough, her letter was dated April first. Under that very
+date, and about that time of the day, a health officer in a near-by
+borough was making an entry regarding certain coloured gentlemen
+shipped north from Louisiana to work on a railroad. Opposite the
+name of one Augustus Baird he put a cross. This indicated that
+Augustus Baird had not been vaccinated.
+
+By the sixth of April "Twenty-two" had progressed from splints to a
+plaster cast, and was being most awfully bored. Jane Brown had not
+returned, and there was a sort of relentless maturity about the
+nurses who looked after him that annoyed him.
+
+Lying there, he had a good deal of time to study them, and somehow
+his recollection of the girl with the hunting-case watch did not
+seem to fit her in with these kindly and efficient women. He could
+not, for instance, imagine her patronising the Senior Surgical
+Interne in a deferential but unmistakable manner, or good-naturedly
+bullying the First Assistant, who was a nervous person in shoes too
+small for her, as to their days off duty.
+
+Twenty-two began to learn things about the hospital. For instance,
+the day nurse, while changing his pillow slips, would observe that
+Nineteen was going to be operated on that day, and close her lips
+over further information. But when the afternoon relief, while
+giving him his toothbrush after lunch, said there was a most
+interesting gall-stone case in nineteen, and the night nurse, in
+reply to a direct question, told Nineteen's name, but nothing else,
+Twenty-two had a fair working knowledge of the day's events.
+
+He seemed to learn about everything but Jane Brown. He knew when a
+new baby came, and was even given a glimpse of one, showing, he
+considered, about the colour and general contour of a maraschino
+cherry. And he learned soon that the god of the hospital is the
+Staff, although worship did not blind the nurses to their
+weaknesses. Thus the older men, who had been trained before the day
+of asepsis and modern methods, were revered but carefully watched.
+They would get out of scrubbing their hands whenever they could, and
+they hated their beards tied up with gauze. The nurses, keen,
+competent and kindly, but shrewd, too, looked after these elderly
+recalcitrants; loved a few, hated some, and presented to the world
+unbroken ranks for their defence.
+
+Twenty-two learned also the story of the First Assistant, who was in
+love with one of the Staff, who was married, and did not care for
+her anyhow. So she wore tight shoes, and was always beautifully
+waved, and read Browning.
+
+She had a way of coming in and saying brightly, as if to reassure
+herself:
+
+"Good morning, Twenty-two. Well, God is still in His heaven, and
+all's well with the world."
+
+Twenty-two got to feeling awfully uncomfortable about her. She used
+to bring him flowers and sit down a moment to rest her feet, which
+generally stung. And she would stop in the middle of a sentence and
+look into space, but always with a determined smile.
+
+He felt awfully uncomfortable. She was so neat and so efficient--and
+so tragic. He tried to imagine being hopelessly in love, and trying
+to live on husks of Browning. Not even Mrs. Browning.
+
+The mind is a curious thing. Suddenly, from thinking of Mrs.
+Browning, he thought of N. Jane Brown. Of course not by that
+ridiculous name. He had learned that she was stationed on that
+floor. And in the same flash he saw the Senior Surgical Interne
+swanking about in white ducks and just the object for a probationer
+to fall in love with. He lay there, and pulled the beginning of the
+new moustache, and reflected. The First Assistant was pinning a
+spray of hyacinth in her cap.
+
+"Look here," he said. "Why can't I be put in a wheeled chair and get
+about? One that I can manipulate myself," he added craftily.
+
+She demurred. Indeed, everybody demurred when he put it up to them.
+But he had gone through the world to the age of twenty-four, getting
+his own way about ninety-seven per cent. of the time. He got it this
+time, consisting of a new cast, which he named Elizabeth, and a
+roller-chair, and he spent a full day learning how to steer himself
+around.
+
+Then, on the afternoon of the third day, rolling back toward the
+elevator and the _terra incognita_ which lay beyond, he saw a sign.
+He stared at it blankly, because it interfered considerably with a
+plan he had in mind. The sign was of tin, and it said:
+
+"No private patients allowed beyond here."
+
+Twenty-two sat in his chair and stared at it. The plaster cast
+stretched out in front of him, and was covered by a grey blanket.
+With the exception of the trifling formality of trousers, he was
+well dressed in a sack coat, a shirt, waistcoat, and a sort of
+college-boy collar and tie, which one of the orderlies had purchased
+for him. His other things were in that extremely expensive English
+car which the city was storing.
+
+The plain truth is that Twenty-two was looking for Jane Brown. Since
+she had not come to him, he must go to her. He particularly wanted
+to set her right as to Mabel. And he felt, too, that that trick
+about respirations had not been entirely fair.
+
+He was, of course, not in the slightest degree in love with her. He
+had only seen her once, and then he had had a broken leg and a
+quarter grain of morphia and a burned moustache and no eyebrows left
+to speak of.
+
+But there was the sign. It was hung to a nail beside the elevator
+shaft. And far beyond, down the corridor, was somebody in a blue
+dress and no cap. It might be anybody, but again----
+
+Twenty-two looked around. The elevator had just gone down at its
+usual rate of a mile every two hours. In the convalescent parlour,
+where private patients _en negligée_ complained about the hospital
+food, the nurse in charge was making a new cap. Over all the
+hospital brooded an after-luncheon peace.
+
+Twenty-two wheeled up under the sign and considered his average of
+ninety-seven per cent. Followed in sequence these events: (a)
+Twenty-two wheeled back to the parlour, where old Mr. Simond's cane
+leaned against a table, and, while engaging that gentleman in
+conversation, possessed himself of the cane. (b) Wheeled back to the
+elevator. (c) Drew cane from beneath blanket. (d) Unhooked sign with
+cane and concealed both under blanket. (e) Worked his way back along
+the forbidden territory, past I and J until he came to H ward.
+
+Jane Brown was in H ward.
+
+She was alone, and looking very professional. There is nothing quite
+so professional as a new nurse. She had, indeed, reached a point
+where, if she took a pulse three times, she got somewhat similar
+results. There had been a time when they had run something like
+this: 56--80--120----
+
+Jane Brown was taking pulses. It was a visiting day, and all the
+beds had fresh white spreads, tucked in neatly at the foot. In the
+exact middle of the centre table with its red cloth, was a vase of
+yellow tulips. The sun came in and turned them to golden flame.
+
+Jane Brown was on duty alone and taking pulses with one eye while
+she watched the visitors with the other. She did the watching better
+than she did the pulses. For instance, she was distinctly aware that
+Stanislas Krzykolski's wife, in the bed next the end, had just slid
+a half-dozen greasy cakes, sprinkled with sugar, under his pillow.
+She knew, however, that not only grease but love was in those cakes,
+and she did not intend to confiscate them until after Mrs.
+Krzykolski had gone.
+
+More visitors came. Shuffling and self-conscious mill-workers,
+walking on their toes; draggled women; a Chinese boy; a girl with a
+rouged face and a too confident manner. A hum of conversation hung
+over the long room. The sunlight came in and turned to glory, not
+only the tulips and the red tablecloth, but also the brass basins,
+the fireplace fender, and the Probationer's hair.
+
+Twenty-two sat unnoticed in the doorway. A young girl, very lame,
+with a mandolin, had just entered the ward. In the little stir of
+her arrival, Twenty-two had time to see that Jane Brown was worth
+even all the trouble he had taken, and more. Really, to see Jane
+Brown properly, she should have always been seen in the sun. She was
+that sort.
+
+The lame girl sat down in the centre of the ward, and the buzz died
+away. She was not pretty, and she was very nervous. Twenty-two
+frowned a trifle.
+
+"Poor devils," he said to himself. But Jane Brown put away her
+hunting-case watch, and the lame girl swept the ward with soft eyes
+that had in them a pity that was almost a benediction.
+
+Then she sang. Her voice was like her eyes, very sweet and rather
+frightened, but tender. And suddenly something a little hard and
+selfish in Twenty-two began to be horribly ashamed of itself. And,
+for no earthly reason in the world, he began to feel like a cumberer
+of the earth. Before she had finished the first song, he was
+thinking that perhaps when he was getting about again, he might run
+over to France for a few months in the ambulance service. A fellow
+really ought to do his bit.
+
+At just about that point Jane Brown turned and saw him. And although
+he had run all these risks to get to her, and even then had an
+extremely cold tin sign lying on his knee under the blanket, at
+first she did not know him. The shock of this was almost too much
+for him. In all sorts of places people were glad to see him,
+especially women. He was astonished, but it was good for him.
+
+She recognised him almost immediately, however, and flushed a
+little, because she knew he had no business there. She was awfully
+bound up with rules.
+
+"I came back on purpose to see you," said Twenty-two, when at last
+the lame girl had limped away. "Because, that day I came in and you
+looked after me, you know, I--must have talked a lot of nonsense."
+
+"Morphia makes some people talk," she said. It was said in an exact
+copy of the ward nurse's voice, a frightfully professional and
+impersonal tone.
+
+"But," said Twenty-two, stirring uneasily, "I said a lot that wasn't
+true. You may have forgotten, but I haven't. Now that about a girl
+named Mabel, for instance----"
+
+He stirred again, because, after all, what did it matter what he had
+said? She was gazing over the ward. She was not interested in him.
+She had almost forgotten him. And as he stirred Mr. Simond's cane
+fell out. It was immediately followed by the tin sign, which only
+gradually subsided, face up, on the bare floor, in a slowly
+diminishing series of crashes.
+
+Jane Brown stooped and picked them both up and placed them on his
+lap. Then, very stern, she marched out of the ward into the
+corridor, and there subsided into quiet hysterics of mirth.
+Twenty-two, who hated to be laughed at, followed her in the chair,
+looking extremely annoyed.
+
+"What else was I to do?" he demanded, after a time. "Of course, if
+you report it, I'm gone."
+
+"What do you intend to do with it now?" she asked. All her
+professional manner had gone, and she looked alarmingly young.
+
+"If I put it back, I'll only have to steal it again. Because I am
+absolutely bored to death in that room of mine. I have played a
+thousand games of solitaire."
+
+The Probationer looked around. There was no one in sight.
+
+"I should think," she suggested, "that if you slipped it behind that
+radiator, no one would ever know about it."
+
+Fortunately, the ambulance gong set up a clamour below the window
+just then, and no one heard one of the hospital's most cherished
+rules going, as one may say, into the discard.
+
+The Probationer leaned her nose against the window and looked down.
+A coloured man was being carried in on a stretcher. Although she did
+not know it--indeed, never did know it--the coloured gentleman in
+question was one Augustus Baird.
+
+Soon afterward Twenty-two squeaked--his chair needed
+oiling--squeaked back to his lonely room and took stock. He found
+that he was rid of Mabel, but was still a reporter, hurt in doing
+his duty. He had let this go because he saw that duty was a sort of
+fetish with the Probationer. And since just now she liked him for
+what she thought he was, why not wait to tell her until she liked
+him for himself?
+
+He hoped she was going to like him, because she was going to see him
+a lot. Also, he liked her even better than he had remembered that he
+did. She had a sort of thoroughbred look that he liked. And he liked
+the way her hair was soft and straight and shiny. And he liked the
+way she was all business and no nonsense. And the way she counted
+pulses, with her lips moving and a little frown between her
+eyebrows. And he liked her for being herself--which is, after all,
+the reason why most men like the women they like, and extremely
+reasonable.
+
+The First Assistant loaned him Browning that afternoon, and he read
+"Pippa Passes." He thought Pippa must have looked like the
+Probationer.
+
+The Head was a bit querulous that evening. The Heads of Training
+Schools get that way now and then, although they generally reveal it
+only to the First Assistant. They have to do so many irreconcilable
+things, such as keeping down expenses while keeping up requisitions,
+and remembering the different sorts of sutures the Staff likes, and
+receiving the Ladies' Committee, and conducting prayers and
+lectures, and knowing by a swift survey of a ward that the stands
+have been carbolised and all the toe-nails cut. Because it is
+amazing the way toe-nails grow in bed.
+
+The Head would probably never have come out flatly, but she had a
+wretched cold, and the First Assistant was giving her a mustard
+footbath, which was very hot. The Head sat up with a blanket over
+her shoulders, and read lists while her feet took on the blush of
+ripe apples. And at last she said:
+
+"How is that Probationer with the ridiculous name getting along?"
+
+The First Assistant poured in more hot water.
+
+"N. Jane?" she asked. "Well, she's a nice little thing, and she
+seems willing. But, of course----"
+
+The Head groaned.
+
+"Nineteen!" she said. "And no character at all. I detest fluttery
+people. She flutters the moment I go into the ward."
+
+The First Assistant sat back and felt of her cap, which was of
+starched tulle and was softening a bit from the steam. She felt a
+thrill of pity for the Probationer. She, too, had once felt fluttery
+when the Head came in.
+
+"She is very anxious to stay," she observed. "She works hard, too.
+I----"
+
+"She has no personality, no decision," said the Head, and sneezed
+twice. She was really very wretched, and so she was unfair. "She is
+pretty and sweet. But I cannot run my training school on prettiness
+and sweetness. Has Doctor Harvard come in yet?"
+
+"I--I think not," said the First Assistant. She looked up quickly,
+but the Head was squeezing a lemon in a cup of hot water beside her.
+
+Now, while the Head was having a footbath, and Twenty-two was having
+a stock-taking, and Augustus Baird was having his symptoms recorded,
+Jane Brown was having a shock.
+
+She heard an unmistakable shuffling of feet in the corridor.
+
+Sounds take on much significance in a hospital, and probationers
+study them, especially footsteps. It gives them a moment sometimes
+to think what to do next.
+
+_Internes_, for instance, frequently wear rubber soles on their
+white shoes and have a way of slipping up on one. And the engineer
+goes on a half run, generally accompanied by the clanking of a tool
+or two. And the elevator man runs, too, because generally the bell
+is ringing. And ward patients shuffle about in carpet slippers, and
+the pharmacy clerk has a brisk young step, inclined to be jaunty.
+
+But it is the Staff which is always unmistakable. It comes along the
+corridor deliberately, inexorably. It plants its feet firmly and
+with authority. It moves with the inevitability of fate, with the
+pride of royalty, with the ease of the best made-to-order boots. The
+ring of a Staff member's heel on a hospital corridor is the most
+authoritative sound on earth. He may be the gentlest soul in the
+world, but he will tread like royalty.
+
+But this was not Staff. Jane Brown knew this sound, and it filled
+her with terror. It was the scuffling of four pairs of feet,
+carefully instructed not to keep step. It meant, in other words, a
+stretcher. But perhaps it was not coming to her. Ah, but it was!
+
+Panic seized Jane Brown. She knew there were certain things to do,
+but they went out of her mind like a cat out of a cellar window.
+However, the ward was watching. It had itself, generally speaking,
+come in feet first. It knew the procedure. So, instructed by low
+voices from the beds around, Jane Brown feverishly tore the spread
+off the emergency bed and drew it somewhat apart from its fellows.
+Then she stood back and waited.
+
+Came in four officers from the police patrol. Came in the Senior
+Surgical Interne. Came two convalescents from the next ward to stare
+in at the door. Came the stretcher, containing a quiet figure under
+a grey blanket.
+
+Twenty-two, at that exact moment, was putting a queen on a ten spot
+and pretending there is nothing wrong about cheating oneself.
+
+In a very short time the quiet figure was on the bed, and the Senior
+Surgical Interne was writing in the order book: "Prepare for
+operation."
+
+Jane Brown read it over his shoulder, which is not etiquette.
+
+"But--I can't," she quavered. "I don't know how. I won't touch him.
+He's--he's bloody!"
+
+Then she took another look at the bed and she saw--Johnny Fraser.
+
+Now Johnny had, in his small way, played a part in the Probationer's
+life, such as occasionally scrubbing porches or borrowing a half
+dollar or being suspected of stealing the eggs from the henhouse.
+But _that_ Johnny Fraser had been a wicked, smiling imp, much given
+to sitting in the sun.
+
+Here lay another Johnny Fraser, a quiet one, who might never again
+feel the warm earth through his worthless clothes on his worthless
+young body. A Johnny of closed eyes and slow, noisy breathing.
+
+"Why, Johnny!" said the Probationer, in a strangled voice.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne was interested.
+
+"Know him?" he said.
+
+"He is a boy from home." She was still staring at this quiet,
+un-impudent figure.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne eyed her with an eye that was only
+partially professional. Then he went to the medicine closet and
+poured a bit of aromatic ammonia into a glass.
+
+"Sit down and drink this," he said, in a very masculine voice. He
+liked to feel that he could do something for her. Indeed, there was
+something almost proprietary in the way he took her pulse.
+
+Some time after the early hospital supper that evening Twenty-two,
+having oiled his chair with some olive oil from his tray, made a
+clandestine trip through the twilight of the corridor back of the
+elevator shaft. To avoid scandal he pretended interest in other
+wards, but he gravitated, as a needle to the pole, to H. And there
+he found the Probationer, looking rather strained, and mothering a
+quiet figure on a bed.
+
+He was a trifle puzzled at her distress, for she made no secret of
+Johnny's status in the community. What he did not grasp was that
+Johnny Fraser was a link between this new and rather terrible world
+of the hospital and home. It was not Johnny alone, it was Johnny
+scrubbing a home porch and doing it badly, it was Johnny in her
+father's old clothes, it was Johnny fishing for catfish in the
+creek, or lending his pole to one of the little brothers whose
+pictures were on her table in the dormitory.
+
+Twenty-two felt a certain depression. He reflected rather grimly
+that he had been ten days missing and that no one had apparently
+given a hang whether he turned up or not.
+
+"Is he going to live?" he inquired. He could see that the ward nurse
+had an eye on him, and was preparing for retreat.
+
+"O yes," said Jane Brown. "I think so now. The _interne_ says they
+have had a message from Doctor Willie. He is coming." There was a
+beautiful confidence in her tone.
+
+Things moved very fast with the Probationer for the next twenty-four
+hours. Doctor Willie came, looking weary but smiling benevolently.
+Jane Brown met him in a corridor and kissed him, as, indeed, she had
+been in the habit of doing since her babyhood.
+
+"Where is the young rascal?" said Doctor Willie. "Up to his old
+tricks, Nellie, and struck by a train." He put a hand under her
+chin, which is never done to the members of the training school in a
+hospital, and searched her face with his kind old eyes. "Well, how
+does it go, Nellie?"
+
+Jane Brown swallowed hard.
+
+"All right," she managed. "They want to operate, Doctor Willie."
+
+"Tut!" he said. "Always in a hurry, these hospitals. We'll wait a
+while, I think."
+
+"Is everybody well at home?"
+
+It had come to her, you see, what comes to every nurse once in her
+training--the thinness of the veil, the terror of calamity, the fear
+of death.
+
+"All well. And----" he glanced around. Only the Senior Surgical
+Interne was in sight, and he was out of hearing. "Look here,
+Nellie," he said, "I've got a dozen fresh eggs for you in my
+satchel. Your mother sent them."
+
+She nearly lost her professional manner again then. But she only
+asked him to warn the boys about automobiles and riding on the backs
+of wagons.
+
+Had any one said Twenty-two to her, she would not have known what
+was meant. Not just then, anyhow.
+
+In the doctors' room that night the Senior Surgical Interne lighted
+a cigarette and telephoned to the operating room.
+
+"That trephining's off," he said, briefly.
+
+Then he fell to conversation with the Senior Medical, who was rather
+worried about a case listed on the books as Augustus Baird,
+coloured.
+
+Twenty-two did not sleep very well that night. He needed exercise,
+he felt. But there was something else. Miss Brown had been just a
+shade too ready to accept his explanation about Mabel, he felt, so
+ready that he feared she had been more polite than sincere. Probably
+she still believed there was a Mabel. Not that it mattered, except
+that he hated to make a fool of himself. He roused once in the night
+and was quite sure he heard her voice down the corridor. He knew
+this must be wrong, because they would not make her work all day and
+all night, too.
+
+But, as it happened, it _was_ Jane Brown. The hospital provided
+plenty of sleeping time, but now and then there was a slip-up and
+somebody paid. There had been a night operation, following on a busy
+day, and the operating-room nurses needed help. Out of a sound sleep
+the night Assistant had summoned Jane Brown to clean instruments.
+
+At five o'clock that morning she was still sitting on a stool beside
+a glass table, polishing instruments which made her shiver. All
+around were things that were spattered with blood. But she looked
+anything but fluttery. She was a very grim and determined young
+person just then, and professional beyond belief. The other things,
+like washing window-sills and cutting toe-nails, had had no
+significance. But here she was at last on the edge of mercy. Some
+one who might have died had lived that night because of this room,
+and these instruments, and willing hands.
+
+She hoped she would always have willing hands.
+
+She looked very pale at breakfast the next morning, and rather
+older. Also she had a new note of authority in her voice when she
+telephoned the kitchen and demanded H ward's soft-boiled eggs. She
+washed window-sills that morning again, but no longer was there
+rebellion in her soul. She was seeing suddenly how the hospital
+required all these menial services, which were not menial at all but
+only preparation; that there were little tasks and big ones, and one
+graduated from the one to the other.
+
+She took some flowers from the ward bouquet and put them beside
+Johnny's bed--Johnny, who was still lying quiet, with closed eyes.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne did a dressing in the ward that morning.
+He had been in to see Augustus Baird, and he felt uneasy. He vented
+it on Tony, the Italian, with a stiletto thrust in his neck, by
+jerking at the adhesive. Tony wailed, and Jane Brown, who was the
+"dirty" nurse--which does not mean what it appears to mean, but is
+the person who receives the soiled dressings--Jane Brown gritted her
+teeth.
+
+"Keep quiet," said the S.S.I., who was a good fellow, but had never
+been stabbed in the neck for running away with somebody else's wife.
+
+"Eet hurt," said Tony. "Ow."
+
+Jane Brown turned very pink.
+
+"Why don't you let me cut it off properly?" she said, in a strangled
+tone.
+
+The total result of this was that Jane Brown was reprimanded by the
+First Assistant, and learned some things about ethics.
+
+"But," she protested, "it was both stupid and cruel. And if I know I
+am right----"
+
+"How are you to know you are right?" demanded the First Assistant,
+crossly. Her feet were stinging. "'A little knowledge is a dangerous
+thing.'" This was a favorite quotation of hers, although not
+Browning. "Nurses in hospitals are there to carry out the doctor's
+orders. Not to think or to say what they think unless they are
+asked. To be intelligent, but----"
+
+"But not too intelligent!" said the Probationer. "I see."
+
+This was duly reported to the Head, who observed that it was merely
+what she had expected and extremely pert. Her cold was hardly any
+better.
+
+It was taking the Probationer quite a time to realise her own total
+lack of significance in all this. She had been accustomed to men who
+rose when a woman entered a room and remained standing as long as
+she stood. And now she was in a new world, where she had to rise and
+remain standing while a cocky youth in ducks, just out of medical
+college, sauntered in with his hands in his pockets and took a
+_boutonnière_ from the ward bouquet.
+
+It was probably extremely good for her.
+
+She was frightfully tired that day, and toward evening the little
+glow of service began to fade. There seemed to be nothing to do for
+Johnny but to wait. Doctor Willie had seemed to think that nature
+would clear matters up there, and had requested no operation. She
+smoothed beds and carried cups of water and broke another
+thermometer. And she put the eggs from home in the ward pantry and
+made egg-nogs of them for Stanislas Krzykolski, who was
+unaccountably upset as to stomach.
+
+She had entirely forgotten Twenty-two. He had stayed away all that
+day, in a sort of faint hope that she would miss him. But she had
+not. She was feeling rather worried, to tell the truth. For a Staff
+surgeon going through the ward, had stopped by Johnny's bed and
+examined the pupils of his eyes, and had then exchanged a glance
+with the Senior Surgical Interne that had perplexed her.
+
+In the chapel at prayers that evening all around her the nurses sat
+and rested, their tired hands folded in their laps. They talked a
+little among themselves, but it was only a buzzing that reached the
+Probationer faintly. Some one near was talking about something that
+was missing.
+
+"Gone?" she said. "Of course it is gone. The bath-room man reported
+it to me and I went and looked."
+
+"But who in the world would take it?"
+
+"My dear," said the first speaker, "who _does_ take things in a
+hospital, anyhow? Only--a tin sign!"
+
+It was then that the Head came in. She swept in; her grey gown, her
+grey hair gave her a majesty that filled the Probationer with awe.
+Behind her came the First Assistant with the prayer-book and hymnal.
+The Head believed in form.
+
+Jane Brown offered up a little prayer that night for Johnny Fraser,
+and another little one without words, that Doctor Willie was right.
+She sat and rested her weary young body, and remembered how Doctor
+Willie was loved and respected, and the years he had cared for the
+whole countryside. And the peace of the quiet room, with the Easter
+lilies on the tiny altar, brought rest to her.
+
+It was when prayers were over that the Head made her announcement.
+She rose and looked over the shadowy room, where among the rows of
+white caps only the Probationer's head was uncovered, and she said:
+
+"I have an announcement to make to the training school. One which I
+regret, and which will mean a certain amount of hardship and
+deprivation.
+
+"A case of contagion has been discovered in one of the wards, and it
+has been considered necessary to quarantine the hospital. The doors
+were closed at seven-thirty this evening."
+
+
+II
+
+Considering that he could not get out anyhow, Twenty-two took the
+news of the quarantine calmly. He reflected that, if he was shut in,
+Jane Brown was shut in also. He had a wicked hope, at the beginning,
+that the Senior Surgical Interne had been shut out, but at nine
+o'clock that evening that young gentleman showed up at the door of
+his room, said "Cheer-o," came in, helped himself to a cigarette,
+gave a professional glance at Twenty-two's toes, which were all that
+was un-plastered of the leg, and departing threw back over his
+shoulder his sole conversational effort:
+
+"Hell of a mess, isn't it?"
+
+Twenty-two took up again gloomily the book he was reading, which was
+on Diseases of the Horse, from the hospital library. He was in the
+midst of Glanders.
+
+He had, during most of that day, been making up his mind to let his
+family know where he was. He did not think they cared, particularly.
+He had no illusions about that. But there was something about Jane
+Brown which made him feel like doing the decent thing. It annoyed
+him frightfully, but there it was. She was so eminently the sort of
+person who believed in doing the decent thing.
+
+So, about seven o'clock, he had sent the orderly out for stamps and
+paper. He imagined that Jane Brown would not think writing home on
+hospital stationery a good way to break bad news. But the orderly
+had stopped for a chat at the engine house, and had ended by playing
+a game of dominoes. When, at ten o'clock, he had returned to the
+hospital entrance, the richer by a quarter and a glass of beer, he
+had found a strange policeman on the hospital steps, and the doors
+locked.
+
+The quarantine was on.
+
+Now there are different sorts of quarantines. There is the sort
+where a trained nurse and the patient are shut up in a room and
+bath, and the family only opens the door and peers in. And there is
+the sort where the front door has a placard on it, and the family
+goes in and out the back way, and takes a street-car to the office,
+the same as usual. And there is the hospital quarantine, which is
+the real thing, because hospitals are expected to do things
+thoroughly.
+
+So our hospital was closed up as tight as a jar of preserves. There
+were policemen at all the doors, quite suddenly. They locked the
+doors and put the keys in their pockets, and from that time on they
+opened them only to pass things in, such as newspapers or milk or
+groceries or the braver members of the Staff. But not to let
+anything out--except the Staff. Supposedly Staffs do not carry
+germs.
+
+And, indeed, even the Staff was not keen about entering. It thought
+of a lot of things it ought to do about visiting time, and
+prescribed considerably over the telephone.
+
+At first there was a great deal of confusion, because quite a number
+of people had been out on various errands when it happened. And they
+came back, and protested to the office that they had only their
+uniforms on under their coats, and three dollars; or their slippers
+and no hats. Or that they would sue the city. One or two of them got
+quite desperate and tried to crawl up the fire-escape, but failed.
+
+This is of interest chiefly because it profoundly affected Jane
+Brown. Miss McAdoo, her ward nurse, had debated whether to wash her
+hair that evening, or to take a walk. She had decided on the walk,
+and was therefore shut out, along with the Junior Medical, the
+kitchen cat, the Superintendent's mother-in-law and six other
+nurses.
+
+The next morning the First Assistant gave Jane Brown charge of H
+ward.
+
+"It's very irregular," she said. "I don't exactly know--you have
+only one bad case, haven't you?"
+
+"Only Johnny."
+
+The First Assistant absent-mindedly ran a finger over the top of a
+table, and examined it for dust.
+
+"Of course," she said, "it's a great chance for you. Show that you
+can handle this ward, and you are practically safe."
+
+Jane Brown drew a long breath and stood up very straight. Then she
+ran her eye over the ward. There was something vaguely reminiscent
+of Miss McAdoo in her glance.
+
+Twenty-two made three brief excursions back along the corridor
+that first day of the quarantine. But Jane Brown was extremely
+professional and very busy. There was an air of discipline over the
+ward. Let a man but so much as turn over in bed and show an inch of
+blanket, and she pounced on the bed and reduced it to the most
+horrible neatness. All the beds looked as if they had been made up
+with a carpenter's square.
+
+On the third trip, however, Jane Brown was writing at the table.
+Twenty-two wheeled himself into the doorway and eyed her with
+disapproval.
+
+"What do you mean by sitting down?" he demanded sarcastically.
+"Don't you know that now you are in charge you ought to keep
+moving?"
+
+To which she replied, absently:
+
+"Three buttered toasts, two dry toasts, six soft boiled eggs, and
+twelve soups." She was working on the diet slips.
+
+Then she smiled at him. They were quite old friends already. It is
+curious about love and friendship and all those kindred emotions.
+They do not grow nearly so fast when people are together as when
+they are apart. It is an actual fact that the growth of many an
+intimacy is checked by meetings. Because when people are apart it is
+what they _are_ that counts, and when they are together it is what
+they do and say and look like. Many a beautiful affair has been
+ruined because, just as it was going along well, the principals met
+again.
+
+However, all this merely means that Twenty-two and Jane Brown were
+infinitely closer friends than four or five meetings really
+indicates.
+
+The ward was very quiet on this late afternoon call of his save for
+Johnny's heavy breathing. There is a quiet hour in a hospital,
+between afternoon temperatures and the ringing of the bell which
+means that the suppers for the wards are on their way--a quiet hour
+when over the long rows of beds broods the peace of the ending day.
+
+It is a melancholy hour, too, because from the streets comes faintly
+the echo of feet hurrying home, the eager trot of a horse bound
+stableward. To those in the eddy that is the ward comes at this time
+a certain heaviness of spirit. Poor thing though home may have been,
+they long for it.
+
+In H ward that late afternoon there was a wave of homesickness in
+the air, and on the part of those men who were up and about, who
+shuffled up and down the ward in flapping carpet slippers, an
+inclination to mutiny.
+
+"How did they take it?" Twenty-two inquired. She puckered her
+eyebrows.
+
+"They don't like it," she confessed. "Some of them were about ready
+to go home and it--_Tony!_" she called sharply.
+
+For Tony, who had been cunningly standing by the window leading to a
+fire-escape, had flung the window up and was giving unmistakable
+signs of climbing out and returning to the other man's wife.
+
+"Tony!" she called, and ran. Tony scrambled up on the sill. A sort
+of titter ran over the ward and Tony, now on the platform outside,
+waved a derisive hand through the window.
+
+"Good-bye, mees!" he said, and--disappeared.
+
+It was not a very dramatic thing, after all. It is chiefly
+significant for its effect on Twenty-two, who was obliged to sit
+frozen with horror and cursing his broken leg, while Jane Brown
+raced a brown little Italian down the fire-escape and caught him at
+the foot of it. Tony took a look around. The courtyard gates were
+closed and a policeman sat outside on a camp-stool reading the
+newspaper. Tony smiled sheepishly and surrendered.
+
+Some seconds later Tony and Jane Brown appeared on the platform
+outside. Jane Brown had Tony by the ear, and she stopped long enough
+outside to exchange the ear for his shoulder, by which she shook
+him, vigorously.
+
+Twenty-two turned his chair around and wheeled himself back to his
+room. He was filled with a cold rage--because she might have fallen
+on the fire-escape and been killed; because he had not been able to
+help her; because she was there, looking after the derelicts of
+life, when the world was beautiful outside, and she was young;
+because to her he was just Twenty-two and nothing more.
+
+He had seen her exactly six times.
+
+Jane Brown gave the ward a little talk that night before the night
+nurse reported. She stood in the centre of the long room, beside the
+tulips, and said that she was going to be alone there, and that she
+would have to put the situation up to their sense of honour. If they
+tried to escape, they would hurt her. Also they would surely be
+caught and brought back. And, because she believed in a combination
+of faith and deeds, she took three nails and the linen-room
+flatiron, and nailed shut the window onto the fire-escape.
+
+After that, she brushed crumbs out of the beds with a whiskbroom and
+rubbed a few backs with alcohol, and smoothed the counterpanes, and
+hung over Johnny's unconscious figure for a little while, giving
+motherly pats to his flat pillow and worrying considerably because
+there was so little about him to remind her of the Johnny she knew
+at home.
+
+After that she sat down and made up her records for the night nurse.
+The ward understood, and was perfectly good, trying hard not to muss
+its pillows or wrinkle the covers. And struggling, too, with a new
+idea. They were prisoners. No more release cards would brighten the
+days. For an indefinite period the old Frenchman would moan at
+night, and Bader the German would snore, and the Chinaman would
+cough. Indefinitely they would eat soft-boiled eggs and rice and
+beef-tea and cornstarch.
+
+The ward felt extremely low in its mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night the Senior Surgical Interne went in to play cribbage with
+Twenty-two, and received a lecture on leaving a young girl alone in
+H with a lot of desperate men. They both grew rather heated over the
+discussion and forgot to play cribbage at all. Twenty-two lay awake
+half the night, because he had seen clearly that the Senior Surgical
+Interne was interested in Jane Brown also, and would probably loaf
+around H most of the time since there would be no new cases now. It
+was a crowning humiliation to have the night nurse apply to the
+Senior Surgical Interne for a sleeping powder for him!
+
+Toward morning he remembered that he had promised to write out from
+memory one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese for the First
+Assistant, and he turned on the light and jotted down two lines of
+it. He wrote:
+
+          "_For we two look two ways, and cannot shine
+            With the same sunlight on our brow and hair._"--
+
+And then sat up in bed for half an hour looking at it because he was
+so awfully afraid it was true of Jane Brown and himself. Not, of
+course, that he wanted to shine at all. It was the looking two ways
+that hurt.
+
+The next evening the nurses took their airing on the roof, which was
+a sooty place with a parapet, and in the courtyard, which was an
+equally sooty place with a wispy fountain. And because the whole
+situation was new, they formed in little groups on the wooden
+benches and sang, hands folded on white aprons, heads lifted, eyes
+upturned to where, above the dimly lighted windows, the stars peered
+palely through the smoke.
+
+The S.S.I. sauntered out. He had thought he saw the Probationer from
+his window, and in the new relaxation of discipline he saw a chance
+to join her. But the figure he had thought he recognised proved to
+be some one else, and he fell to wandering alone up and down the
+courtyard.
+
+He was trying to work out this problem: would the advantage of
+marrying early and thus being considered eligible for certain
+cases, offset the disadvantage of the extra expense?
+
+He decided to marry early and hang the expense.
+
+The days went by, three, then four, and a little line of tension
+deepened around Jane Brown's mouth. Perhaps it has not been
+mentioned that she had a fighting nose, short and straight, and a
+wistful mouth. For Johnny Fraser was still lying in a stupor.
+
+Jane Brown felt that something was wrong. Doctor Willie came in once
+or twice, making the long trip without complaint and without hope of
+payment. All his busy life he had worked for the sake of work, and
+not for reward. He called her "Nellie," to the delight of the ward,
+which began to love him, and he spent a long hour each time by
+Johnny's bed. But the Probationer was quick to realise that the
+Senior Surgical Interne disapproved of him.
+
+That young man had developed a tendency to wander into H at odd
+hours, and sit on the edge of a table, leaving Jane Brown divided
+between proper respect for an _interne_ and fury over the wrinkling
+of her table covers. It was during one of these visits that she
+spoke of Doctor Willie.
+
+"Because he is a country practitioner," she said, "you--you
+patronise him."
+
+"Not at all," said the Senior Surgical Interne. "Personally I like
+him immensely."
+
+"Personally!"
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne waved a hand toward Johnny's bed.
+
+"Look there," he said. "You don't think that chap's getting any
+better, do you?"
+
+"If," said Jane Brown, with suspicious quiet, "if you think you know
+more than a man who has practised for forty years, and saved more
+people than you ever saw, why don't you tell him so?"
+
+There is really no defence for this conversation. Discourse between
+a probationer and an _interne_ is supposed to be limited to yea,
+yea, and nay, nay. But the circumstances were unusual.
+
+"Tell him!" exclaimed the Senior Surgical Interne, "and be called
+before the Executive Committee and fired! Dear girl, I am
+inexpressibly flattered, but the voice of an _interne_ in a hospital
+is the voice of one crying in the wilderness."
+
+Twenty-two, who was out on crutches that day for the first time, and
+was looking very big and extremely awkward, Twenty-two looked back
+from the elevator shaft and scowled. He seemed always to see a flash
+of white duck near the door of H ward.
+
+To add to his chagrin, the Senior Surgical Interne clapped him on
+the back in congratulation a moment later, and nearly upset him. He
+had intended to go back to the ward and discuss a plan he had, but
+he was very morose those days and really not a companionable person.
+He stumped back to his room and resolutely went to bed.
+
+There he lay for a long time looking at the ceiling, and saying, out
+of his misery, things not necessary to repeat.
+
+So Twenty-two went to bed and sulked, refusing supper, and having
+the word "Vicious" marked on his record by the nurse, who hoped he
+would see it some time. And Jane Brown went and sat beside a
+strangely silent Johnny, and worried. And the Senior Surgical
+Interne went down to the pharmacy and thereby altered a number of
+things.
+
+The pharmacy clerk had been shaving--his own bedroom was dark--and
+he saw the Senior Surgical Interne in the little mirror hung on the
+window frame.
+
+"Hello," he said, over the soap. "Shut the door."
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne shut the door, and then sniffed. "Smells
+like a bar-room," he commented.
+
+The pharmacy clerk shaved the left angle of his jaw, and then turned
+around.
+
+"Little experiment of mine," he explained. "Simple syrup, grain
+alcohol, a dash of cochineal for colouring, and some flavouring
+extract. It's an imitation cordial. Try it."
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne was not a drinker, but he was willing
+to try anything once. So he secured a two-ounce medicine glass, and
+filled it.
+
+"Looks nice," he commented, and tasted it. "It's not bad."
+
+"Not bad!" said the pharmacy clerk. "You'd pay four dollars a bottle
+for that stuff in a hotel. Actual cost here, about forty cents."
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne sat down and stretched out his legs. He
+had the glass in his hand.
+
+"It's rather sweet," he said. "But it looks pretty." He took another
+sip.
+
+After he had finished it, he got to thinking things over. He felt
+about seven feet tall and very important, and not at all like a
+voice crying in the wilderness. He had a strong inclination to go
+into the Superintendent's office and tell him where he went wrong in
+running the institution--which he restrained. And another to go up
+to H and tell Jane Brown the truth about Johnny Fraser--which he
+yielded to.
+
+On the way up he gave the elevator man a cigar.
+
+He was very explicit with Jane Brown.
+
+"Your man's wrong, that's all there is about it," he said. "I can't
+say anything and you can't. But he's wrong. That's an operative
+case. The Staff knows it."
+
+"Then, why doesn't the Staff do it?"
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne was still feeling very tall. He looked
+down at her from a great distance.
+
+"Because, dear child," he said, "it's your man's case. You ought to
+know enough about professional ethics for that."
+
+He went away, then, and had a violent headache, which he blamed on
+confinement and lack of exercise. But he had sowed something in the
+Probationer's mind.
+
+For she knew, suddenly, that he had been right. The Staff had meant
+that, then, when they looked at Johnny and shook their heads. The
+Staff knew, the hospital knew. Every one knew but Doctor Willie. But
+Doctor Willie had the case. Back in her little town Johnny's mother
+was looking to Doctor Willie, believing in him, hoping through him.
+
+That night Twenty-two slept, and Jane Brown lay awake. And down in H
+ward Johnny Fraser had a bad spell at that hour toward dawn when the
+vitality is low, and men die. He did not die, however. But the night
+nurse recorded, "Pulse very thin and iregular," at four o'clock.
+
+She, too, was not a famous speller.
+
+During the next morning, while the ward rolled bandages, having
+carefully scrubbed its hands first, Jane Brown wrote records--she
+did it rather well now--and then arranged the pins in the ward
+pincushion. She made concentric circles of safety-pins outside and
+common pins inside, with a large H in the centre. But her mind was
+not on this artistic bit of creation. It was on Johnny Fraser.
+
+She made up her mind to speak to Doctor Willie.
+
+Twenty-two had got over his sulking or his jealousy, or whatever it
+was, and during the early hours, those hours when Johnny was hardly
+breathing, he had planned something. He thought that he did it to
+interest the patients and make them contented, but somewhere in the
+back of his mind he knew it was to see more of Jane Brown. He
+planned a concert in the chapel.
+
+So that morning he took Elizabeth, the plaster cast, back to H ward,
+where Jane Brown was fixing the pincushion, and had a good minute of
+feasting his eyes on her while she was sucking a jabbed finger. She
+knew she should have dipped the finger in a solution, but habit is
+strong in most of us.
+
+Twenty-two had a wild desire to offer to kiss the finger and make it
+well. This, however, was not habit. It was insanity. He recognised
+this himself, and felt more than a trifle worried about it, because
+he had been in love quite a number of times before, but he had never
+had this sort of feeling.
+
+He put the concert up to her with a certain amount of anxiety. If
+she could sing, or play, or recite--although he hoped she would not
+recite--all would be well. But if she refused to take any part, he
+did not intend to have a concert. That was flat.
+
+"I can play," she said, making a neat period after the H on the
+pincushion.
+
+He was awfully relieved.
+
+"Good," he said. "You know, I like the way you say that. It's
+so--well, it's so competent." He got out a notebook and wrote "Miss
+Brown, piano selections."
+
+It was while he was writing that Jane Brown had a sort of mental
+picture--the shabby piano at home, kicked below by many childish
+feet, but mellow and sweet, like an old violin, and herself sitting
+practising, over and over, that part of Paderewski's Minuet where,
+as every one knows, the fingering is rather difficult, and outside
+the open window, leaning on his broom, worthless Johnny Fraser,
+staring in with friendly eyes and an extremely dirty face. To
+Twenty-two's unbounded amazement she flung down the cushion and made
+for the little ward linen room.
+
+He found her there a moment later, her arms outstretched on the
+table and her face buried in them. Some one had been boiling a
+rubber tube and had let the pan go dry. Ever afterward Twenty-two
+was to associate the smell of burning rubber with Jane Brown, and
+with his first real knowledge that he was in love with her.
+
+He stumped in after her and closed the door, and might have ruined
+everything then and there by taking her in his arms, crutch and
+all. But the smell of burning rubber is a singularly permeating one,
+and he was kept from one indiscretion by being discovered in
+another.
+
+It was somewhat later that Jane Brown was reprimanded for being
+found in the linen room with a private patient. She made no excuse,
+but something a little defiant began to grow in her eyes. It was not
+that she loved her work less. She was learning, day by day, the
+endless sacrifices of this profession she had chosen, its
+unselfishness, its grinding hard work, the payment that may lie in a
+smile of gratitude, the agony of pain that cannot be relieved. She
+went through her days with hands held out for service, and at night,
+in the chapel, she whispered soundless little prayers to be
+accepted, and to be always gentle and kind. She did not want to
+become a machine. She knew, although she had no words for it, the
+difference between duty and service.
+
+But--a little spirit of rebellion was growing in her breast. She did
+not understand about Johnny Fraser, for one thing. And the matter of
+the linen room hurt. There seemed to be too many rules.
+
+Then, too, she began to learn that hospitals had limitations. Jane
+Brown's hospital had no social worker. Much as she loved the work,
+the part that the hospital could not do began to hurt her. Before
+the quarantine women with new babies had gone out, without an idea
+of where to spend the night. Ailing children had gone home to such
+places as she could see from the dormitory windows, where the work
+the hospital had begun could not be finished.
+
+From the roof of the building at night she looked out over a city
+that terrified her. The call of a playing child in the street began
+to sound to her like the shriek of accident. The very grinding of
+the trolley cars, the smoke of the mills, began to mean the
+operating room. She thought a great deal, those days, about the
+little town she had come from, with its peace and quiet streets. The
+city seemed cruel. But now and then she learned that if cities are
+cruel, men are kind.
+
+Thus, on the very day of the concert, the quarantine was broken for
+a few minutes. It was broken forcibly, and by an officer of the law.
+A little newsie, standing by a fire at the next corner, for the
+spring day was cold, had caught fire. The big corner man had seen it
+all. He stripped off his overcoat, rolled the boy in it, and ran to
+the hospital. Here he was confronted by a brother officer, who was
+forbidden to admit him. The corner man did the thing that seemed
+quickest. He laid the newsie on the ground, knocked out the
+quarantine officer in two blows, broke the glass of the door with a
+third, slipped a bolt, and then, his burden in his arms, stalked in.
+
+It did not lessen the majesty of that entrance that he was crying
+all the time.
+
+The Probationer pondered that story when she heard it. After all,
+laws were right and good, but there were higher things than laws.
+She went and stood by Johnny's bed for a long time, thinking.
+
+In the meantime, unexpected talent for the concert had developed.
+The piano in the chapel proving out of order, the elevator man
+proved to have been a piano tuner. He tuned it with a bone forceps.
+Strange places, hospitals, into which drift men from every walk of
+life, to find a haven and peace within their quiet walls. Old Tony
+had sung, in his youth, in the opera at Milan. A pretty young nurse
+went around the corridors muttering bits of "Orphant Annie" to
+herself. The Senior Surgical Interne was to sing the "Rosary," and
+went about practising to himself. He came into H ward and sang it
+through for Jane Brown, with his heart in his clear young eyes. He
+sang about the hours he had spent with her being strings of pearls,
+and all that, but he was really asking her if she would be willing
+to begin life with him in a little house, where she would have to
+answer the door-bell and watch telephone calls while he was out.
+
+Jane Brown felt something of this, too. For she said: "You sing it
+beautifully," although he had flatted at least three times.
+
+He wrote his name on a medicine label and glued it to her hand. It
+looked alarmingly possessive.
+
+Twenty-two presided at the concert that night. He was extravagantly
+funny, and the sort of creaking solemnity with which things began
+turned to uproarious laughter very soon.
+
+Everything went off wonderfully. Tony started his selection too
+high, and was obliged to stop and begin over again. And the two
+Silversteins, from the children's ward, who were to dance a Highland
+fling together, had a violent quarrel at the last moment and had to
+be scratched. But everything else went well. The ambulance driver
+gave a bass solo, and kept a bar or two ahead of the accompaniment,
+dodging chords as he did wagons on the street, and fetching up with
+a sort of garrison finish much as he brought in the ambulance.
+
+But the real musical event of the evening was Jane Brown's playing.
+She played Schubert without any notes, because she had been taught
+to play Schubert that way.
+
+And when they called her back, she played little folk songs of the
+far places of Europe. Standing around the walls, in wheeled chairs,
+on crutches, pale with the hospital pallor, these aliens in their
+eddy listened and thrilled. Some of them wept, but they smiled also.
+
+At the end she played the Minuet, with a sort of flaming look in
+her eyes that puzzled Twenty-two. He could not know that she was
+playing it to Johnny Fraser, lying with closed eyes in the ward
+upstairs. He did not realise that there was a passion of sacrifice
+throbbing behind the dignity of the music.
+
+Doctor Willie had stayed over for the concert. He sat, beaming
+benevolently, in the front row, and toward the end he got up and
+told some stories. After all, it was Doctor Willie who was the real
+hit of the evening. The convalescents rocked with joy in their
+roller chairs. Crutches came down in loud applause. When he sat down
+he slipped a big hand over Jane Brown's and gave hers a hearty
+squeeze.
+
+"How d'you like me as a parlour entertainer, Nellie?" he whispered.
+
+She put her other hand over his. Somehow she could not speak.
+
+The First Assistant called to the Probationer that night as she went
+past her door. Lights were out, so the First Assistant had a candle,
+and she was rubbing her feet with witch hazel.
+
+"Come in," she called. "I have been looking for you. I have some
+news for you."
+
+The exaltation of the concert had died away. Jane Brown, in the
+candle light, looked small and tired and very, very young.
+
+"We have watched you carefully," said the First Assistant, who had
+her night garments on but had forgotten to take off her cap.
+"Although you are young, you have shown ability, and--you are to be
+accepted."
+
+"Thank you, very much," replied Jane Brown, in a strangled tone.
+
+"At first," said the First Assistant, "we were not sure. You were
+very young, and you had such odd ideas. You know that yourself now."
+
+She leaned down and pressed a sore little toe with her forefinger.
+Then she sighed. The mention of Jane Brown's youth had hurt her,
+because she was no longer very young. And there were times when she
+was tired, when it seemed to her that only youth counted. She felt
+that way to-night.
+
+When Jane Brown had gone on, she blew out her candle and went to
+bed, still in her cap.
+
+Hospitals do not really sleep at night. The elevator man dozes in
+his cage, and the night watchman may nap in the engineer's room in
+the basement. But the night nurses are always making their sleepless
+rounds, and in the wards, dark and quiet, restless figures turn and
+sigh.
+
+Before she went to bed that night, Jane Brown, by devious ways,
+slipped back to her ward. It looked strange to her, this cavernous
+place, filled with the unlovely noises of sleeping men. By the one
+low light near the doorway she went back to Johnny's bed, and sat
+down beside him. She felt that this was the place to think things
+out. In her room other things pressed in on her; the necessity of
+making good for the sake of those at home, her love of the work, and
+cowardice. But here she saw things right.
+
+The night nurse found her there some time later, asleep, her
+hunting-case watch open on Johnny's bed and her fingers still on his
+quiet wrist. She made no report of it.
+
+Twenty-two had another sleepless night written in on his record that
+night. He sat up and worried. He worried about the way the Senior
+Surgical Interne had sung to Jane Brown that night. And he worried
+about things he had done and shouldn't have, and things he should
+have done and hadn't. Mostly the first. At five in the morning he
+wrote a letter to his family telling them where he was, and that he
+had been vaccinated and that the letter would be fumigated. He also
+wrote a check for an artificial leg for the boy in the children's
+ward, and then went to bed and put himself to sleep by reciting the
+"Rosary" over and over. His last conscious thought was that the
+hours he had spent with a certain person would not make much of a
+string of pearls.
+
+The Probationer went to Doctor Willie the next day. Some of the
+exuberance of the concert still bubbled in him, although he shook
+his head over Johnny's record.
+
+"A little slow, Nellie," he said. "A little slow."
+
+Jane Brown took a long breath.
+
+"Doctor Willie," she said, "won't you have him operated on?"
+
+He looked up at her over his spectacles.
+
+"Operated on? What for?"
+
+"Well, he's not getting any better," she managed desperately.
+"I'm--sometimes I think he'll die while we're waiting for him to get
+better."
+
+He was surprised, but he was not angry.
+
+"There's no fracture, child," he said gently. "If there is a clot
+there, nature is probably better at removing it than we are. The
+trouble with you," he said indulgently, "is that you have come here,
+where they operate first and regret afterward. Nature is the best
+surgeon, child."
+
+She cast about her despairingly for some way to tell him the truth.
+But even when she spoke she knew she was foredoomed to failure.
+
+"But--suppose the Staff thinks that he should be?"
+
+Doctor Willie's kindly mouth set itself into grim lines.
+
+"The Staff!" he said, and looked at her searchingly. Then his jaws
+set at an obstinate angle.
+
+"Well, Nellie," he said, "I guess one opinion's as good as another
+in these cases. And I don't suppose they'll do any cutting and
+hacking without my consent." He looked at Johnny's unconscious
+figure. "He never amounted to much," he added, "but it's surprising
+the way money's been coming in to pay his board here. Your mother
+sent five dollars. A good lot of people are interested in him. I
+can't see myself going home and telling them he died on the
+operating table."
+
+He patted her on the arm as he went out.
+
+"Don't get an old head on those young shoulders yet, Nellie," he
+said as he was going. "Leave the worrying to me. I'm used to it."
+
+She saw then that to him she was still a little girl. She probably
+would always be just a little girl to him. He did not take her
+seriously, and no one else would speak to him. She was quite
+despairing.
+
+The ward loved Doctor Willie since the night before. It watched him
+out with affectionate eyes. Jane Brown watched him, too, his fine
+old head, the sturdy step that had brought healing and peace to a
+whole county. She had hurt him, she knew that. She ached at the
+thought of it. And she had done no good.
+
+That afternoon Jane Brown broke another rule. She went to Twenty-two
+on her off duty, and caused a mild furore there. He had been drawing
+a sketch of her from memory, an extremely poor sketch, with one eye
+larger than the other. He hid it immediately, although she could not
+possibly have recognised it, and talked very fast to cover his
+excitement.
+
+"Well, well!" he said. "I knew I was going to have some luck to-day.
+My right hand has been itching--or is that a sign of money?" Then he
+saw her face, and reduced his speech to normality, if not his heart.
+
+"Come and sit down," he said. "And tell me about it."
+
+But she would not sit down. She went to the window and looked out
+for a moment. It was from there she said:
+
+"I have been accepted."
+
+"Good." But he did not, apparently, think it such good news. He drew
+a long breath. "Well, I suppose your friends should be glad for
+you."
+
+"I didn't come to talk about being accepted," she announced.
+
+"I don't suppose, by any chance, you came to see how I am getting
+along?" he inquired humbly.
+
+"I can see that."
+
+"You can't see how lonely I am." When she offered nothing to this
+speech, he enlarged on it. "When it gets unbearable," he said, "I
+sit in front of the mirror and keep myself company. If that doesn't
+make your heart ache, nothing will."
+
+"I'm afraid I have a heart-ache, but it is not that." For a
+terrible moment he thought of that theory of his which referred to a
+disappointment in love. Was she going to have the unbelievable
+cruelty to tell him about it?
+
+"I have to talk to somebody," she said simply. "And I came to you,
+because you've worked on a newspaper, and you have had a lot of
+experience. It's--a matter of ethics. But really it's a matter of
+life and death."
+
+He felt most horribly humble before her, and he hated the lie,
+except that it had brought her to him. There was something so direct
+and childlike about her. The very way she drew a chair in front of
+him, and proceeded, talking rather fast, to lay the matter before
+him, touched him profoundly. He felt, somehow, incredibly old and
+experienced.
+
+And then, after all that, to fail her!
+
+"You see how it is," she finished. "I can't go to the Staff, and
+they wouldn't do anything if I did--except possibly put me out.
+Because a nurse really only follows orders. And--I've got to stay,
+if I can. And Doctor Willie doesn't believe in an operation and
+won't see that he's dying. And everybody at home thinks he is right,
+because--well," she added hastily, "he's been right a good many
+times."
+
+He listened attentively. His record, you remember, was his own way
+some ninety-seven per cent of the time, and at first he would not
+believe that this was going to be the three per cent, or a part of
+it.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "we'll just make the Staff turn in and do
+it. That's easy."
+
+"But they won't. They can't."
+
+"We can't let Johnny die, either, can we?"
+
+But when at last she was gone, and the room was incredibly empty
+without her,--when, to confess a fact that he was exceedingly
+shame-faced about, he had wheeled over to the chair she had sat in
+and put his cheek against the arm where her hand had rested, when he
+was somewhat his own man again and had got over the feeling that his
+arms were empty of something they had never held--then it was that
+Twenty-two found himself up against the three per cent.
+
+The hospital's attitude was firm. It could not interfere. It was an
+outside patient and an outside doctor. Its responsibility ended with
+providing for the care of the patient, under his physician's orders.
+It was regretful--but, of course, unless the case was turned over to
+the Staff----
+
+He went back to the ward to tell her, after it had all been
+explained to him. But she was not surprised. He saw that, after all,
+she had really known he was going to fail her.
+
+"It's hopeless," was all she said. "Everybody is right, and
+everybody is wrong."
+
+It was the next day that, going to the courtyard for a breath of
+air, she saw a woman outside the iron gate waving to her. It was
+Johnny's mother, a forlorn old soul in what Jane Brown recognised as
+an old suit of her mother's.
+
+"Doctor Willie bought my ticket, Miss Nellie," she said nervously.
+"It seems like I had to come, even if I couldn't get in. I've been
+waiting around most all afternoon. How is he?"
+
+"He is resting quietly," said Jane Brown, holding herself very
+tense, because she wanted to scream. "He isn't suffering at all."
+
+"Could you tell me which window he's near, Miss Nellie?"
+
+She pointed out the window, and Johnny Fraser's mother stood,
+holding to the bars, peering up at it. Her lips moved, and Jane
+Brown knew that she was praying. At last she turned her eyes away.
+
+"Folks have said a lot about him," she said, "but he was always a
+good son to me. If only he'd had a chance--I'd be right worried,
+Miss Nellie, if he didn't have Doctor Willie looking after him."
+
+Jane Brown went into the building. There was just one thing clear in
+her mind. Johnny Fraser must have his chance, somehow.
+
+In the meantime things were not doing any too well in the hospital.
+A second case, although mild, had extended the quarantine.
+Discontent grew, and threatened to develop into mutiny. Six men
+from one of the wards marched _en masse_ to the lower hall, and were
+preparing to rush the guards when they were discovered. The Senior
+Surgical Interne took two prisoners himself, and became an emergency
+case for two stitches and arnica compresses.
+
+Jane Brown helped to fix him up, and he took advantage of her
+holding a dressing basin near his cut lip to kiss her hand, very
+respectfully. She would have resented it under other circumstances,
+but the Senior Surgical Interne was, even if temporarily, a patient,
+and must be humoured. She forgot about the kiss immediately, anyhow,
+although he did not.
+
+Her three months of probation were drawing to a close now, and her
+cap was already made and put away in a box, ready for the day she
+should don it. But she did not look at it very often.
+
+And all the time, fighting his battle with youth and vigour, but
+with closed eyes, and losing it day by day, was Johnny Fraser.
+
+Then, one night on the roof, Jane Brown had to refuse the Senior
+Surgical Interne. He took it very hard.
+
+"We'd have been such pals," he said, rather wistfully, after he saw
+it was no use.
+
+"We can be, anyhow."
+
+"I suppose," he said with some bitterness, "that I'd have stood a
+better chance if I'd done as you wanted me to about that fellow in
+your ward, gone to the staff and raised hell."
+
+"I wouldn't have married you," said Jane Brown, "but I'd have
+thought you were pretty much of a man."
+
+The more he thought about that the less he liked it. It almost kept
+him awake that night.
+
+It was the next day that Twenty-two had his idea. He ran true to
+form, and carried it back to Jane Brown for her approval. But she
+was not enthusiastic.
+
+"It would help to amuse them, of course, but how can you publish a
+newspaper without any news?" she asked, rather listlessly, for her.
+
+"News! This building is full of news. I have some bits already.
+Listen!" He took a notebook out of his pocket. "The stork breaks
+quarantine. New baby in O ward. The chief engineer has developed a
+boil on his neck. Elevator Man arrested for breaking speed limit.
+Wanted, four square inches of cuticle for skin grafting in W. How's
+that? And I'm only beginning."
+
+Jane Brown listened. Somehow, behind Twenty-two's lightness of tone,
+she felt something more earnest. She did not put it into words, even
+to herself, but she divined something new, a desire to do his bit,
+there in the hospital. It was, if she had only known it, a
+milestone in a hitherto unmarked career. Twenty-two, who had always
+been a man, was by way of becoming a person.
+
+He explained about publishing it. He used to run a typewriter in
+college, and the convalescents could mimeograph it and sell it.
+There was a mimeographing machine in the office.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne came in just then. Refusing to marry him
+had had much the effect of smacking a puppy. He came back, a trifle
+timid, but friendly. So he came in just then, and elected himself to
+the advertising and circulation department, and gave the Probationer
+the society end, although it was not his paper or his idea, and sat
+down at once at the table and started a limerick, commencing:
+
+          "_We're here in the city, marooned_"
+
+However, he never got any further with it, because there are,
+apparently, no rhymes for "marooned." He refused "tuned" which
+several people offered him, with extreme scorn.
+
+Up to this point Jane Brown had been rather too worried to think
+about Twenty-two. She had grown accustomed to seeing him coming
+slowly back toward her ward, his eyes travelling much faster than he
+did. Not, of course, that she knew that. And to his being, in a way,
+underfoot a part of every day, after the Head had made rounds and
+was safely out of the road for a good two hours.
+
+But two things happened that day to turn her mind in onto her heart.
+One was when she heard about the artificial leg. The other was when
+she passed the door of his room, where a large card now announced
+"Office of the _Quarantine Sentinel_." She passed the door, and she
+distinctly heard most un-hospital-like chatter within. Judging from
+the shadows on the glass door, too, the room was full. It sounded
+joyous and carefree.
+
+Something in Jane Brown--her mind, probably--turned right around and
+looked into her heart, and made an odd discovery. This was that Jane
+Brown's heart had sunk about two inches, and was feeling very queer.
+
+She went straight on, however, and put on a fresh collar in her
+little bedroom, and listed her washing and changed her shoes,
+because her feet still ached a lot of the time. But she was a brave
+person and liked to look things in the face. So before she went back
+to the ward, she stood in front of her mirror and said:
+
+"You're a nice nurse, Nell Brown. To--to talk about duty and brag
+about service, and then to act like a fool."
+
+She went back to the ward and sat beside Johnny. But that night she
+went up on the roof again, and sat on the parapet. She could see,
+across the courtyard, the dim rectangles of her ward, and around a
+corner in plain view, "room Twenty-two." Its occupant was sitting at
+the typewriter, and working hard. Or he seemed to be. It was too far
+away to be sure. Jane Brown slid down onto the roof, which was not
+very clean, and putting her elbows on the parapet, watched him for a
+long time. When he got up, at last, and came to the open window, she
+hardly breathed. However, he only stood there, looking toward her
+but not seeing her.
+
+Jane Brown put her head on the parapet that night and cried. She
+thought she was crying about Johnny Fraser. She might have felt
+somewhat comforted had she known that Twenty-two, being tired with
+his day's work, had at last given way to most horrible jealousy of
+the Senior Surgical Interne, and that his misery was to hers as five
+is to one.
+
+The first number of the _Quarantine Sentinel_ was a great success.
+It served in the wards much the same purpose as the magazines
+published in the trenches. It relieved the monotony, brought the
+different wards together, furnished laughter and gossip. Twenty-two
+wrote the editorials, published the paper, with the aid of a couple
+of convalescents, and in his leisure drew cartoons. He drew very
+well, but all his girls looked like Jane Brown. It caused a ripple
+of talk.
+
+The children from the children's ward distributed them, and went
+back from the private rooms bearing tribute of flowers and fruit.
+Twenty-two himself developed a most reprehensible habit of
+concealing candy in the _Sentinel_ office and smuggling it to his
+carriers. Altogether a new and neighbourly feeling seemed to
+follow in the wake of the little paper. People who had sulked
+in side-by-side rooms began, in the relaxed discipline of
+convalescence, to pay little calls about. Crotchety dowagers knitted
+socks for new babies. A wave of friendliness swept over every one,
+and engulfed particularly Twenty-two.
+
+In the glow of it he changed perceptibly. This was the first
+popularity he had ever earned, and the first he had ever cared a
+fi-penny bit about. And, because he valued it, he felt more and more
+unworthy of it.
+
+But it kept him from seeing Jane Brown. He was too busy for many
+excursions to the ward, and when he went he was immediately the
+centre of an animated group. He hardly ever saw her alone, and when
+he did he began to suspect that she pretended duties that might have
+waited.
+
+One day he happened to go back while Doctor Willie was there, and
+after that he understood her problem better.
+
+Through it all Johnny lived. His thin, young body was now hardly an
+outline under the smooth, white covering of his bed. He swallowed,
+faintly, such bits of liquid as were placed between his lips, but
+there were times when Jane Brown's fingers, more expert now, could
+find no pulse at all. And still she had found no way to give him his
+chance.
+
+She made a last appeal to Doctor Willie that day, but he only shook
+his head gravely.
+
+"Even if there was an operation now, Nellie," said Doctor Willie
+that day, "he could not stand it."
+
+It was the first time that Twenty-two had known her name was Nellie.
+
+That was the last day of Jane Brown's probation. On the next day she
+was to don her cap. The _Sentinel_ came out with a congratulatory
+editorial, and at nine o'clock that night the First Assistant
+brought an announcement, in the Head's own writing, for the paper.
+
+"The Head of the Training School announces with much pleasure the
+acceptance of Miss N. Jane Brown as a pupil nurse."
+
+Twenty-two sat and stared at it for quite a long time.
+
+That night Jane Brown fought her battle and won. She went to her
+room immediately after chapel, and took the family pictures off her
+little stand and got out ink and paper. She put the photographs out
+of sight, because she knew that they were counting on her, and she
+could not bear her mother's eyes. And then she counted her money,
+because she had broken another thermometer, and the ticket home was
+rather expensive. She had enough, but very little more.
+
+After that she went to work.
+
+It took her rather a long time, because she had a great deal to
+explain. She had to put her case, in fact. And she was not strong on
+either ethics or logic. She said so, indeed, at the beginning. She
+said also that she had talked to a lot of people, but that no one
+understood how she felt--that there ought to be no professional
+ethics, or etiquette, or anything else, where it was life or death.
+That she felt hospitals were to save lives and not to save feelings.
+It seemed necessary, after that, to defend Doctor Willie--without
+naming him, of course. How much good he had done, and how he came to
+rely on himself and his own opinion because in the country there was
+no one to consult with.
+
+However, she was not so gentle with the Staff. She said that it was
+standing by and letting a patient die, because it was too polite to
+interfere, although they had all agreed among themselves that an
+operation was necessary. And that if they felt that way, would they
+refuse to pull a child from in front of a locomotive because it was
+its mother's business, and she didn't know how to do it?
+
+_Then she signed it._
+
+She turned it in at the _Sentinel_ office the next morning while
+the editor was shaving. She had to pass it through a crack in the
+door. Even that, however, was enough for the editor in question to
+see that she wore no cap.
+
+"But--see here," he said, in a rather lathery voice, "you're
+accepted, you know. Where's the--the visible sign?"
+
+Jane Brown was not quite sure she could speak. However, she managed.
+
+"After you read that," she said, "you'll understand."
+
+He read it immediately, of course, growing more and more grave, and
+the soap drying on his chin. Its sheer courage made him gasp.
+
+"Good girl," he said to himself. "Brave little girl. But it finishes
+her here, and she knows it."
+
+He was pretty well cut up about it, too, because while he was
+getting it ready he felt as if he was sharpening a knife to stab her
+with. Her own knife, too. But he had to be as brave as she was.
+
+The paper came out at two o'clock. At three the First Assistant,
+looking extremely white, relieved Jane Brown of the care of H ward
+and sent her to her room.
+
+Jane Brown eyed her wistfully.
+
+"I'm not to come back, I suppose?"
+
+The First Assistant avoided her eyes.
+
+"I'm afraid not," she said.
+
+Jane Brown went up the ward and looked down at Johnny Fraser. Then
+she gathered up her bandage scissors and her little dressing forceps
+and went out.
+
+The First Assistant took a step after her, but stopped. There were
+tears in her eyes.
+
+Things moved very rapidly in the hospital that day, while the guards
+sat outside on their camp-stools and ate apples or read the
+newspapers, and while Jane Brown sat alone in her room.
+
+First of all the Staff met and summoned Twenty-two. He went down in
+the elevator--he had lost Elizabeth a few days before, and was using
+a cane--ready for trouble. He had always met a fight more than
+halfway. It was the same instinct that had taken him to the fire.
+
+But no one wanted to fight. The Staff was waiting, grave and
+perplexed, but rather anxious to put its case than otherwise. It
+felt misunderstood, aggrieved, and horribly afraid it was going to
+get in the newspapers. But it was not angry. On the contrary, it was
+trying its extremely intelligent best to see things from a new
+angle.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne was waiting outside. He had smoked
+eighteen cigarettes since he received his copy of the _Sentinel_,
+and was as unhappy as an _interne_ can be.
+
+"What the devil made you publish it?" he demanded.
+
+Twenty-two smiled.
+
+"Because," he said, "I have always had a sneaking desire to publish
+an honest paper, one where public questions can be discussed. If
+this isn't a public question, I don't know one when I see it."
+
+But he was not smiling when he went in.
+
+An hour later Doctor Willie came in. He had brought some flowers for
+the children's ward, and his arms were bulging. To his surprise,
+accustomed as he was to the somewhat cavalier treatment of the
+country practitioner in a big city hospital, he was invited to the
+Staff room.
+
+To the eternal credit of the Staff Jane Brown's part in that painful
+half hour was never known. The Staff was careful, too, of Doctor
+Willie. They knew they were being irregular, and were most
+wretchedly uncomfortable. Also, there being six of them against one,
+it looked rather like force, particularly since, after the first two
+minutes, every one of them liked Doctor Willie.
+
+He took it so awfully well. He sat there, with his elbows on a table
+beside a withering mass of spring flowers, and faced the
+white-coated Staff, and said that he hoped he was man enough to
+acknowledge a mistake, and six opinions against one left him nothing
+else to do. The Senior Surgical Interne, who had been hating him
+for weeks, offered him a cigar.
+
+He had only one request to make. There was a little girl in the
+training school who believed in him, and he would like to go to the
+ward and write the order for the operation himself.
+
+Which he did. But Jane Brown was not there.
+
+Late that evening the First Assistant, passing along the corridor in
+the dormitory, was accosted by a quiet figure in a blue uniform,
+without a cap.
+
+"How is he?"
+
+The First Assistant was feeling more cheerful than usual. The
+operating surgeon had congratulated her on the way things had moved
+that day, and she was feeling, as she often did, that, after all,
+work was a solace for many troubles.
+
+"Of course, it is very soon, but he stood it well." She looked up at
+Jane Brown, who was taller than she was, but who always, somehow,
+looked rather little. There are girls like that. "Look here," she
+said, "you must not sit in that room and worry. Run up to the
+operating-room and help to clear away."
+
+She was very wise, the First Assistant. For Jane Brown went, and
+washed away some of the ache with the stains of Johnny's operation.
+Here, all about her, were the tangible evidences of her triumph,
+which was also a defeat. A little glow of service revived in her.
+If Johnny lived, it was a small price to pay for a life. If he died,
+she had given him his chance. The operating-room nurses were very
+kind. They liked her courage, but they were frightened, too. She,
+like the others, had been right, but also she was wrong.
+
+They paid her tribute of little kindnesses, but they knew she must
+go.
+
+It was the night nurse who told Twenty-two that Jane Brown was in
+the operating-room. He was still up and dressed at midnight, but the
+sheets of to-morrow's editorial lay blank on his table.
+
+The night nurse glanced at her watch to see if it was time for the
+twelve o'clock medicines.
+
+"There's a rumour going about," she said, "that the quarantine's to
+be lifted to-morrow. I'll be rather sorry. It has been a change."
+
+"To-morrow," said Twenty-two, in a startled voice.
+
+"I suppose you'll be going out at once?"
+
+There was a wistful note in her voice. She liked him. He had been an
+oasis of cheer in the dreary rounds of the night. A very little
+more, and she might have forgotten her rule, which was never to be
+sentimentally interested in a patient.
+
+"I wonder," said Twenty-two, in a curious tone, "if you will give me
+my cane?"
+
+He was clad, at that time, in a hideous bathrobe, purchased by the
+orderly, over his night clothing, and he had the expression of a
+person who intends to take no chances.
+
+"Thanks," said Twenty-two. "And--will you send the night watchman
+here?"
+
+The night nurse went out. She had a distinct feeling that something
+was about to happen. At least she claimed it later. But she found
+the night watchman making coffee in a back pantry, and gave him her
+message.
+
+Some time later Jane Brown stood in the doorway of the
+operating-room and gave it a farewell look. Its white floor and
+walls were spotless. Shining rows of instruments on clean towels
+were ready to put away in the cabinets. The sterilisers glowed in
+warm rectangles of gleaming copper. Over all brooded the peace of
+order, the quiet of the night.
+
+Outside the operating-room door she drew a long breath, and faced
+the night watchman. She had left something in Twenty-two. Would she
+go and get it?
+
+"It's very late," said Jane Brown. "And it isn't allowed, I'm sure."
+
+However, what was one more rule to her who had defied them all? A
+spirit of recklessness seized her. After all, why not? She would
+never see him again. Like the operating-room, she would stand in the
+doorway and say a mute little farewell.
+
+Twenty-two's door was wide open, and he was standing in the centre
+of the room, looking out. He had heard her long before she came in
+sight, for he, too, had learned the hospital habit of classifying
+footsteps.
+
+He was horribly excited. He had never been so nervous before. He had
+made up a small speech, a sort of beginning, but he forgot it the
+moment he heard her, and she surprised him in the midst of trying,
+agonisingly, to remember it.
+
+There was a sort of dreadful calm, however, about Jane Brown.
+
+"The watchman says I have left something here."
+
+It was clear to him at once that he meant nothing to her. It was in
+her voice.
+
+"You did," he said. And tried to smile.
+
+"Then--if I may have it----"
+
+"I wish to heaven you could have it," he said, very rapidly. "I
+don't want it. It's darned miserable."
+
+"It's--what?"
+
+"It's an ache," he went on, still rather incoherent. "A pain. A
+misery." Then, seeing her beginning to put on a professional look:
+"No, not that. It's a feeling. Look here," he said, rather more
+slowly, "do you mind coming in and closing the door? There's a man
+across who's always listening."
+
+She went in, but she did not close the door. She went slowly,
+looking rather pale.
+
+"What I sent for you for is this," said Twenty-two, "are you going
+away? Because I've got to know."
+
+"I'm being sent away as soon as the quarantine is over. It's--it's
+perfectly right. I expected it. Things would soon go to pieces if
+the nurses took to--took to doing what I did."
+
+Suddenly Twenty-two limped across the room and slammed the door
+shut, a proceeding immediately followed by an irritated ringing of
+bells at the night nurse's desk. Then he turned, his back against
+the door.
+
+"Because I'm going when you do," he said, in a terrible voice. "I'm
+going when you go, and wherever you go. I've stood all the waiting
+around for a glimpse of you that I'm going to stand." He glared at
+her. "For weeks," he said, "I've sat here in this room and listened
+for you, and hated to go to sleep for fear you would pass and I
+wouldn't be looking through that damned door. And now I've reached
+the limit."
+
+A sort of band which had seemed to be fastened around Jane Brown's
+head for days suddenly removed itself to her heart, which became
+extremely irregular.
+
+"And I want to say this," went on Twenty-two, still in a savage
+tone. He was horribly frightened, so he blustered. "I don't care
+whether you want me or not, you've got to have me. I'm so much in
+love with you that it hurts."
+
+Suddenly Jane Brown's heart settled down into a soft rhythmic
+beating that was like a song. After all, life was made up of love
+and work, and love came first.
+
+She faced Twenty-two with brave eyes.
+
+"I love you, too--so much that it hurts."
+
+The gentleman across the hall, sitting up in bed, with an angry
+thumb on the bell, was electrified to see, on the glass door across,
+the silhouette of a young lady without a cap go into the arms of a
+very large, masculine silhouette in a dressing-gown. He heard, too,
+the thump of a falling cane.
+
+Late that night Jane Brown, by devious ways, made her way back to H
+ward. Johnny was there, a strange Johnny with a bandaged head, but
+with open eyes.
+
+At dawn, the dawn of the day when Jane Brown was to leave the little
+world of the hospital for a little world of two, consisting of a man
+and a woman, the night nurse found her there, asleep, her fingers
+still on Johnny's thin wrist.
+
+She did not report it.
+
+
+
+
+JANE
+
+
+I
+
+Having retired to a hospital to sulk, Jane remained there. The
+family came and sat by her bed uncomfortably and smoked, and finally
+retreated with defeat written large all over it, leaving Jane to the
+continued possession of Room 33, a pink kimono with slippers to
+match, a hand-embroidered face pillow with a rose-coloured bow on
+the corner, and a young nurse with a gift of giving Jane daily the
+appearance of a strawberry and vanilla ice rising from a meringue of
+bed linen.
+
+Jane's complaint was temper. The family knew this, and so did
+Jane, although she had an annoying way of looking hurt, a gentle
+heart-brokenness of speech that made the family, under the
+pretence of getting a match, go out into the hall and swear softly
+under its breath. But it was temper, and the family was not
+deceived. Also, knowing Jane, the family was quite ready to
+believe that while it was swearing in the hall, Jane was biting
+holes in the hand-embroidered face pillow in Room 33.
+
+It had finally come to be a test of endurance. Jane vowed to stay
+at the hospital until the family on bended knee begged her to emerge
+and to brighten the world again with her presence. The family, being
+her father, said it would be damned if it would, and that if Jane
+cared to live on anæmic chicken broth, oatmeal wafers and massage
+twice a day for the rest of her life, why, let her.
+
+The dispute, having begun about whether Jane should or should not
+marry a certain person, Jane representing the affirmative and her
+father the negative, had taken on new aspects, had grown and
+altered, and had, to be brief, become a contest between the
+masculine Johnson and the feminine Johnson as to which would take
+the count. Not that this appeared on the surface. The masculine
+Johnson, having closed the summer home on Jane's defection and gone
+back to the city, sent daily telegrams, novels and hothouse grapes,
+all three of which Jane devoured indiscriminately. Once, indeed,
+Father Johnson had motored the forty miles from town, to be told
+that Jane was too ill and unhappy to see him, and to have a glimpse,
+as he drove furiously away, of Jane sitting pensive at her window in
+the pink kimono, gazing over his head at the distant hills and
+clearly entirely indifferent to him and his wrath.
+
+So we find Jane, on a frosty morning in late October, in triumphant
+possession of the field--aunts and cousins routed, her father
+sulking in town, and the victor herself--or is victor feminine?--and
+if it isn't, shouldn't it be?--sitting up in bed staring blankly at
+her watch.
+
+Jane had just wakened--an hour later than usual; she had rung the
+bell three times and no one had responded. Jane's famous temper
+began to stretch and yawn. At this hour Jane was accustomed
+to be washed with tepid water, scented daintily with violet,
+alcohol-rubbed, talcum-powdered, and finally fresh-linened, coifed
+and manicured, to be supported with a heap of fresh pillows and fed
+creamed sweet-bread and golden-brown coffee and toast.
+
+Jane rang again, with a line between her eyebrows. The bell was not
+broken. She could hear it distinctly. This was an outrage! She would
+report it to the superintendent. She had been ringing for ten
+minutes. That little minx of a nurse was flirting somewhere with one
+of the internes.
+
+Jane angrily flung the covers back and got out on her small bare
+feet. Then she stretched her slim young arms above her head, her
+spoiled red mouth forming a scarlet O as she yawned. In her
+sleeveless and neckless nightgown, with her hair over her shoulders,
+minus the more elaborate coiffure which later in the day helped
+her to poise and firmness, she looked a pretty young girl,
+almost--although Jane herself never suspected this--almost an
+amiable young person.
+
+Jane saw herself in the glass and assumed immediately the two lines
+between her eyebrows which were the outward and visible token of
+what she had suffered. Then she found her slippers, a pair of
+stockings to match and two round bits of pink silk elastic of
+private and feminine use, and sat down on the floor to put them on.
+
+The floor was cold. To Jane's wrath was added indignation. She
+hitched herself along the boards to the radiator and put her hand on
+it. It was even colder than Jane.
+
+The family temper was fully awake by this time and ready for
+business. Jane, sitting on the icy floor, jerked on her stockings,
+snapped the pink bands into place, thrust her feet into her slippers
+and rose, shivering. She went to the bed, and by dint of careful
+manoeuvring so placed the bell between the head of the bed and the
+wall that during the remainder of her toilet it rang steadily.
+
+The remainder of Jane's toilet was rather casual. She flung on the
+silk kimono, twisted her hair on top of her head and stuck a pin or
+two in it, thus achieving a sort of effect a thousand times more
+bewildering than she had ever managed with a curling iron and
+twenty seven hair pins, and flinging her door wide stalked into the
+hall. At least she meant to stalk, but one does not really stamp
+about much in number-two, heelless, pink-satin mules.
+
+At the first stalk--or stamp--she stopped. Standing uncertainly just
+outside her door was a strange man, strangely attired. Jane clutched
+her kimono about her and stared.
+
+"Did--did you--are you ringing?" asked the apparition. It wore a
+pair of white-duck trousers, much soiled, a coat that bore the words
+"furnace room" down the front in red letters on a white tape, and a
+clean and spotless white apron. There was coal dust on its face and
+streaks of it in its hair, which appeared normally to be red.
+
+"There's something the matter with your bell," said the young man.
+"It keeps on ringing."
+
+"I intend it to," said Jane coldly.
+
+"You can't make a racket like that round here, you know," he
+asserted, looking past her into the room.
+
+"I intend to make all the racket I can until I get some attention."
+
+"What have you done--put a book on it?"
+
+"Look here"--Jane added another line to the two between her
+eyebrows. In the family this was generally a signal for a retreat,
+but of course the young man could not know this, and, besides, he
+was red-headed. "Look here," said Jane, "I don't know who you are
+and I don't care either, but that bell is going to ring until I get
+my bath and some breakfast. And it's going to ring then unless I
+stop it."
+
+The young man in the coal dust and the white apron looked at Jane
+and smiled. Then he walked past her into the room, jerked the bed
+from the wall and released the bell.
+
+"Now!" he said as the din outside ceased. "I'm too busy to talk just
+at present, but if you do that again I'll take the bell out of the
+room altogether. There are other people in the hospital besides
+yourself."
+
+At that he started out and along the hall, leaving Jane speechless.
+After he'd gone about a dozen feet he stopped and turned, looking at
+Jane reflectively.
+
+"Do you know anything about cooking?" he asked.
+
+"I know more about cooking than you do about politeness," she
+retorted, white with fury, and went into her room and slammed the
+door. She went directly to the bell and put it behind the bed and
+set it to ringing again. Then she sat down in a chair and picked up
+a book. Had the red-haired person opened the door she was perfectly
+prepared to fling the book at him. She would have thrown a hatchet
+had she had one.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, he did not come back. The bell rang
+with a soul-satisfying jangle for about two minutes and then died
+away, and no amount of poking with a hairpin did any good. It was
+clear that the bell had been cut off outside!
+
+For fifty-five minutes Jane sat in that chair breakfastless, very
+casually washed and with the aforesaid Billie Burkeness of hair.
+Then, hunger gaining over temper, she opened the door and peered
+out. From somewhere near at hand there came a pungent odor of
+burning toast. Jane sniffed; then, driven by hunger, she made a
+short sally down the hall to the parlour where the nurses on duty
+made their headquarters. It was empty. The dismantled bell register
+was on the wall, with the bell unscrewed and lying on the mantel
+beside it, and the odour of burning toast was stronger than ever.
+
+Jane padded softly to the odour, following her small nose. It led
+her to the pantry, where under ordinary circumstances the patients'
+trays were prepared by a pantrymaid, the food being shipped there
+from the kitchen on a lift. Clearly the circumstances were not
+ordinary. The pantrymaid was not in sight.
+
+Instead, the red-haired person was standing by the window scraping
+busily at a blackened piece of toast. There was a rank odour of
+boiling tea in the air.
+
+"Damnation!" said the red-haired person, and flung the toast into a
+corner where there already lay a small heap of charred breakfast
+hopes. Then he saw Jane.
+
+"I fixed the bell, didn't I?" he remarked. "I say, since you claim
+to know so much about cooking, I wish you'd make some toast."
+
+"I didn't say I knew much," snapped Jane, holding her kimono round
+her. "I said I knew more than you knew about politeness."
+
+The red-haired person smiled again, and then, making a deep bow,
+with a knife in one hand and a toaster in the other, he said:
+"Madam, I prithee forgive me for my untoward conduct of an hour
+since. Say but the word and I replace the bell."
+
+"I won't make any toast," said Jane, looking at the bread with
+famished eyes.
+
+"Oh, very well," said the red-haired person with a sigh. "On your
+head be it!"
+
+"But I'll tell you how to do it," conceded Jane, "if you'll explain
+who you are and what you are doing in that costume and where the
+nurses are."
+
+The red-haired person sat down on the edge of the table and looked
+at her.
+
+"I'll make a bargain with you," he said. "There's a convalescent
+typhoid in a room near yours who swears he'll go down to the village
+for something to eat in his--er--hospital attire unless he's fed
+soon. He's dangerous, empty. He's reached the cannibalistic stage.
+If he should see you in that ravishing pink thing, I--I wouldn't
+answer for the consequences. I'll tell you everything if you'll make
+him six large slices of toast and boil him four or five eggs, enough
+to hold him for a while. The tea's probably ready; it's been boiling
+for an hour."
+
+Hunger was making Jane human. She gathered up the tail of her
+kimono, and stepping daintily into the pantry proceeded to spread
+herself a slice of bread and butter.
+
+"Where is everybody?" she asked, licking some butter off her thumb
+with a small pink tongue.
+
+          _Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold,
+             And the mate of the Nancy brig,
+           And the bosun tight and the midshipmite,
+             And the crew of the captain's gig._
+
+recited the red-haired person.
+
+"You!" said Jane with the bread halfway to her mouth.
+
+"Even I," said the red-haired person. "I'm the superintendent, the
+staff, the training school, the cooks, the furnace man and the
+ambulance driver."
+
+Jane was pouring herself a cup of tea, and she put in milk and sugar
+and took a sip or two before she would give him the satisfaction of
+asking him what he meant. Anyhow, probably she had already guessed.
+Jane was no fool.
+
+"I hope you're getting the salary list," she said, sitting on the
+pantry girl's chair and, what with the tea inside and somebody to
+quarrel with, feeling more like herself. "My father's one of the
+directors, and somebody gets it."
+
+The red-haired person sat on the radiator and eyed Jane. He looked
+slightly stunned, as if the presence of beauty in a Billie Burke
+chignon and little else except a kimono was almost too much for him.
+From somewhere near by came a terrific thumping, as of some one
+pounding a hairbrush on a table. The red-haired person shifted along
+the radiator a little nearer Jane, and continued to gloat.
+
+"Don't let that noise bother you," he said; "that's only the
+convalescent typhoid banging for his breakfast. He's been shouting
+for food ever since I came at six last night."
+
+"Is it safe to feed him so much?"
+
+"I don't know. He hasn't had anything yet. Perhaps if you're ready
+you'd better fix him something."
+
+Jane had finished her bread and tea by this time and remembered her
+kimono.
+
+"I'll go back and dress," she said primly. But he wouldn't hear of
+it.
+
+"He's starving," he objected as a fresh volley of thumps came along
+the hall. "I've been trying at intervals since daylight to make him
+a piece of toast. The minute I put it on the fire I think of
+something I've forgotten, and when I come back it's in flames."
+
+So Jane cut some bread and put on eggs to boil, and the red-haired
+person told his story.
+
+"You see," he explained, "although I appear to be a furnace man from
+the waist up and an interne from the waist down, I am really the new
+superintendent."
+
+"I hope you'll do better than the last one," she said severely. "He
+was always flirting with the nurses."
+
+"I shall never flirt with the nurses," he promised, looking at her.
+"Anyhow I shan't have any immediate chance. The other fellow left
+last night and took with him everything portable except the
+ambulance--nurses, staff, cooks. I wish to Heaven he'd taken the
+patients! And he did more than that. He cut the telephone wires!"
+
+"Well!" said Jane. "Are you going to stand for it?"
+
+The red-haired man threw up his hands. "The village is with him," he
+declared. "It's a factional fight--the village against the
+fashionable summer colony on the hill. I cannot telephone from the
+village--the telegraph operator is deaf when I speak to him; the
+village milkman and grocer sent boys up this morning--look here."
+He fished a scrap of paper from his pocket and read:
+
+      I will not supply the Valley Hospital with any fresh
+      meats, canned oysters and sausages, or do any plumbing
+      for the hospital until the reinstatement of Dr. Sheets.
+                                T. CASHDOLLAR, Butcher.
+
+Jane took the paper and read it again. "Humph!" she commented.
+"Old Sheets wrote it himself. Mr. Cashdollar couldn't think
+'reinstatement,' let alone spell it."
+
+"The question is not who wrote it, but what we are to do," said the
+red-haired person. "Shall I let old Sheets come back?"
+
+"If you do," said Jane fiercely, "I shall hate you the rest of my
+life."
+
+And as it was clear by this time that the red-haired person could
+imagine nothing more horrible, it was settled then and there that he
+should stay.
+
+"There are only two wards," he said. "In the men's a man named
+Higgins is able to be up and is keeping things straight. And in the
+woman's ward Mary O'Shaughnessy is looking after them. The furnaces
+are the worst. I'd have forgiven almost anything else. I've sat up
+all night nursing the fires, but they breathed their last at six
+this morning and I guess there's nothing left but to call the
+coroner."
+
+Jane had achieved a tolerable plate of toast by that time and four
+eggs. Also she had a fine flush, a combination of heat from the gas
+stove and temper.
+
+"They ought to be ashamed," she cried angrily, "leaving a lot of
+sick people!"
+
+"Oh, as to that," said the red-headed person, "there aren't any
+very sick ones. Two or three neurasthenics like yourself and a
+convalescent typhoid and a D.T. in a private room. If it wasn't
+that Mary O'Shaughnessy----"
+
+But at the word "neurasthenics" Jane had put down the toaster, and
+by the time the unconscious young man had reached the O'Shaughnessy
+she was going out the door with her chin up. He called after her,
+and finding she did not turn he followed her, shouting apologies at
+her back until she went into her room. And as hospital doors don't
+lock from the inside she pushed the washstand against the knob and
+went to bed to keep warm.
+
+He stood outside and apologised again, and later he brought a tray
+of bread and butter and a pot of the tea, which had been boiling for
+two hours by that time, and put it outside the door on the floor.
+But Jane refused to get it, and finished her breakfast from a jar of
+candied ginger that some one had sent her, and read "Lorna Doone."
+
+Now and then a sound of terrific hammering would follow the
+steampipes and Jane would smile wickedly. By noon she had finished
+the ginger and was wondering what the person about whom she and the
+family had disagreed would think when he heard the way she was being
+treated. And by one o'clock she had cried her eyes entirely shut and
+had pushed the washstand back from the door.
+
+
+II
+
+Now a hospital full of nurses and doctors with a bell to summon food
+and attention is one thing. A hospital without nurses and doctors,
+and with only one person to do everything, and that person mostly in
+the cellar, is quite another. Jane was very sad and lonely, and to
+add to her troubles the delirium-tremens case down the hall began to
+sing "Oh Promise Me" in a falsetto voice and kept it up for hours.
+
+At three Jane got up and bathed her eyes. She also did her hair,
+and thus fortified she started out to find the red-haired person.
+She intended to say that she was paying sixty-five dollars a week
+and belonged to a leading family, and that she didn't mean to
+endure for a moment the treatment she was getting, and being
+called a neurasthenic and made to cook for the other patients.
+
+She went slowly along the hall. The convalescent typhoid heard her
+and called.
+
+"Hey, doc!" he cried. "Hey, doc! Great Scott, man, when do I get
+some dinner?"
+
+Jane quickened her steps and made for the pantry. From somewhere
+beyond, the delirium-tremens case was singing happily:
+
+          _I--love you o--own--ly,
+           I love--but--you._
+
+Jane shivered a little. The person in whom she had been interested
+and who had caused her precipitate retirement, if not to a nunnery,
+to what answered the same purpose, had been very fond of that song.
+He used to sing it, leaning over the piano and looking into her
+eyes.
+
+Jane's nose led her again to the pantry. There was a sort of soupy
+odour in the air, and sure enough the red-haired person was there,
+very immaculate in fresh ducks, pouring boiling water into three
+tea-cups out of a kettle and then dropping a beef capsule into each
+cup.
+
+Now Jane had intended, as I have said, to say that she was being
+outrageously treated, and belonged to one of the best families, and
+so on. What she really said was piteously:
+
+"How good it smells!"
+
+"Doesn't it!" said the red-haired person, sniffing. "Beef capsules.
+I've made thirty cups of it so far since one o'clock--the more they
+have the more they want. I say, be a good girl and run up to the
+kitchen for some more crackers while I carry food to the
+convalescent typhoid. He's murderous!"
+
+"Where are the crackers?" asked Jane stiffly, but not exactly caring
+to raise an issue until she was sure of getting something to eat.
+
+"Store closet in the kitchen, third drawer on the left," said the
+red-haired man, shaking some cayenne pepper into one of the cups.
+"You might stop that howling lunatic on your way if you will."
+
+"How?" asked Jane, pausing.
+
+"Ram a towel down his throat, or--but don't bother. I'll dose him
+with this beef tea and red pepper, and he'll be too busy putting out
+the fire to want to sing."
+
+"You wouldn't be so cruel!" said Jane, rather drawing back. The
+red-haired person smiled and to Jane it showed that he was actually
+ferocious. She ran all the way up for the crackers and down again,
+carrying the tin box. There is no doubt that Jane's family would
+have promptly swooned had it seen her.
+
+When she came down there was a sort of after-dinner peace reigning.
+The convalescent typhoid, having filled up on milk and beef soup,
+had floated off to sleep. "The Chocolate Soldier" had given way to
+deep-muttered imprecations from the singer's room. Jane made herself
+a cup of bouillon and drank it scalding. She was making the second
+when the red-haired person came back with an empty cup.
+
+"I forgot to explain," he said, "that beef tea and red pepper's the
+treatment for our young friend in there. After a man has been
+burning his stomach daily with a quart or so of raw booze----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Jane coolly. Booze was not considered good
+form on the hill--the word, of course. There was plenty of the
+substance.
+
+"Raw booze," repeated the red-haired person. "Nothing short of red
+pepper or dynamite is going to act as a substitute. Why, I'll bet
+the inside of that chap's stomach is of the general sensitiveness
+and consistency of my shoe."
+
+"Indeed!" said Jane, coldly polite. In Jane's circle people did not
+discuss the interiors of other people's stomachs. The red-haired
+person sat on the table with a cup of bouillon in one hand and a
+cracker in the other.
+
+"You know," he said genially, "it's awfully bully of you to come out
+and keep me company like this. I never put in such a day. I've given
+up fussing with the furnace and got out extra blankets instead. And
+I think by night our troubles will be over." He held up the cup and
+glanced at Jane, who was looking entrancingly pretty. "To our
+troubles being over!" he said, draining the cup, and then found
+that he had used the red pepper again by mistake. It took five
+minutes and four cups of cold water to enable him to explain what he
+meant.
+
+"By our troubles being over," he said finally when he could speak,
+"I mean this: There's a train from town at eight to-night, and if
+all goes well it will deposit in the village half a dozen nurses, a
+cook or two, a furnace man--good Heavens, I wonder if I forgot a
+furnace man!"
+
+It seemed, as Jane discovered, that the telephone wires being cut,
+he had sent Higgins from the men's ward to the village to send some
+telegrams for him.
+
+"I couldn't leave, you see," he explained, "and having some small
+reason to believe that I am _persona non grata_ in this vicinity I
+sent Higgins."
+
+Jane had always hated the name Higgins. She said afterward that she
+felt uneasy from that moment. The red-haired person, who was not
+bad-looking, being tall and straight and having a very decent nose,
+looked at Jane, and Jane, having been shut away for weeks--Jane
+preened a little and was glad she had done her hair.
+
+"You looked better the other way," said the red-haired person,
+reading her mind in a most uncanny manner. "Why should a girl with
+as pretty hair as yours cover it up with a net, anyhow?"
+
+"You are very disagreeable and--and impertinent," said Jane,
+sliding off the table.
+
+"It isn't disagreeable to tell a girl she has pretty hair," the
+red-haired person protested--"or impertinent either."
+
+Jane was gathering up the remnants of her temper, scattered by the
+events of the day.
+
+"You said I was a neurasthenic," she accused him. "It--it isn't
+being a neurasthenic to be nervous and upset and hating the very
+sight of people, is it?"
+
+"Bless my soul!" said the red-haired man. "Then what is it?" Jane
+flushed, but he went on tactlessly: "I give you my word, I think you
+are the most perfectly"--he gave every appearance of being about to
+say "beautiful," but he evidently changed his mind--"the most
+perfectly healthy person I have ever looked at," he finished.
+
+It is difficult to say just what Jane would have done under other
+circumstances, but just as she was getting her temper really in hand
+and preparing to launch something, shuffling footsteps were heard in
+the hall and Higgins stood in the doorway.
+
+He was in a sad state. One of his eyes was entirely closed, and the
+corresponding ear stood out large and bulbous from his head. Also he
+was coated with mud, and he was carefully nursing one hand with the
+other.
+
+He said he had been met at the near end of the railroad bridge by
+the ex-furnace man and one of the ex-orderlies and sent back firmly,
+having in fact been kicked back part of the way. He'd been told to
+report at the hospital that the tradespeople had instituted a
+boycott, and that either the former superintendent went back or the
+entire place could starve to death.
+
+It was then that Jane discovered that her much-vaunted temper was
+not one-two-three to that of the red-haired person. He turned a sort
+of blue-white, shoved Jane out of his way as if she had been a
+chair, and she heard him clatter down the stairs and slam out of the
+front door.
+
+Jane went back to her room and looked down the drive. He was running
+toward the bridge, and the sunlight on his red hair and his flying
+legs made him look like a revengeful meteor. Jane was weak in the
+knees. She knelt on the cold radiator and watched him out of sight,
+and then got trembly all over and fell to snivelling. This was of
+course because, if anything happened to him, she would be left
+entirely alone. And anyhow the D.T. case was singing again and had
+rather got on her nerves.
+
+In ten minutes the red-haired person appeared. He had a
+wretched-looking creature by the back of the neck and he alternately
+pushed and kicked him up the drive. He--the red-haired person--was
+whistling and clearly immensely pleased with himself.
+
+Jane put a little powder on her nose and waited for him to come and
+tell her all about it. But he did not come near. This was quite the
+cleverest thing he could have done, had he known it. Jane was not
+accustomed to waiting in vain. He must have gone directly to the
+cellar, half pushing and half kicking the luckless furnace man, for
+about four o'clock the radiator began to get warm.
+
+At five he came and knocked at Jane's door, and on being invited in
+he sat down on the bed and looked at her.
+
+"Well, we've got the furnace going," he said.
+
+"Then that was the----"
+
+"Furnace man? Yes."
+
+"Aren't you afraid to leave him?" queried Jane. "Won't he run off?"
+
+"Got him locked in a padded cell," he said. "I can take him out to
+coal up. The rest of the time he can sit and think of his sins. The
+question is--what are we to do next?"
+
+"I should think," ventured Jane, "that we'd better be thinking about
+supper."
+
+"The beef capsules are gone."
+
+"But surely there must be something else about--potatoes or things
+like that?"
+
+He brightened perceptibly. "Oh, yes, carloads of potatoes, and
+there's canned stuff. Higgins can pare potatoes, and there's Mary
+O'Shaughnessy. We could have potatoes and canned tomatoes and eggs."
+
+"Fine!" said Jane with her eyes gleaming, although the day before
+she would have said they were her three abominations.
+
+And with that he called Higgins and Mary O'Shaughnessy and the four
+of them went to the kitchen.
+
+Jane positively shone. She had never realised before how much she
+knew about cooking. They built a fire and got kettles boiling and
+everybody pared potatoes, and although in excess of zeal the eggs
+were ready long before everything else and the tomatoes scorched
+slightly, still they made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in
+ability, and when Higgins had carried the trays to the lift and
+started them on their way, Jane and the red-haired person shook
+hands on it and then ate a boiled potato from the same plate,
+sitting side by side on a table.
+
+They were ravenous. They boiled one egg each and ate it, and then
+boiled another and another, and when they finished they found that
+Jane had eaten four potatoes, four eggs and unlimited bread and
+butter, while the red-haired person had eaten six saucers of stewed
+tomatoes and was starting on the seventh.
+
+"You know," he said over the seventh, "we've got to figure this
+thing out. The entire town is solid against us--no use trying to get
+to a telephone. And anyhow they've got us surrounded. We're in a
+state of siege."
+
+Jane was beating up an egg in milk for the D.T. patient, the
+capsules being exhausted, and the red-haired person was watching her
+closely. She had the two vertical lines between her eyes, but they
+looked really like lines of endeavour and not temper.
+
+She stopped beating and looked up.
+
+"Couldn't I go to the village?" she asked.
+
+"They would stop you."
+
+"Then--I think I know what we can do," she said, giving the eggnog a
+final whisk. "My people have a summer place on the hill. If you
+could get there you could telephone to the city."
+
+"Could I get in?"
+
+"I have a key."
+
+Jane did not explain that the said key had been left by her father,
+with the terse hope that if she came to her senses she could get
+into the house and get her clothes.
+
+"Good girl," said the red-headed person and patted her on the
+shoulder. "We'll euchre the old skate yet." Curiously, Jane did not
+resent either the speech or the pat.
+
+He took the glass and tied on a white apron. "If our friend doesn't
+drink this, I will," he continued. "If he'd seen it in the making,
+as I have, he'd be crazy about it."
+
+He opened the door and stood listening. From below floated up the
+refrain:
+
+          _I--love you o--own--ly,
+           I love--but--you._
+
+"Listen to that!" he said. "Stomach's gone, but still has a heart!"
+
+Higgins came up the stairs heavily and stopped close by the
+red-haired person, whispering something to him. There was a second's
+pause. Then the red-haired person gave the eggnog to Higgins and
+both disappeared.
+
+Jane was puzzled. She rather thought the furnace man had got out and
+listened for a scuffle, but none came. She did, however, hear the
+singing cease below, and then commence with renewed vigour, and she
+heard Higgins slowly remounting the stairs. He came in, with the
+empty glass and a sheepish expression. Part of the eggnog was
+distributed over his person.
+
+"He wants his nurse, ma'am," said Higgins. "Wouldn't let me near
+him. Flung a pillow at me."
+
+"Where is the doctor?" demanded Jane.
+
+"Busy," replied Higgins. "One of the women is sick."
+
+Jane was provoked. She had put some labour into the eggnog. But it
+shows the curious evolution going on in her that she got out the
+eggs and milk and made another one without protest. Then with her
+head up she carried it to the door.
+
+"You might clear things away, Higgins," she said, and went down the
+stairs. Her heart was going rather fast. Most of the men Jane knew
+drank more or less, but this was different. She would have turned
+back halfway there had it not been for Higgins and for owning
+herself conquered. That was Jane's real weakness--she never owned
+herself beaten.
+
+The singing had subsided to a low muttering. Jane stopped outside
+the door and took a fresh grip on her courage. Then she pushed the
+door open and went in.
+
+The light was shaded, and at first the tossing figure on the bed was
+only a misty outline of greys and whites. She walked over, expecting
+a pillow at any moment and shielding the glass from attack with her
+hand.
+
+"I have brought you another eggnog," she began severely, "and if you
+spill it----"
+
+Then she looked down and saw the face on the pillow.
+
+To her everlasting credit, Jane did not faint. But in that moment,
+while she stood staring down at the flushed young face with its
+tumbled dark hair and deep-cut lines of dissipation, the man who had
+sung to her over the piano, looking love into her eyes, died to her,
+and Jane, cold and steady, sat down on the side of the bed and fed
+the eggnog, spoonful by spoonful, to his corpse!
+
+When the blank-eyed young man on the bed had swallowed it all
+passively, looking at her with dull, incurious eyes, she went back
+to her room and closing the door put the washstand against it. She
+did nothing theatrical. She went over to the window and stood
+looking out where the trees along the drive were fading in the dusk
+from green to grey, from grey to black. And over the transom came
+again and again monotonously the refrain:
+
+          _I--love you o--own--ly,
+           I love--but--you._
+
+Jane fell on her knees beside the bed and buried her wilful head in
+the hand-embroidered pillow, and said a little prayer because she
+had found out in time.
+
+
+III
+
+The full realisation of their predicament came with the dusk. The
+electric lights were shut off! Jane, crawling into bed tearfully at
+half after eight, turned the reading light switch over her head, but
+no flood of rosy radiance poured down on the hand-embroidered pillow
+with the pink bow.
+
+Jane sat up and stared round her. Already the outline of her dresser
+was faint and shadowy. In half an hour black night would settle down
+and she had not even a candle or a box of matches. She crawled out,
+panicky, and began in the darkness to don her kimono and slippers.
+As she opened the door and stepped into the hall the convalescent
+typhoid heard her and set up his usual cry.
+
+"Hey," he called, "whoever that is come in and fix the lights.
+They're broken. And I want some bread and milk. I can't sleep on an
+empty stomach!"
+
+Jane padded on past the room where love lay cold and dead, down the
+corridor with its alarming echoes. The house seemed very quiet. At a
+corner unexpectedly she collided with some one going hastily. The
+result was a crash and a deluge of hot water. Jane got a drop on her
+bare ankle, and as soon as she could breathe she screamed.
+
+"Why don't you look where you're going?" demanded the red-haired
+person angrily. "I've been an hour boiling that water, and now it
+has to be done over again!"
+
+"It would do a lot of good to look!" retorted Jane. "But if you
+wish I'll carry a bell!"
+
+"The thing for you to do," said the red-haired person severely, "is
+to go back to bed like a good girl and stay there until morning. The
+light is cut off."
+
+"Really!" said Jane. "I thought it had just gone out for a walk. I
+daresay I may have a box of matches at least?"
+
+He fumbled in his pockets without success.
+
+"Not a match, of course!" he said disgustedly. "Was any one ever in
+such an infernal mess? Can't you get back to your room without
+matches?"
+
+"I shan't go back at all unless I have some sort of light,"
+maintained Jane. "I'm--horribly frightened!"
+
+The break in her voice caught his attention and he put his hand out
+gently and took her arm.
+
+"Now listen," he said. "You've been brave and fine all day, and
+don't stop it now. I--I've got all I can manage. Mary O'Shaughnessy
+is----" He stopped. "I'm going to be very busy," he said with half a
+groan. "I surely do wish you were forty for the next few hours. But
+you'll go back and stay in your room, won't you?"
+
+He patted her arm, which Jane particularly hated generally. But Jane
+had altered considerably since morning.
+
+"Then you cannot go to the telephone?"
+
+"Not to-night."
+
+"And Higgins?"
+
+"Higgins has gone," he said. "He slipped off an hour ago. We'll have
+to manage to-night somehow. Now will you be a good child?"
+
+"I'll go back," she promised meekly. "I'm sorry I'm not forty."
+
+He turned her round and started her in the right direction with a
+little push. But she had gone only a step or two when she heard him
+coming after her quickly.
+
+"Where are you?"
+
+"Here," quavered Jane, not quite sure of him or of herself perhaps.
+
+But when he stopped beside her he didn't try to touch her arm again.
+He only said:
+
+"I wouldn't have you forty for anything in the world. I want you to
+be just as you are, very beautiful and young."
+
+Then, as if he was afraid he would say too much, he turned on his
+heel, and a moment after he kicked against the fallen pitcher in the
+darkness and awoke a thousand echoes. As for Jane, she put her
+fingers to her ears and ran to her room, where she slammed the door
+and crawled into bed with burning cheeks.
+
+Jane was never sure whether it was five minutes later or five
+seconds when somebody in the room spoke--from a chair by the window.
+
+"Do you think," said a mild voice--"do you think you could find me
+some bread and butter? Or a glass of milk?"
+
+Jane sat up in bed suddenly. She knew at once that she had made a
+mistake, but she was quite dignified about it. She looked over at
+the chair, and the convalescent typhoid was sitting in it, wrapped
+in a blanket and looking wan and ghostly in the dusk.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm in the wrong room," Jane said very stiffly, trying
+to get out of the bed with dignity, which is difficult. "The hall is
+dark and all the doors look so alike----"
+
+She made for the door at that and got out into the hall with her
+heart going a thousand a minute again.
+
+"You've forgotten your slippers," called the convalescent typhoid
+after her. But nothing would have taken Jane back.
+
+The convalescent typhoid took the slippers home later and locked
+them away in an inner drawer, where he kept one or two things like
+faded roses, and old gloves, and a silk necktie that a girl had made
+him at college--things that are all the secrets a man keeps from his
+wife and that belong in that small corner of his heart which also
+he keeps from his wife. But that has nothing to do with Jane.
+
+Jane went back to her own bed thoroughly demoralised. And sleep
+being pretty well banished by that time, she sat up in bed and
+thought things over. Before this she had not thought much, only
+raged and sulked alternately. But now she thought. She thought about
+the man in the room down the hall with the lines of dissipation on
+his face. And she thought a great deal about what a silly she had
+been, and that it was not too late yet, she being not forty and
+"beautiful." It must be confessed that she thought a great deal
+about that. Also she reflected that what she deserved was to marry
+some person with even a worse temper than hers, who would bully her
+at times and generally keep her straight. And from that, of course,
+it was only a step to the fact that red-haired people are
+proverbially bad-tempered!
+
+She thought, too, about Mary O'Shaughnessy without another woman
+near, and not even a light, except perhaps a candle. Things were
+always so much worse in the darkness. And perhaps she might be going
+to be very ill and ought to have another doctor!
+
+Jane seemed to have been reflecting for a long time, when the church
+clock far down in the village struck nine. And with the chiming of
+the clock was born, full grown, an idea which before it was sixty
+seconds of age was a determination.
+
+In pursuance of the idea Jane once more crawled out of bed and began
+to dress; she put on heavy shoes and a short skirt, a coat, and a
+motor veil over her hair. The indignation at the defection of the
+hospital staff, held in subjection during the day by the necessity
+for doing something, now rose and lent speed and fury to her
+movements. In an incredibly short time Jane was feeling her way
+along the hall and down the staircase, now a well of unfathomable
+blackness and incredible rustlings and creakings.
+
+The front doors were unlocked. Outside there was faint starlight,
+the chirp of a sleepy bird, and far off across the valley the
+gasping and wheezing of a freight climbing the heavy grade to the
+village.
+
+Jane paused at the drive and took a breath. Then at her best
+gymnasium pace, arms close to sides, head up, feet well planted, she
+started to run. At the sundial she left the drive and took to the
+lawn gleaming with the frost of late October. She stopped running
+then and began to pick her way more cautiously. Even at that she
+collided heavily with a wire fence marking the boundary, and sat on
+the ground for some time after, whimpering over the outrage and
+feeling her nose. It was distinctly scratched and swollen. No one
+would think her beautiful with a nose like that!
+
+She had not expected the wire fence. It was impossible to climb and
+more difficult to get under. However, she found one place where the
+ground dipped, and wormed her way under the fence in most
+undignified fashion. It is perfectly certain that had Jane's family
+seen her then and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing
+for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary
+O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it
+had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But
+it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night
+for the first time in her spoiled young life.
+
+Jane never told the details of that excursion. Those that came out
+in the paper were only guess-work, of course, but it is quite true
+that a reporter found scraps of her motor veil on three wire fences,
+and there seems to be no reason to doubt, also, that two false curls
+were discovered a week later in a cow pasture on her own estate. But
+as Jane never wore curls afterward anyhow----
+
+Well, Jane got to her own house about eleven and crept in like a
+thief to the telephone. There were more rustlings and creakings and
+rumblings in the empty house than she had ever imagined, and she
+went backward through the hall for fear of something coming after
+her. But, which is to the point, she got to the telephone and called
+up her father in the city.
+
+The first message that astonished gentleman got was that a
+red-haired person at the hospital was very ill, having run into a
+wire fence and bruised a nose, and that he was to bring out at once
+from town two doctors, six nurses, a cook and a furnace man!
+
+After a time, however, as Jane grew calmer, he got it straightened
+out, and said a number of things over the telephone anent the
+deserting staff that are quite forbidden by the rules both of the
+club and of the telephone company. He gave Jane full instructions
+about sending to the village and having somebody come up and stay
+with her, and about taking a hot footbath and going to bed between
+blankets, and when Jane replied meekly to everything "Yes, father,"
+and "All right, father," he was so stunned by her mildness that he
+was certain she must be really ill.
+
+Not that Jane had any idea of doing all these things. She hung up
+the telephone and gathered all the candles from all the candlesticks
+on the lower floor, and started back for the hospital. The moon had
+come up and she had no more trouble with fencing, but she was
+desperately tired. She climbed the drive slowly, coming to frequent
+pauses. The hospital, long and low and sleeping, lay before her,
+and in one upper window there was a small yellow light.
+
+Jane climbed the steps and sat down on the top one. She felt very
+tired and sad and dejected, and she sat down on the upper step to
+think of how useless she was, and how much a man must know to be a
+doctor, and that perhaps she would take up nursing in earnest and
+amount to something, and----
+
+It was about three o'clock in the morning when the red-haired
+person, coming down belatedly to close the front doors, saw a
+shapeless heap on the porch surrounded by a radius of white-wax
+candles, and going up shoved at it with his foot. Whereat the heap
+moved slightly and muttered "Lemme shleep."
+
+The red-haired person said "Good Heavens!" and bending down held a
+lighted match to the sleeper's face and stared, petrified. Jane
+opened her eyes, sat up and put her hand over her mutilated nose
+with one gesture.
+
+"You!" said the red-haired person. And then mercifully the match
+went out.
+
+"Don't light another," said Jane. "I'm an alarming sight.
+Would--would you mind feeling if my nose is broken?"
+
+He didn't move to examine it. He just kept on kneeling and staring.
+
+"Where have you been?" he demanded.
+
+"Over to telephone," said Jane, and yawned. "They're bringing
+everybody in automobiles--doctors, nurses, furnace man--oh, dear me,
+I hope I mentioned a cook!"
+
+"Do you mean to say," said the red-haired person wonderingly, "that
+you went by yourself across the fields and telephoned to get me out
+of this mess?"
+
+"Not at all," Jane corrected him coolly. "I'm in the mess myself."
+
+"You'll be ill again."
+
+"I never was ill," said Jane. "I was here for a mean disposition."
+
+Jane sat in the moonlight with her hands in her lap and looked at
+him calmly. The red-haired person reached over and took both her
+hands.
+
+"You're a heroine," he said, and bending down he kissed first one
+and then the other. "Isn't it bad enough that you are beautiful
+without your also being brave?"
+
+Jane eyed him, but he was in deadly earnest. In the moonlight his
+hair was really not red at all, and he looked pale and very, very
+tired. Something inside of Jane gave a curious thrill that was half
+pain. Perhaps it was the dying of her temper, perhaps----
+
+"Am I still beautiful with this nose?" she asked.
+
+"You are everything that a woman should be," he said, and dropping
+her hands he got up. He stood there in the moonlight, straight and
+young and crowned with despair, and Jane looked up from under her
+long lashes.
+
+"Then why don't you stay where you were?" she asked.
+
+At that he reached down and took her hands again and pulled her to
+her feet. He was very strong.
+
+"Because if I do I'll never leave you again," he said. "And I must
+go."
+
+He dropped her hands, or tried to, but Jane wasn't ready to be
+dropped.
+
+"You know," she said, "I've told you I'm a sulky, bad-tempered----"
+
+But at that he laughed suddenly, triumphantly, and put both his arms
+round her and held her close.
+
+"I love you," he said, "and if you are bad-tempered, so am I, only I
+think I'm worse. It's a shame to spoil two houses with us, isn't
+it?"
+
+To her eternal shame be it told, Jane never struggled. She simply
+held up her mouth to be kissed.
+
+That is really all the story. Jane's father came with three
+automobiles that morning at dawn, bringing with him all that goes to
+make up a hospital, from a pharmacy clerk to absorbent cotton, and
+having left the new supplies in the office he stamped upstairs to
+Jane's room and flung open the door.
+
+He expected to find Jane in hysterics and the pink silk kimono.
+
+What he really saw was this: A coal fire was lighted in Jane's
+grate, and in a low chair before it, with her nose swollen level
+with her forehead, sat Jane, holding on her lap Mary O'Shaughnessy's
+baby, very new and magenta-coloured and yelling like a trooper.
+Kneeling beside the chair was a tall, red-headed person holding a
+bottle of olive oil.
+
+"Now, sweetest," the red-haired person was saying, "turn him on his
+tummy and we'll rub his back. Gee, isn't that a fat back!"
+
+And as Jane's father stared and Jane anxiously turned the baby, the
+red-haired person leaned over and kissed the back of Jane's neck.
+
+"Jane!" he whispered.
+
+"Jane!!" said her father.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE PAVILION
+
+
+I
+
+Now, had Billy Grant really died there would be no story. The story
+is to relate how he nearly died; and how, approaching that bourne to
+which no traveller may take with him anything but his sins--and this
+with Billy Grant meant considerable luggage--he cast about for some
+way to prevent the Lindley Grants from getting possession of his
+worldly goods.
+
+Probably it would never have happened at all had not young Grant,
+having hit on a scheme, clung to it with a tenacity that might
+better have been devoted to saving his soul, and had he not said to
+the Nurse, who was at that moment shaking a thermometer: "Come
+on--be a sport! It's only a matter of hours." Not that he said it
+aloud--he whispered it, and fought for the breath to do even that.
+The Nurse, having shaken down the thermometer, walked to the table
+and recorded a temperature of one hundred and six degrees through a
+most unprofessional mist of tears. Then in the symptom column she
+wrote: "Delirious."
+
+But Billy Grant was not delirious. A fever of a hundred and four or
+thereabout may fuse one's mind in a sort of fiery crucible, but when
+it gets to a hundred and six all the foreign thoughts, like seeing
+green monkeys on the footboard and wondering why the doctor is
+walking on his hands--all these things melt away, and one sees one's
+past, as when drowning, and remembers to hate one's relations, and
+is curious about what is coming when one goes over.
+
+So Billy Grant lay on his bed in the contagious pavilion of the
+hospital, and remembered to hate the Lindley Grants and to try to
+devise a way to keep them out of his property. And, having studied
+law, he knew no will that he might make now would hold against the
+Lindley Grants for a minute, unless he survived its making some
+thirty days. The Staff Doctor had given him about thirty hours or
+less.
+
+Perhaps he would have given up in despair and been forced to rest
+content with a threat to haunt the Lindley Grants and otherwise mar
+the enjoyment of their good fortune, had not the Nurse at that
+moment put the thermometer under his arm.
+
+Now, as every one knows, an axillary temperature takes five minutes,
+during which it is customary for a nurse to kneel beside the bed, or
+even to sit very lightly on the edge, holding the patient's arm
+close to his side and counting his respirations while pretending to
+be thinking of something else. It was during these five minutes that
+the idea came into Billy Grant's mind and, having come, remained.
+The Nurse got up, rustling starchily, and Billy caught her eye.
+
+"Every engine," he said with difficulty, "labours--in a low--gear.
+No wonder I'm--heated up!"
+
+The Nurse, who was young, put her hand on his forehead.
+
+"Try to sleep," she said.
+
+"Time for--that--later," said Billy Grant. "I'll--I'll be a--long
+time--dead. I--I wonder whether you'd--do me a--favour."
+
+"I'll do anything in the world you want."
+
+She tried to smile down at him, but only succeeded in making her
+chin quiver, which would never do--being unprofessional and likely
+to get to the head nurse; so, being obliged to do something, she
+took his pulse by the throbbing in his neck.
+
+"One, two, three, four, five, six----"
+
+"Then--marry me," gasped Billy Grant. "Only for an--hour or--two,
+you know. You--promised. Come on--be a sport!"
+
+It was then that the Nurse walked to the table and recorded
+"Delirious" in the symptom column. And, though she was a Smith
+College girl and had taken a something or other in mathematics, she
+spelled it just then with two r's.
+
+Billy Grant was not in love with the Nurse. She was a part of his
+illness, like the narrow brass bed and the yellow painted walls,
+and the thermometer under his arm, and the medicines. There were
+even times--when his fever subsided for a degree or two, after a
+cold sponge, and the muddled condition of mind returned--when she
+seemed to have more heads than even a nurse requires. So sentiment
+did not enter into the matter at all; it was revenge.
+
+"You--promised," he said again; but the Nurse only smiled
+indulgently and rearranged the bottles on the stand in neat rows.
+
+Jenks, the orderly, carried her supper to the isolation pavilion at
+six o'clock--cold ham, potato salad, egg custard and tea. Also, he
+brought her an evening paper. But the Nurse was not hungry. She went
+into the bathroom, washed her eyes with cold water, put on a clean
+collar, against the impending visit of the Staff Doctor, and then
+stood at the window, looking across at the hospital and feeling very
+lonely and responsible. It was not a great hospital, but it loomed
+large and terrible that night. The ambulance came out into the
+courtyard, and an interne, in white ducks, came out to it, carrying
+a surgical bag. He looked over at her and waved his hand. "Big
+railroad wreck!" he called cheerfully. "Got 'em coming in bunches."
+He crawled into the ambulance, where the driver, trained to many
+internes, gave him time to light a cigarette; then out into the
+dusk, with the gong beating madly. Billy Grant, who had lapsed into
+a doze, opened his eyes.
+
+"What--about it?" he asked. "You're not--married already--are you?"
+
+"Please try to rest. Perhaps if I get your beef juice----"
+
+"Oh, damn--the beef juice!" whispered Billy Grant, and shut his eyes
+again--but not to sleep. He was planning how to get his way, and
+finally, out of a curious and fantastic medley of thoughts, he
+evolved something. The doctor, of course! These women had to do what
+the doctor ordered. He would see the doctor!--upon which, with a
+precision quite amazing, all the green monkeys on the footboard of
+the bed put their thumbs to their noses at him.
+
+The situation was unusual; for here was young Grant, far enough from
+any one who knew he was one of the Van Kleek Grants--and, as such,
+entitled to all the nurses and doctors that money could
+procure--shut away in the isolation pavilion of a hospital, and not
+even putting up a good fight! Even the Nurse felt this, and when the
+Staff Man came across the courtyard that night she met him on the
+doorstep and told him.
+
+"He doesn't care whether he gets well or not," she said
+dispiritedly. "All he seems to think about is to die and to leave
+everything he owns so his relatives won't get it. It's horrible!"
+
+The Staff Man, who had finished up a hard day with a hospital supper
+of steak and fried potatoes, sat down on the doorstep and fished out
+a digestive tablet from his surgical bag.
+
+"It's pretty sad, little girl," he said, over the pill. He had known
+the Nurse for some time, having, in fact, brought her--according to
+report at the time--in a predecessor of the very bag at his feet,
+and he had the fatherly manner that belongs by right to the man who
+has first thumped one between the shoulder-blades to make one
+breathe, and who had remarked on this occasion to some one beyond
+the door: "A girl, and fat as butter!"
+
+The Nurse tiptoed in and found Billy Grant apparently asleep.
+Actually he had only closed his eyes, hoping to lure one of the
+monkeys within clutching distance. So the Nurse came out again, with
+the symptom record.
+
+"Delirious, with two r's," said the Staff Doctor, glancing over his
+spectacles. "He must have been pretty bad."
+
+"Not wild; he--he wanted me to marry him!"
+
+She smiled, showing a most alluring dimple in one cheek.
+
+"I see! Well, that's not necessarily delirium. H'm--pulse,
+respiration--look at that temperature! Yes, it's pretty sad--away
+from home, too, poor lad!"
+
+"You---- Isn't there any hope, doctor?"
+
+"None at all--at least, I've never had 'em get well."
+
+Now the Nurse should, by all the ethics of hospital practice, have
+walked behind the Staff Doctor, listening reverentially to what he
+said, not speaking until she was spoken to, and carrying in one hand
+an order blank on which said august personage would presently
+inscribe certain cabalistic characters, to be deciphered later by
+the pharmacy clerk with a strong light and much blasphemy, and in
+the other hand a clean towel. The clean towel does not enter into
+the story, but for the curious be it said that were said personage
+to desire to listen to the patient's heart, the towel would be
+unfolded and spread, without creases, over the patient's
+chest--which reminds me of the Irishman and the weary practitioner;
+but every one knows that story.
+
+Now that is what the Nurse should have done; instead of which, in
+the darkened passageway, being very tired and exhausted and under a
+hideous strain, she suddenly slipped her arm through the Staff
+Doctor's and, putting her head on his shoulder, began to cry softly.
+
+"What's this?" demanded the Staff Doctor sternly and, putting his
+arm round her: "Don't you know that Junior Nurses are not supposed
+to weep over the Staff?" And, getting no answer but a choke: "We
+can't have you used up like this; I'll make them relieve you. When
+did you sleep?"
+
+"I don't want to be relieved," said the Nurse, very muffled.
+"No-nobody else would know wh-what he wanted. I just--I just can't
+bear to see him--to see him----"
+
+The Staff Doctor picked up the clean towel, which belonged on the
+Nurse's left arm, and dried her eyes for her; then he sighed.
+
+"None of us likes to see it, girl," he said. "I'm an old man, and
+I've never got used to it. What do they send you to eat?"
+
+"The food's all right," she said rather drearily. "I'm not
+hungry--that's all. How long do you think----"
+
+The Staff Doctor, who was putting an antiseptic gauze cap over his
+white hair, ran a safety pin into his scalp at that moment and did
+not reply at once. Then, "Perhaps--until morning," he said.
+
+He held out his arms for the long, white, sterilised coat, and a
+moment later, with his face clean-washed of emotion, and looking
+like a benevolent Turk, he entered the sick room. The Nurse was just
+behind him, with an order book in one hand and a clean towel over
+her arm.
+
+Billy Grant, from his bed, gave the turban a high sign of greeting.
+
+"Allah--is--great!" he gasped cheerfully. "Well, doctor--I guess
+it's all--over but--the shouting."
+
+
+II
+
+Some time after midnight Billy Grant roused out of a stupor. He was
+quite rational; in fact, he thought he would get out of bed. But his
+feet would not move. This was absurd! One's feet must move if one
+wills them to! However, he could not stir either of them. Otherwise
+he was beautifully comfortable.
+
+Faint as was the stir he made the Nurse heard him. She was sitting
+in the dark by the window.
+
+"Water?" she asked softly, coming to him.
+
+"Please." His voice was stronger than it had been.
+
+Some of the water went down his neck, but it did not matter. Nothing
+mattered except the Lindley Grants. The Nurse took his temperature
+and went out into the hall to read the thermometer, so he might not
+watch her face. Then, having recorded it under the nightlight, she
+came back into the room.
+
+"Why don't you put on something comfortable?" demanded Billy Grant
+querulously. He was so comfortable himself and she was so stiffly
+starched, so relentless of collar and cap.
+
+"I am comfortable."
+
+"Where's that wrapper thing you've been wearing at night?" The Nurse
+rather flushed at this. "Why don't you lie down on the cot and take
+a nap? I don't need anything."
+
+"Not--not to-night."
+
+He understood, of course, but he refused to be depressed. He was too
+comfortable. He was breathing easily, and his voice, though weak,
+was clear.
+
+"Would you mind sitting beside me? Or are you tired? But of course
+you are. Perhaps in a night or so you'll be over there again,
+sleeping in a nice white gown in a nice fresh bed, with no querulous
+devil----"
+
+"Please!"
+
+"You'll have to be sterilised or formaldehyded?"
+
+"Yes." This very low.
+
+"Will you put your hand over mine? Thanks. It's--company, you know."
+He was apologetic; under her hand his own burned fire. "I--I spoke
+to the Staff about that while you were out of the room."
+
+"About what?"
+
+"About your marrying me."
+
+"What did he say?" She humoured him.
+
+"He said he was willing if you were. You're not going to move--are
+you?"
+
+"No. But you must not talk."
+
+"It's like this. I've got a little property--not much; a little." He
+was nervously eager about this. If she knew it amounted to anything
+she would refuse, and the Lindley Grants---- "And when I--you
+know---- I want to leave it where it will do some good. That little
+brother of yours--it would send him through college, or help to."
+
+Once, weeks ago, before he became so ill, she had told him of the
+brother. This in itself was wrong and against the ethics of the
+profession. One does not speak of oneself or one's family.
+
+"If you won't try to sleep, shall I read to you?"
+
+"Read what?"
+
+"I thought--the Bible, if you wouldn't mind."
+
+"Certainly," he agreed. "I suppose that's the conventional thing;
+and if it makes you feel any better---- Will you think over what
+I've been saying?"
+
+"I'll think about it," she said, soothing him like a fretful child,
+and brought her Bible.
+
+The clock on the near-by town hall struck two as she drew up her
+chair beside him and commenced to read by the shaded light. Across
+the courtyard the windows were dim yellowish rectangles, with here
+and there one brighter than the others that told its own story of
+sleepless hours. A taxicab rolled along the street outside, carrying
+a boisterous night party.
+
+The Nurse had taken off her cap and put it on a stand. The autumn
+night was warm, and the light touch of the tulle had pressed her
+hair in damp, fine curves over her forehead. There were purple
+hollows of anxiety and sleeplessness under her eyes.
+
+"The perfect nurse," the head of the training school was fond of
+saying, "is more or less of a machine. Too much sympathy is a
+handicap to her work and an embarrassment to her patient. A perfect,
+silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine!"
+
+Poor Junior Nurse!
+
+Now Billy Grant, lying there listening to something out of Isaiah,
+should have been repenting his hard-living, hard-drinking young
+life; should have been forgiving the Lindley Grants--which story
+does not belong here; should have been asking for the consolation of
+the church, and trying to summon from the depths of his
+consciousness faint memories of early teachings as to the life
+beyond, and what he might or might not expect there.
+
+What he actually did while the Nurse read was to try to move his
+legs, and, failing this, to plan a way to achieve the final revenge
+of a not particularly forgiving life.
+
+At a little before three o'clock the Nurse telephoned across for an
+interne, who came over in a bathrobe over his pajamas and shot a
+hypodermic into Billy Grant's left arm. Billy Grant hardly noticed.
+He was seeing Mrs. Lindley Grant when his surprise was sprung on
+her. The interne summoned the Nurse into the hall with a jerk of his
+head.
+
+"About all in!" he said. "Heart's gone--too much booze probably. I'd
+stay, but there's nothing to do."
+
+"Would oxygen----"
+
+"Oh, you can try it if you like. It's like blowing up a leaking
+tire; but if you'll feel better, do it." He yawned and tied the cord
+of his bathrobe round him more securely. "I guess you'll be glad to
+get back," he observed, looking round the dingy hall. "This place
+always gives me a chill. Well, let me know if you want me. Good
+night."
+
+The Nurse stood in the hallway until the echo of his slippers on the
+asphalt had died away. Then she turned to Billy Grant.
+
+"Well?" demanded Billy Grant. "How long have I? Until morning?"
+
+"If you would only not talk and excite yourself----"
+
+"Hell!" said Billy Grant, we regret to record. "I've got to do all
+the talking I'm going to do right now. I beg your pardon--I didn't
+intend to swear."
+
+"Oh, that's all right!" said the Nurse vaguely. This was like no
+deathbed she had ever seen, and it was disconcerting.
+
+"Shall I read again?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+The Nurse looked at her watch, which had been graduation present
+from her mother and which said, inside the case: "To my little
+girl!" There is no question but that, when the Nurse's mother gave
+that inscription to the jeweller, she was thinking of the day when
+the Staff Doctor had brought the Nurse in his leather bag, and had
+slapped her between the shoulders to make her breathe. "To my little
+girl!" said the watch; and across from that--"Three o'clock."
+
+At half-past three Billy Grant, having matured his plans, remarked
+that if it would ease the Nurse any he'd see a preacher. His voice
+was weaker again and broken.
+
+"Not"--he said, struggling--"not that I think--he'll pass me.
+But--if you say so--I'll--take a chance."
+
+All of which was diabolical cunning; for when, as the result of a
+telephone conversation, the minister came, an unworldly man who
+counted the world, an automobile, a vested choir and a silver
+communion service well lost for the sake of a dozen derelicts in a
+slum mission house, Billy Grant sent the Nurse out to prepare a
+broth he could no longer swallow, and proceeded to cajole the man of
+God. This he did by urging the need of the Nurse's small brother for
+an education and by forgetting to mention either the Lindley Grants
+or the extent of his property.
+
+From four o'clock until five Billy Grant coaxed the Nurse with what
+voice he had. The idea had become an obsession; and minute by
+minute, panting breath by panting breath, her resolution wore away.
+He was not delirious; he was as sane as she was and terribly set.
+And this thing he wanted was so easy to grant; meant so little to
+her and, for some strange reason, so much to him. Perhaps, if she
+did it, he would think a little of what the preacher was saying.
+
+At five o'clock, utterly worn out with the struggle and finding his
+pulse a negligible quantity, in response to his pleading eyes the
+Nurse, kneeling and holding a thermometer under her patient's arm
+with one hand, reached the other one over the bed and was married in
+a dozen words and a soiled white apron.
+
+Dawn was creeping in at the windows--a grey city dawn, filled with
+soot and the rumbling of early wagons. A smell of damp asphalt from
+the courtyard floated in and a dirty sparrow chirped on the sill
+where the Nurse had been in the habit of leaving crumbs. Billy
+Grant, very sleepy and contented now that he had got his way,
+dictated a line or two on a blank symptom record, and signed his
+will in a sprawling hand.
+
+"If only," he muttered, "I could see Lin's face when that's--sprung
+on him!"
+
+The minister picked up the Bible from the tumbled bed and opened it.
+
+"Perhaps," he suggested very softly, "if I read from the Word of
+God----"
+
+Satisfied now that he had fooled the Lindley Grants out of their
+very shoebuttons, Billy Grant was asleep--asleep with the
+thermometer under his arm and with his chest rising and falling
+peacefully.
+
+The minister looked across at the Nurse, who was still holding the
+thermometer in place. She had buried her face in the white
+counterpane.
+
+"You are a good woman, sister," he said softly. "The boy is happier,
+and you are none the worse. Shall I keep the paper for you?"
+
+But the Nurse, worn out with the long night, slept where she knelt.
+The minister, who had come across the street in a ragged
+smoking-coat and no collar, creaked round the bed and threw the edge
+of the blanket over her shoulders.
+
+Then, turning his coat collar up over his unshaved neck, he departed
+for the mission across the street, where one of his derelicts, in
+his shirtsleeves, was sweeping the pavement. There, mindful of the
+fact that he had come from the contagious pavilion, the minister
+brushed his shabby smoking-coat with a whiskbroom to remove the
+germs!
+
+
+III
+
+Billy Grant, of course, did not die. This was perhaps because only
+the good die young. And Billy Grant's creed had been the honour of a
+gentleman rather than the Mosaic Law. There was, therefore, no
+particular violence done to his code when his last thoughts--or what
+appeared to be his last thoughts--were revenge instead of salvation.
+
+The fact was, Billy Grant had a real reason for hating the Lindley
+Grants. When a fellow like that has all the Van Kleek money and a
+hereditary thirst, he is bound to drink. The Lindley Grants did not
+understand this and made themselves obnoxious by calling him "Poor
+Billy!" and not having wine when he came to dinner. That, however,
+was not his reason for hating them.
+
+Billy Grant fell in love. To give the devil his due, he promptly set
+about reforming himself. He took about half as many whisky-and-sodas
+as he had been in the habit of doing, and cut out champagne
+altogether. He took up golf to fill in the time, too, but gave it up
+when he found it made him thirstier than ever. And then, with
+things so shaping up that he could rise in the morning without
+having a drink to get up on, the Lindley Grants thought it best to
+warn the girl's family before it was too late.
+
+"He is a nice boy in some ways," Mrs. Lindley Grant had said on the
+occasion of the warning; "but, like all drinking men, he is a broken
+reed, eccentric and irresponsible. No daughter of mine could marry
+him. I'd rather bury her. And if you want facts Lindley will give
+them to you."
+
+So the girl had sent back her ring and a cold little letter, and
+Billy Grant had got roaring full at a club that night and presented
+the ring to a cabman--all of which is exceedingly sordid, but rather
+human after all.
+
+The Nurse, having had no sleep for forty-eight hours, slept for
+quite thirty minutes. She wakened at the end of that time and
+started up with a horrible fear that the thing she was waiting for
+had come. But Billy Grant was still alive, sleeping naturally, and
+the thermometer, having been in place forty minutes, registered a
+hundred and three.
+
+At eight o'clock the interne, hurrying over in fresh ducks, with a
+laudable desire to make the rounds before the Staff began to drop
+in, found Billy Grant very still and with his eyes closed, and the
+Nurse standing beside the bed, pale and tremulous.
+
+"Why didn't you let me know?" he demanded, aggrieved. "I ought to
+have been called. I told you----"
+
+"He isn't dead," said the Nurse breathlessly. "He--I think he is
+better."
+
+Whereon she stumbled out of the room into her own little room across
+the hall, locking the door behind her, and leaving the interne to
+hunt the symptom record for himself--a thing not to be lightly
+overlooked; though of course internes are not the Staff.
+
+The interne looked over the record and whistled.
+
+"Wouldn't that paralyse you!" he said under his breath. "'Pulse very
+weak.' 'Pulse almost obliterated.' 'Very talkative.' 'Breathing hard
+at four A.M. Cannot swallow.' And then: 'Sleeping calmly from five
+o'clock.' 'Pulse stronger.' Temperature one hundred and three.' By
+gad, that last prescription of mine was a hit!"
+
+So now began a curious drama of convalescence in the little
+isolation pavilion across the courtyard. Not for a minute did the
+two people most concerned forget their strange relationship; not for
+worlds would either have allowed the other to know that he or she
+remembered. Now and then the Nurse caught Billy Grant's eyes fixed
+on her as she moved about the room, with a curious wistful
+expression in them. And sometimes, waking from a doze, he would find
+her in her chair by the window, with her book dropped into her lap
+and a frightened look in her eyes, staring at him.
+
+He gained strength rapidly and the day came when, with the orderly's
+assistance, he was lifted to a chair. There was one brief moment in
+which he stood tottering on his feet. In that instant he had
+realised what a little thing she was, after all, and what a cruel
+advantage he had used for his own purpose.
+
+When he was settled in the chair and the orderly had gone she
+brought an extra pillow to put behind him, and he dared the first
+personality of their new relationship.
+
+"What a little girl you are, after all!" he said. "Lying there in
+the bed shaking at your frown, you were so formidable."
+
+"I am not small," she said, straightening herself. She had always
+hoped that her cap gave her height. "It is you who are so tall.
+You--you are a giant!"
+
+"A wicked giant, seeking whom I may devour and carrying off lovely
+girls for dinner under pretence of marriage----" He stopped his
+nonsense abruptly, having got so far, and both of them coloured.
+Thrashing about desperately for something to break the wretched
+silence, he seized on the one thing that in those days of his
+convalescence was always pertinent--food. "Speaking of dinner," he
+said hastily, "isn't it time for some buttermilk?"
+
+She was quite calm when she came back--cool, even smiling; but
+Billy Grant had not had the safety valve of action. As she placed
+the glass on the table at his elbow he reached out and took her
+hand.
+
+"Can you ever forgive me?" he asked. Not an original speech; the
+usual question of the marauding male, a query after the fact and too
+late for anything but forgiveness.
+
+"Forgive you? For not dying?"
+
+She was pale; but no more subterfuge now, no more turning aside from
+dangerous subjects. The matter was up before the house.
+
+"For marrying you!" said Billy Grant, and upset the buttermilk. It
+took a little time to wipe up the floor and to put a clean cover on
+the stand, and after that to bring a fresh glass and place it on the
+table. But these were merely parliamentary preliminaries while each
+side got its forces in line.
+
+"Do you hate me very much?" opened Billy Grant. This was, to change
+the figure, a blow below the belt.
+
+"Why should I hate you?" countered the other side.
+
+"I should think you would. I forced the thing on you."
+
+"I need not have done it."
+
+"But being you, and always thinking about making some one else happy
+and comfortable----"
+
+"Oh, if only they don't find it out over there!" she burst out. "If
+they do and I have to leave, with Jim----"
+
+Here, realising that she was going to cry and not caring to screw up
+her face before any one, she put her arms on the stand and buried
+her face in them. Her stiff tulle cap almost touched Billy Grant's
+arm.
+
+Billy Grant had a shocked second.
+
+"Jim?"
+
+"My little brother," from the table.
+
+Billy Grant drew a long breath of relief. For a moment he had
+thought----
+
+"I wonder--whether I dare to say something to you." Silence from the
+table and presumably consent. "Isn't he--don't you think that--I
+might be allowed to--to help Jim? It would help me to like myself
+again. Just now I'm not standing very high with myself."
+
+"Won't you tell me why you did it?" she said, suddenly sitting up,
+her arms still out before her on the table. "Why did you coax so?
+You said it was because of a little property you had, but--that
+wasn't it--was it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Or because you cared a snap for me." This was affirmation, not
+question.
+
+"No, not that, though I----"
+
+She gave a hopeless little gesture of despair.
+
+"Then--why? Why?"
+
+"For one of the meanest reasons I know--to be even with some people
+who had treated me badly."
+
+The thing was easier now. His flat denial of any sentimental reason
+had helped to make it so.
+
+"A girl that you cared about?"
+
+"Partly that. The girl was a poor thing. She didn't care enough to
+be hurt by anything I did. But the people who made the trouble----"
+
+Now a curious thing happened. Billy Grant found at this moment that
+he no longer hated the Lindley Grants. The discovery left him
+speechless--that he who had taken his hate into the very valley of
+death with him should now find himself thinking of both Lindley and
+his wife with nothing more bitter than contempt shocked him. A state
+of affairs existed for which his hatred of the Lindley Grants was
+alone responsible; now the hate was gone and the state of affairs
+persisted.
+
+"I should like," said Billy Grant presently, "to tell you a
+little--if it will not bore you--about myself and the things I have
+done that I shouldn't, and about the girl. And of course, you know,
+I'm--I'm not going to hold you to--to the thing I forced you into.
+There are ways to fix that."
+
+Before she would listen, however, she must take his temperature and
+give him his medicine, and see that he drank his buttermilk--the
+buttermilk last, so as not to chill his mouth for the thermometer.
+The tired lines had gone from under her eyes and she was very lovely
+that day. She had always been lovely, even when the Staff Doctor
+had slapped her between the shoulders long ago--you know about
+that--only Billy Grant had never noticed it; but to-day, sitting
+there with the thermometer in his mouth while she counted his
+respirations, pretending to be looking out the window while she did
+it, Billy Grant saw how sweet and lovely and in every way adorable
+she was, in spite of the sad droop of her lips--and found it hard to
+say the thing he felt he must.
+
+"After all," he remarked round the thermometer, "the thing is not
+irrevocable. I can fix it up so that----"
+
+"Keep your lips closed about the thermometer!" she said sternly, and
+snapped her watch shut.
+
+The pulse and so on having been recorded, and "Very hungry" put down
+under Symptoms, she came back to her chair by the window, facing
+him. She sat down primly and smoothed her white apron in her lap.
+
+"Now!" she said.
+
+"I am to go on?"
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+"If you are going to change the pillows or the screen, or give me
+any other diabolical truck to swallow," he said somewhat peevishly,
+"will you get it over now, so we can have five unprofessional
+minutes?"
+
+"Certainly," she said; and bringing an extra blanket she spread it,
+to his disgust, over his knees.
+
+This time, when she sat down, one of her hands lay on the table near
+him and he reached over and covered it with his.
+
+"Please!" he begged. "For company! And it will help me to tell you
+some of the things I have to tell."
+
+She left it there, after an uneasy stirring. So, sitting there,
+looking out into the dusty courtyard with its bandaged figures in
+wheeled chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench--their crutches
+beside them--its waterless fountain and its dingy birds, he told her
+about the girl and the Lindley Grants, and even about the cabman and
+the ring. And feeling, perhaps in some current from the small hand
+under his, that she was knowing and understanding and not turning
+away, he told her a great deal he had not meant to tell--ugly
+things, many of them--for that was his creed.
+
+And, because in a hospital one lives many lives vicariously with
+many people, what the girl back home would never have understood
+this girl did and faced unabashed. Life, as she knew it, was not all
+good and not all bad; passion and tenderness, violence and peace,
+joy and wretchedness, birth and death--these she had looked on, all
+of them, with clear eyes and hands ready to help.
+
+So Billy Grant laid the good and the bad of his life before her,
+knowing that he was burying it with her. When he finished, her hand
+on the table had turned and was clasping his. He bent over and
+kissed her fingers softly.
+
+After that she read to him, and their talk, if any, was impersonal.
+When the orderly had put him back to bed he lay watching her moving
+about, rejoicing in her quiet strength, her repose. How well she was
+taking it all! If only--but there was no hope of that. She could go
+to Reno, and in a few months she would be free again and the thing
+would be as if it had never been.
+
+At nine o'clock that night the isolation pavilion was ready for the
+night. The lights in the sickroom were out. In the hall a nightlight
+burned low, Billy Grant was not asleep. He tried counting the
+lighted windows of the hospital and grew only more wakeful.
+
+The Nurse was sleeping now in her own room across, with the doors
+open between. The slightest movement and she was up, tiptoeing in,
+with her hair in a long braid down her back and her wrapper sleeves
+falling away loosely from her white, young arms. So, aching with
+inaction, Billy Grant lay still until the silence across indicated
+that she was sleeping.
+
+Then he got up. This is a matter of difficulty when one is still
+very weak, and is achieved by rising first into a sitting posture by
+pulling oneself up by the bars of the bed, and then by slipping
+first one leg, then the other, over the side. Properly done, even
+the weakest thus find themselves in a position that by the aid of a
+chairback may become, however shaky, a standing one.
+
+He got to his feet better than he expected, but not well enough to
+relinquish the chair. He had made no sound. That was good. He would
+tell her in the morning and rally her on her powers as a sleeper. He
+took a step--if only his knees----
+
+He had advanced into line with the doorway and stood looking through
+the open door of the room across.
+
+The Nurse was on her knees beside the bed, in her nightgown, crying.
+Her whole young body was shaken with silent sobs; her arms, in their
+short white sleeves, stretched across the bed, her fingers clutching
+the counterpane.
+
+Billy Grant stumbled back to his bed and fell in with a sort of
+groan. Almost instantly she was at the door, her flannel wrapper
+held about her, peering into the darkness.
+
+"I thought I heard--are you worse?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"I'm all right," he said, hating himself; "just not sleepy. How
+about you?"
+
+"Not asleep yet, but--resting," she replied.
+
+She stood in the doorway, dimly outlined, with her long braid over
+her shoulder and her voice still a little strained from crying. In
+the darkness Billy Grant half stretched out his arms, then dropped
+them, ashamed.
+
+"Would you like another blanket?"
+
+"If there is one near."
+
+She came in a moment later with the blanket and spread it over the
+bed. He lay very still while she patted and smoothed it into place.
+He was mustering up his courage to ask for something--a curious
+state of mind for Billy Grant, who had always taken what he wanted
+without asking.
+
+"I wish you would kiss me--just once!" he said wistfully. And then,
+seeing her draw back, he took an unfair advantage: "I think that's
+the reason I'm not sleeping."
+
+"Don't be absurd!"
+
+"Is it so absurd--under the circumstances?"
+
+"You can sleep quite well if you only try."
+
+She went out into the hall again, her chin well up. Then she
+hesitated, turned and came swiftly back into the room.
+
+"If I do," she said rather breathlessly, "will you go to sleep? And
+will you promise to hold your arms up over your head?"
+
+"But my arms----"
+
+"Over your head!"
+
+He obeyed at that, and the next moment she had bent over him in the
+darkness; and quickly, lightly, deliciously, she kissed--the tip of
+his nose!
+
+
+IV
+
+She was quite cheerful the next day and entirely composed. Neither
+of them referred to the episode of the night before, but Billy Grant
+thought of little else. Early in the morning he asked her to bring
+him a hand mirror and, surveying his face, tortured and disfigured
+by the orderly's shaving, suffered an acute wound in his vanity. He
+was glad it had been dark or she probably would not have---- He
+borrowed a razor from the interne and proceeded to enjoy himself.
+
+Propped up in his chair, he rioted in lather, sliced a piece out of
+his right ear, and shaved the back of his neck by touch, in lieu of
+better treatment. This done, and the ragged and unkempt hair over
+his ears having been trimmed in scallops, due to the work being done
+with curved surgical scissors, he was his own man again.
+
+That afternoon, however, he was nervous and restless. The Nurse was
+troubled. He avoided the subject that had so obsessed him the day
+before, was absent and irritable, could not eat, and sat in his
+chair by the window, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands.
+
+The Nurse was puzzled, but the Staff Doctor, making rounds that day,
+enlightened her.
+
+"He has pulled through--God and you alone know how," he said. "But
+as soon as he begins to get his strength he's going to yell for
+liquor again. When a man has been soaking up alcohol for years----
+Drat this hospital cooking anyhow! Have you got any essence of
+pepsin?"
+
+The Nurse brought the pepsin and a medicine glass and the Staff
+Doctor swallowed and grimaced.
+
+"You were saying," said the Nurse timidly--for, the stress being
+over, he was Staff again and she was a Junior and not even entitled
+to a Senior's privileges, such as returning occasional badinage.
+
+"Every atom of him is going to crave it. He's wanting it now. He has
+been used to it for years." The Nurse was white to the lips, but
+steady. "He is not to have it?"
+
+"Not a drop while he is here. When he gets out it is his own affair
+again, but while he's here--by-the-way, you'll have to watch the
+orderly. He'll bribe him."
+
+"I don't think so, doctor. He is a gentleman."
+
+"Pooh! Of course he is. I dare say he's a gentleman when he's drunk
+too; but he's a drinker--a habitual drinker."
+
+The Nurse went back into the room and found Billy Grant sitting in a
+chair, with the book he had been reading on the floor and his face
+buried in his hands.
+
+"I'm awfuly sorry!" he said, not looking up. "I heard what he said.
+He's right, you know."
+
+"I'm sorry. And I'm afraid this is a place where I cannot help."
+
+She put her hand on his head, and he brought it down and held it
+between his.
+
+"Two or three times," he said, "when things were very bad with me,
+you let me hold your hand, and we got past somehow--didn't we?"
+
+She closed her eyes, remembering the dawn when, to soothe a dying
+man, in the presence of the mission preacher, she had put her hand
+in his. Billy Grant thought of it too.
+
+"Now you know what you've married," he said bitterly. The bitterness
+was at himself of course. "If--if you'll sit tight I have a fighting
+chance to make a man of myself; and after it's over we'll fix this
+thing for you so you will forget it ever happened. And I---- Don't
+take your hand away. Please!"
+
+"I was feeling for my handkerchief," she explained.
+
+"Have I made you cry again?"
+
+"Again?'
+
+"I saw you last night in your room. I didn't intend to; but I was
+trying to stand, and----"
+
+She was very dignified at this, with her eyes still wet, and tried
+unsuccessfully to take her hand away.
+
+"If you are going to get up when it is forbidden I shall ask to be
+relieved."
+
+"You wouldn't do that!"
+
+"Let go of my hand."
+
+"You wouldn't do that!!"
+
+"Please! The head nurse is coming."
+
+He freed her hand then and she wiped her eyes, remembering the
+"perfect, silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine."
+
+The head of the training school came to the door of the pavilion,
+but did not enter. The reason for this was twofold: first, she had
+confidence in the Nurse; second, she was afraid of contagion--this
+latter, of course, quite _sub rosa_, in view of the above quotation.
+
+The Head Nurse was a tall woman in white, and was so starchy that
+she rattled like a newspaper when she walked.
+
+"Good morning," she said briskly. "Have you sent over the soiled
+clothes?" Head nurses are always bothering about soiled clothes;
+and what becomes of all the nailbrushes, and how can they use so
+many bandages.
+
+"Yes, Miss Smith."
+
+"Meals come over promptly?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Smith."
+
+"Getting any sleep?"
+
+"Oh, yes, plenty--now."
+
+Miss Smith peered into the hallway, which seemed tidy, looked at the
+Nurse with approval, and then from the doorstep into the patient's
+room, where Billy Grant sat. At the sight of him her eyebrows rose.
+
+"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "I thought he was older than that!"
+
+"Twenty-nine," said the Nurse; "twenty-nine last Fourth of July."
+
+"H'm!" commented the Head Nurse. "You evidently know! I had no idea
+you were taking care of a boy. It won't do. I'll send over Miss
+Hart."
+
+The Nurse tried to visualise Billy Grant in his times of stress
+clutching at Miss Hart's hand, and failed.
+
+"Jenks is here, of course," she said, Jenks being the orderly.
+
+The idea of Jenks as a chaperon, however, did not appeal to the head
+nurse. She took another glance through the window at Billy Grant,
+looking uncommonly handsome and quite ten years younger since the
+shave, and she set her lips.
+
+"I am astonished beyond measure," she said. "Miss Hart will relieve
+you at two o'clock. Take your antiseptic bath and you may have the
+afternoon to yourself. Report in L Ward in the morning."
+
+Miss Smith rattled back across the courtyard and the Nurse stood
+watching her; then turned slowly and went into the house to tell
+Billy Grant.
+
+Now the stories about what followed differ. They agree on one point:
+that Billy Grant had a heart-to-heart talk with the substitute at
+two o'clock that afternoon and told her politely but firmly that he
+would none of her. Here the divergence begins. Some say he got the
+superintendent over the house telephone and said he had intended to
+make a large gift to the hospital, but if his comfort was so little
+considered as to change nurses just when he had got used to one, he
+would have to alter his plans. Another and more likely story,
+because it sounds more like Billy Grant, is that at five o'clock a
+florist's boy delivered to Miss Smith a box of orchids such as never
+had been seen before in the house, and a card inside which said:
+"Please, dear Miss Smith, take back the Hart that thou gavest."
+
+Whatever really happened--and only Billy Grant and the lady in
+question ever really knew--that night at eight o'clock, with Billy
+Grant sitting glumly in his room and Miss Hart studying typhoid
+fever in the hall, the Nurse came back again to the pavilion with
+her soft hair flying from its afternoon washing and her eyes
+shining. And things went on as before--not quite as before; for with
+the nurse question settled the craving got in its work again, and
+the next week was a bad one. There were good days, when he taught
+her double-dummy auction bridge, followed by terrible nights, when
+he walked the floor for hours and she sat by, unable to help. Then
+at dawn he would send her to bed remorsefully and take up the fight
+alone. And there were quiet nights when both slept and when he would
+waken to the craving again and fight all day.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm about killing her," he said to the Staff Doctor one
+day; "but it's my chance to make a man of myself--now or never."
+
+The Staff Doctor was no fool and he had heard about the orchids.
+
+"Fight it out, boy!" he said. "Pretty soon you'll quit peeling and
+cease being a menace to the public health, and you'd better get it
+over before you are free again."
+
+So, after a time, it grew a little easier. Grant was pretty much
+himself again--had put on a little flesh and could feel his biceps
+rise under his fingers. He took to cold plunges when he felt the
+craving coming on, and there were days when the little pavilion was
+full of the sound of running water. He shaved himself daily, too,
+and sent out for some collars.
+
+Between the two of them, since her return, there had been much of
+good fellowship, nothing of sentiment. He wanted her near, but he
+did not put a hand on her. In the strain of those few days the
+strange, grey dawn seemed to have faded into its own mists. Only
+once, when she had brought his breakfast tray and was arranging the
+dishes for him--against his protest, for he disliked being waited
+on--he reached over and touched a plain band ring she wore. She
+coloured.
+
+"My mother's," she said; "her wedding ring."
+
+Their eyes met across the tray, but he only said, after a moment:
+"Eggs like a rock, of course! Couldn't we get 'em raw and boil them
+over here?"
+
+It was that morning, also, that he suggested a thing which had been
+in his mind for some time.
+
+"Wouldn't it be possible," he asked, "to bring your tray in here and
+to eat together? It would be more sociable."
+
+She smiled.
+
+"It isn't permitted."
+
+"Do you think--would another box of orchids----"
+
+She shook her head as she poured out his coffee. "I should probably
+be expelled."
+
+He was greatly aggrieved.
+
+"That's all foolishness," he said. "How is that any worse--any more
+unconventional--than your bringing me your extra blanket on a cold
+night? Oh, I heard you last night!"
+
+"Then why didn't you leave it on?"
+
+"And let you freeze?"
+
+"I was quite warm. As it was, it lay in the hallway all night and
+did no one any good."
+
+Having got thus far from wedding rings, he did not try to get back.
+He ate alone, and after breakfast, while she took her half-hour of
+exercise outside the window, he sat inside reading--only apparently
+reading, however.
+
+Once she went quite as far as the gate and stood looking out.
+
+"Jenks!" called Billy Grant.
+
+Jenks has not entered into the story much. He was a little man,
+rather fat, who occupied a tiny room in the pavilion, carried meals
+and soiled clothes, had sat on Billy Grant's chest once or twice
+during a delirium, and kept a bottle locked in the dish closet.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Jenks, coming behind a strong odour of _spiritus
+frumenti_.
+
+"Jenks," said Billy Grant with an eye on the figure at the gate, "is
+that bottle of yours empty?"
+
+"What bottle?"
+
+"The one in the closet."
+
+Jenks eyed Billy Grant, and Billy eyed Jenks--a look of man to man,
+brother to brother.
+
+"Not quite, sir--a nip or two."
+
+"At," suggested Billy Grant, "say--five dollars a nip?"
+
+Jenks smiled.
+
+"About that," he said. "Filled?"
+
+Billy Grant debated. The Nurse was turning at the gate.
+
+"No," he said. "As it is, Jenks. Bring it here."
+
+Jenks brought the bottle and a glass, but the glass was motioned
+away. Billy Grant took the bottle in his hand and looked at it with
+a curious expression. Then he went over and put it in the upper
+bureau drawer, under a pile of handkerchiefs. Jenks watched him,
+bewildered.
+
+"Just a little experiment, Jenks," said Billy Grant.
+
+Jenks understood then and stopped smiling.
+
+"I wouldn't, Mr. Grant," he said; "it will only make you lose
+confidence in yourself when it doesn't work out."
+
+"But it's going to work out," said Billy Grant. "Would you mind
+turning on the cold water?"
+
+Now the next twenty-four hours puzzled the Nurse. When Billy Grant's
+eyes were not on her with an unfathomable expression in them, they
+were fixed on something in the neighbourhood of the dresser, and at
+these times they had a curious, fixed look not unmixed with triumph.
+She tried a new arrangement of combs and brushes and tilted the
+mirror at a different angle, without effect.
+
+That day Billy Grant took only one cold plunge. As the hours wore on
+he grew more cheerful; the look of triumph was unmistakable. He
+stared less at the dresser and more at the Nurse. At last it grew
+unendurable. She stopped in front of him and looked down at him
+severely. She could only be severe when he was sitting--when he was
+standing she had to look so far up at him, even when she stood on
+her tiptoes.
+
+"What is wrong with me?" she demanded. "You look so queer! Is my cap
+crooked?"
+
+"It is a wonderful cap."
+
+"Is my face dirty?"
+
+"It is a won---- No, certainly not."
+
+"Then would you mind not staring so? You--upset me."
+
+"I shall have to shut my eyes," he replied meekly, and worried her
+into a state of frenzy by sitting for fifty minutes with his head
+back and his eyes shut.
+
+So--the evening and the morning were another day, and the bottle lay
+undisturbed under the handkerchiefs, and the cold shower ceased
+running, and Billy Grant assumed the air of triumph permanently.
+That morning when the breakfast trays came he walked over into the
+Nurse's room and picked hers up, table and all, carrying it across
+the hall. In his own room he arranged the two trays side by side,
+and two chairs opposite each other. When the Nurse, who had been
+putting breadcrumbs on the window-sill, turned round Billy Grant was
+waiting to draw out one of the chairs, and there was something in
+his face she had not seen there before.
+
+"Shall we breakfast?" he said.
+
+"I told you yesterday----"
+
+"Think a minute," he said softly. "Is there any reason why we should
+not breakfast together?" She pressed her hands close together, but
+she did not speak. "Unless--you do not wish to."
+
+"You remember you promised, as soon as you got away, to--fix
+that----"
+
+"So I will if you say the word."
+
+"And--to forget all about it."
+
+"That," said Billy Grant solemnly, "I shall never do so long as I
+live. Do you say the word?"
+
+"What else can I do?"
+
+"Then there is somebody else?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+He took a step toward her, but still he did not touch her.
+
+"If there is no one else," he said, "and if I tell you that you have
+made me a man again----"
+
+"Gracious! Your eggs will be cold." She made a motion toward the
+egg-cup, but Billy Grant caught her hand.
+
+"Damn the eggs!" he said. "Why don't you look at me?"
+
+Something sweet and luminous and most unprofessional shone in the
+little Nurse's eyes, and the line of her pulse on a chart would have
+looked like a seismic disturbance.
+
+"I--I have to look up so far!" she said, but really she was looking
+down when she said it.
+
+"Oh, my dear--my dear!" exulted Billy Grant. "It is I who must look
+up at you!" And with that he dropped on his knees and kissed the
+starched hem of her apron.
+
+The Nurse felt very absurd and a little frightened.
+
+"If only," she said, backing off--"if only you wouldn't be such a
+silly! Jenks is coming!"
+
+But Jenks was not coming. Billy Grant rose to his full height and
+looked down at her--a new Billy Grant, the one who had got drunk at
+a club and given a ring to a cabman having died that grey morning
+some weeks before.
+
+"I love you--love you--love you!" he said, and took her in his arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now the Head Nurse was interviewing an applicant; and, as the H.N.
+took a constitutional each morning in the courtyard and believed in
+losing no time, she was holding the interview as she walked.
+
+"I think I would make a good nurse," said the applicant, a trifle
+breathless, the h.n. being a brisk walker. "I am so sympathetic."
+
+The H.N. stopped and raised a reproving forefinger.
+
+"Too much sympathy is a handicap," she orated. "The perfect nurse is
+a silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine--this little
+building here is the isolation pavilion."
+
+"An emotionless machine," repeated the applicant. "I see--an e----"
+
+The words died on her lips. She was looking past a crowd of birds on
+the windowsill to where, just inside, Billy Grant and the Nurse in a
+very mussed cap were breakfasting together. And as she looked Billy
+Grant bent over across the tray.
+
+"I adore you!" he said distinctly and, lifting the Nurse's hands,
+kissed first one and then the other.
+
+"It is hard work," said Miss Smith--having made a note that the boys
+in the children's ward must be restrained from lowering a pasteboard
+box on a string from a window--"hard work without sentiment. It is
+not a romantic occupation."
+
+She waved an admonitory hand toward the window, and the box went up
+swiftly. The applicant looked again toward the pavilion, where
+Billy Grant, having kissed the Nurse's hands, had buried his face in
+her two palms.
+
+The mild October sun shone down on the courtyard, with its bandaged
+figures in wheel-chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench, their
+crutches beside them, its waterless fountain and dingy birds.
+
+The applicant thrilled to it all--joy and suffering, birth and
+death, misery and hope, life and love. Love!
+
+The H.N. turned to her grimly, but her eyes were soft.
+
+"All this," she said, waving her hand vaguely, "for eight dollars a
+month!"
+
+"I think," said the applicant shyly, "I should like to come."
+
+
+
+
+GOD'S FOOL
+
+
+I
+
+The great God endows His children variously. To some He gives
+intellect--and they move the earth. To some He allots heart--and the
+beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a
+soul, without intelligence--and these, who never grow up, but remain
+always His children, are God's fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as
+if from His palette the Artist of all had taken one colour instead
+of many.
+
+The Dummy was God's fool. Having only a soul and no intelligence, he
+lived the life of the soul. Through his faded, childish old blue
+eyes he looked out on a world that hurried past him with, at
+best, a friendly touch on his shoulder. No man shook his hand in
+comradeship. No woman save the little old mother had ever caressed
+him. He lived alone in a world of his own fashioning, peopled by
+moving, noiseless figures and filled with dreams--noiseless because
+the Dummy had ears that heard not and lips that smiled at a
+kindness, but that did not speak.
+
+In this world of his there was no uncharitableness--no sin. There
+was a God--why should he not know his Father?--there were brasses to
+clean and three meals a day; and there was chapel on Sunday, where
+one held a book--the Dummy held his upside down--and felt the
+vibration of the organ, and proudly watched the afternoon sunlight
+smiling on the polished metal of the chandelier and choir rail.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Probationer sat turning the bandage machine and watching the
+Dummy, who was polishing the brass plates on the beds. The plates
+said: "Endowed in perpetuity"--by various leading citizens, to whom
+God had given His best gifts, both heart and brain.
+
+"How old do you suppose he is?" she asked, dropping her voice.
+
+The Senior Nurse was writing fresh labels for the medicine closet,
+and for "tincture of myrrh" she wrote absently "tincture of mirth,"
+and had to tear it up.
+
+"He can't hear you," she said rather shortly. "How old? Oh, I don't
+know. About a hundred, I should think."
+
+This was, of course, because of his soul, which was all he had, and
+which, having existed from the beginning, was incredibly old. The
+little dead mother could have told them that he was less than
+thirty.
+
+The Probationer sat winding bandages. Now and then they went
+crooked and had to be done again. She was very tired. The creaking
+of the bandage machine made her nervous--that and a sort of
+disillusionment; for was this her great mission, this sitting in a
+silent, sunny ward, where the double row of beds held only querulous
+convalescent women? How close was she to life who had come to soothe
+the suffering and close the eyes of the dying; who had imagined that
+her instruments of healing were a thermometer and a prayer-book; and
+who found herself fighting the good fight with a bandage machine
+and, even worse, a scrubbing brush and a finetooth comb?
+
+The Senior Nurse, having finished the M's, glanced up and surprised
+a tear on the Probationer's round young cheek. She was wise, having
+trained many probationers.
+
+"Go to first supper, please," she said. First supper is the Senior's
+prerogative; but it is given occasionally to juniors and
+probationers as a mark of approval, or when the Senior is not
+hungry, or when a probationer reaches the breaking point, which is
+just before she gets her uniform.
+
+The Probationer smiled and brightened. After all, she must be doing
+fairly well; and if she were not in the battle she was of it.
+Glimpses she had of the battle--stretchers going up and down in the
+slow elevator; sheeted figures on their way to the operating room;
+the clang of the ambulance bell in the courtyard; the occasional cry
+of a new life ushered in; the impressive silence of an old life
+going out. She surveyed the bandages on the bed.
+
+"I'll put away the bandages first," she said. "That's what you said,
+I think--never to leave the emergency bed with anything on it?"
+
+"Right-oh!" said the Senior.
+
+"Though nothing ever happens back here--does it?'
+
+"It's about our turn; I'm looking for a burned case." The
+Probationer, putting the bandages into a basket, turned and stared.
+
+"We have had two in to-day in the house," the Senior went on,
+starting on the N's and making the capital carefully. "There will be
+a third, of course; and we may get it. Cases always seem to run in
+threes. While you're straightening the bed I suppose I might as well
+go to supper after all."
+
+So it was the Probationer and the Dummy who received the new case,
+while the Senior ate cold salmon and fried potatoes with other
+seniors, and inveighed against lectures on Saturday evening and
+other things that seniors object to, such as things lost in the
+wash, and milk in the coffee instead of cream, and women from the
+Avenue who drank carbolic acid and kept the ambulance busy.
+
+The Probationer was from the country and she had never heard of
+the Avenue. And the Dummy, who walked there daily with the
+superintendent's dog, knew nothing of its wickedness. In his soul,
+where there was nothing but kindness, there was even a feeling of
+tenderness for the Avenue. Once the dog had been bitten by a terrier
+from one of the houses, and a girl had carried him in and washed the
+wounds and bound them up. Thereafter the Dummy had watched for her
+and bowed when he saw her. When he did not see her he bowed to the
+house.
+
+The Dummy finished the brass plates and, gathering up his rags and
+polish, shuffled to the door. His walk was a patient shamble, but he
+covered incredible distances. When he reached the emergency bed he
+stopped and pointed to it. The Probationer looked startled.
+
+"He's tellin' you to get it ready," shrilled Irish Delia, sitting up
+in the next bed. "He did that before you was brought in," she called
+to Old Maggie across the ward. "Goodness knows how he finds out--but
+he knows. Get the spread off the bed, miss. There's something
+coming."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Probationer had come from the country and naturally knew nothing
+of the Avenue. Sometimes on her off duty she took short walks there,
+wondering if the passers-by who stared at her knew that she was a
+part of the great building that loomed over the district, happily
+ignorant of the real significance of their glances. Once a girl,
+sitting behind bowed shutters, had leaned out and smiled at her.
+
+"Hot to-day, isn't it?" she said.
+
+The Probationer stopped politely.
+
+"It's fearful! Is there any place near where I can get some soda
+water?"
+
+The girl in the window stared.
+
+"There's a drug store two squares down," she said. "And say, if I
+were you----"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Oh, nothing!" said the girl in the window, and quite unexpectedly
+slammed the shutters.
+
+The Probationer had puzzled over it quite a lot. More than once she
+walked by the house, but she did not see the smiling girl--only,
+curiously enough, one day she saw the Dummy passing the house and
+watched him bow and take off his old cap, though there was no one in
+sight.
+
+Sooner or later the Avenue girls get to the hospital. Sometimes it
+is because they cannot sleep, and lie and think things over--and
+there is no way out; and God hates them--though, of course, there is
+that story about Jesus and the Avenue woman. And what is the use of
+going home and being asked questions that cannot be answered? So
+they try to put an end to things generally--and end up in the
+emergency bed, terribly frightened, because it has occurred to them
+that if they do not dare to meet the home folks how are they going
+to meet the Almighty?
+
+Or sometimes it is jealousy. Even an Avenue woman must love some
+one; and, because she's an elemental creature, if the object of her
+affections turns elsewhere she's rather apt to use a knife or a
+razor. In that case it is the rival who ends up on the emergency
+bed.
+
+Or the life gets her, as it does sooner or later, and she comes in
+with typhoid or a cough, or other things, and lies alone, day after
+day, without visitors or inquiries, making no effort to get better,
+because--well, why should she?
+
+And so the Dummy's Avenue Girl met her turn and rode down the street
+in a clanging ambulance, and was taken up in the elevator and along
+a grey hall to where the emergency bed was waiting; and the
+Probationer, very cold as to hands and feet, was sending mental
+appeals to the Senior to come--and come quickly. The ward got up on
+elbows and watched. Also it told the Probationer what to do.
+
+"Hot-water bottles and screens," it said variously. "Take her
+temperature. Don't be frightened! There'll be a doctor in a minute."
+
+The girl lay on the bed with her eyes shut. It was Irish Delia who
+saw the Dummy and raised a cry.
+
+"Look at the Dummy!" she said. "He's crying."
+
+The Dummy's world had always been a small one. There was the
+superintendent, who gave him his old clothes; and there was the
+engineer, who brought him tobacco; and there were the ambulance
+horses, who talked to him now and then without speech. And, of
+course, there was his Father.
+
+Fringing this small inner circle of his heart was a kaleidoscope of
+changing faces, nurses, _internes_, patients, visitors--a wall of
+life that kept inviolate his inner shrine. And in the holiest place,
+where had dwelt only his Father, and not even the superintendent,
+the Dummy had recently placed the Avenue Girl. She was his saint,
+though he knew nothing of saints. Who can know why he chose her? A
+queer trick of the soul perhaps--or was it super-wisdom?--to choose
+her from among many saintly women and so enshrine her.
+
+Or perhaps---- Down in the chapel, in a great glass window, the
+young John knelt among lilies and prayed. When, at service on
+Sundays, the sunlight came through on to the Dummy's polished choir
+rail and candles, the young John had the face of a girl, with short
+curling hair, very yellow for the colour scheme. The Avenue Girl had
+hair like that and was rather like him in other ways.
+
+And here she was where all the others had come, and where countless
+others would come sooner or later. She was not unconscious and at
+Delia's cry she opened her eyes. The Probationer was off filling
+water bottles, and only the Dummy, stricken, round-shouldered,
+unlovely, stood beside her.
+
+"Rotten luck, old top!" she said faintly.
+
+To the Dummy it was a benediction. She could open her eyes. The
+miracle of speech was still hers.
+
+"Cigarette!" explained the Avenue Girl, seeing his eyes still on
+her. "Must have gone to sleep with it and dropped it. I'm--all in!"
+
+"Don't you talk like that," said Irish Delia, bending over from the
+next bed. "You'll get well a' right--unless you inhaled. Y'ought to
+'a' kept your mouth shut."
+
+Across the ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue
+calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old
+Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where
+squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and scorned it.
+
+"Humph!" she said, without troubling to lower her voice. "I've seen
+her often. I done her washing once. She's as bad as they make 'em."
+
+"You shut your mouth!" Irish Delia rose to the defence. "She's in
+trouble now and what she was don't matter. You go back to bed or
+I'll tell the Head Nurse on you. Look out! The Dummy----"
+
+The Dummy was advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the
+woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands
+and jerked her away from the bed. Old Maggie reeled--almost fell.
+
+"You all seen that!" she appealed to the ward. "I haven't even spoke
+to him and he attacked me! I'll go to the superintendent about it.
+I'll----"
+
+The Probationer hurried in. Her young cheeks were flushed with
+excitement and anxiety; her arms were full of jugs, towels,
+bandages--anything she could imagine as essential. She found the
+Dummy on his knees polishing a bed plate, and the ward in
+order--only Old Maggie was grumbling and making her way back to bed;
+and Irish Delia was sitting up, with her eyes shining--for had not
+the Dummy, who could not hear, known what Old Maggie had said about
+the new girl? Had she not said that he knew many things that were
+hidden, though God knows how he knew them?
+
+The next hour saw the Avenue Girl through a great deal. Her burns
+were dressed by an _interne_ and she was moved back to a bed at the
+end of the ward. The Probationer sat beside her, having refused
+supper. The Dummy was gone--the Senior Nurse had shooed him off as
+one shoos a chicken.
+
+"Get out of here! You're always under my feet," she had said--not
+unkindly--and pointed to the door.
+
+The Dummy had stood, with his faded old-young eyes on her, and had
+not moved. The Senior, who had the ward supper to serve and beds to
+brush out and backs to rub, not to mention having to make up the
+emergency bed and clear away the dressings--the Senior tried
+diplomacy and offered him an orange from her own corner of the
+medicine closet. He shook his head.
+
+"I guess he wants to know whether that girl from the Avenue's going
+to get well," said Irish Delia. "He seems to know her."
+
+There was a titter through the ward at this. Old Maggie's gossiping
+tongue had been busy during the hour. From pity the ward had veered
+to contempt.
+
+"Humph!" said the Senior, and put the orange back. "Why, yes; I
+guess she'll get well. But how in Heaven's name am I to let him
+know?"
+
+She was a resourceful person, however, and by pointing to the Avenue
+Girl and then nodding reassuringly she got her message of cheer over
+the gulf of his understanding. In return the Dummy told her by
+gestures how he knew the girl and how she had bound up the leg of
+the superintendent's dog. The Senior was a literal person and not
+occult; and she was very busy. When the Dummy stooped to indicate
+the dog, a foot or so from the ground, she seized that as the key of
+the situation.
+
+"He's trying to let me know that he knew her when she was a baby,"
+she observed generally. "All right, if that's the case. Come in and
+see her when you want to. And now get out, for goodness' sake!"
+
+The Dummy, with his patient shamble, made his way out of the ward
+and stored his polishes for the night in the corner of a
+scrub-closet. Then, ignoring supper, he went down the stairs, flight
+after flight, to the chapel. The late autumn sun had set behind the
+buildings across the courtyard and the lower part of the silent room
+was in shadow; but the afterglow came palely through the
+stained-glass window, with the young John and tall stalks of white
+lilies, and "To the Memory of My Daughter Elizabeth" beneath.
+
+It was only a coincidence--and not even that to the Dummy--but
+Elizabeth had been the Avenue Girl's name not so long ago.
+
+The Dummy sat down near the door very humbly and gazed at the
+memorial window.
+
+
+II
+
+Time may be measured in different ways--by joys; by throbs of pain;
+by instants; by centuries. In a hospital it is marked by night
+nurses and day nurses; by rounds of the Staff; by visiting days; by
+medicines and temperatures and milk diets and fever baths; by the
+distant singing in the chapel on Sundays; by the shift of the
+morning sun on the east beds to the evening sun on the beds along
+the west windows.
+
+The Avenue Girl lay alone most of the time. The friendly offices of
+the ward were not for her. Private curiosity and possible kindliness
+were over-shadowed by a general arrogance of goodness. The ward
+flung its virtue at her like a weapon and she raised no defence. In
+the first days things were not so bad. She lay in shock for a time,
+and there were not wanting hands during the bad hours to lift a cup
+of water to her lips; but after that came the tedious time when
+death no longer hovered overhead and life was there for the asking.
+
+The curious thing was that the Avenue Girl did not ask. She lay for
+hours without moving, with eyes that seemed tired with looking into
+the dregs of life. The Probationer was in despair.
+
+"She could get better if she would," she said to the _interne_ one
+day. The Senior was off duty and they had done the dressing
+together. "She just won't try."
+
+"Perhaps she thinks it isn't worth while," replied the _interne_,
+who was drying his hands carefully while the Probationer waited for
+the towel.
+
+She was a very pretty Probationer.
+
+"She hasn't much to look forward to, you know."
+
+The Probationer was not accustomed to discussing certain things with
+young men, but she had the Avenue Girl on her mind.
+
+"She has a home--she admits it." She coloured bravely. "Why--why
+cannot she go back to it, even now?"
+
+The _interne_ poured a little rosewater and glycerine into the palm
+of one hand and gave the Probationer the bottle. If his fingers
+touched hers, she never knew it.
+
+"Perhaps they'd not want her after--well, they'd never feel the
+same, likely. They'd probably prefer to think of her as dead and let
+it go at that. There--there doesn't seem to be any way back, you
+know."
+
+He was exceedingly self-conscious.
+
+"Then life is very cruel," said the Probationer with rather shaky
+lips.
+
+And going back to the Avenue Girl's bed she filled her cup with ice
+and straightened her pillows. It was her only way of showing
+defiance to a world that mutilated its children and turned them out
+to die. The _interne_ watched her as she worked. It rather galled
+him to see her touching this patient. He had no particular sympathy
+for the Avenue Girl. He was a man, and ruthless, as men are apt to
+be in such things.
+
+The Avenue Girl had no visitors. She had had one or two at
+first--pretty girls with tired eyes and apologetic glances; a
+negress who got by the hall porter with a box of cigarettes, which
+the Senior promptly confiscated; and--the Dummy. Morning and evening
+came the Dummy and stood by her bed and worshipped. Morning and
+evening he brought tribute--a flower from the masses that came in
+daily; an orange, got by no one knows what trickery from the
+kitchen; a leadpencil; a box of cheap candies. At first the girl had
+been embarrassed by his visits. Later, as the unfriendliness of the
+ward grew more pronounced, she greeted him with a faint smile. The
+first time she smiled he grew quite pale and shuffled out. Late that
+night they found him sitting in the chapel looking at the window,
+which was only a blur.
+
+For certain small services in the ward the Senior depended on the
+convalescents--filling drinking cups; passing milk at eleven and
+three; keeping the white bedspreads in geometrical order. But the
+Avenue Girl was taboo. The boycott had been instituted by Old
+Maggie. The rampant respectability of the ward even went so far as
+to refuse to wash her in those early morning hours when the night
+nurse, flying about with her cap on one ear, was carrying tin basins
+about like a blue-and-white cyclone. The Dummy knew nothing of the
+washing; the early morning was the time when he polished the brass
+doorplate which said: Hospital and Free Dispensary. But he knew
+about the drinking cup and after a time that became his
+self-appointed task.
+
+On Sundays he put on his one white shirt and a frayed collar two
+sizes too large and went to chapel. At those times he sat with his
+prayer book upside down and watched the Probationer who cared for
+his lady and who had no cap to hide her shining hair, and the
+_interne_, who was glad there was no cap because of the hair. God's
+fool he was, indeed, for he liked to look in the _interne's_ eyes,
+and did not know an _interne_ cannot marry for years and years, and
+that a probationer must not upset discipline by being engaged. God's
+fool, indeed, who could see into the hearts of men, but not into
+their thoughts or their lives; and who, seeing only thus, on two
+dimensions of life and not the third, found the Avenue Girl holy and
+worthy of all worship!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Probationer worried a great deal.
+
+"It must hurt her so!" she said to the Senior. "Did you see them
+call that baby away on visiting day for fear she would touch it?"
+
+"None are so good as the untempted," explained the Senior, who had
+been beautiful and was now placid and full of good works. "You
+cannot remake the world, child. Bodies are our business here--not
+souls." But the next moment she called Old Maggie to her.
+
+"I've been pretty patient, Maggie," she said. "You know what I mean.
+You're the ringleader. Now things are going to change, or--you'll go
+back on codliver oil to-night."
+
+"Yes'm," said Old Maggie meekly, with hate in her heart. She loathed
+the codliver oil.
+
+"Go back and straighten her bed!" commanded the Senior sternly.
+
+"Now?"
+
+"Now!"
+
+"It hurts my back to stoop over," whined Old Maggie, with the ward
+watching. "The doctor said that I----"
+
+The Senior made a move for the medicine closet and the bottles
+labelled C.
+
+"I'm going," whimpered Old Maggie. "Can't you give a body time?"
+
+And she went down to defeat, with the laughter of the ward in her
+ears--down to defeat, for the Avenue Girl would have none of her.
+
+"You get out of here!" she said fiercely as Old Maggie set to work
+at the draw sheet. "Get out quick--or I'll throw this cup in your
+face!"
+
+The Senior was watching. Old Maggie put on an air of benevolence and
+called the Avenue Girl an unlovely name under her breath while she
+smoothed her pillow. She did not get the cup, but the water out of
+it, in her hard old face, and matters were as they had been.
+
+The Girl did not improve as she should. The _interne_ did the
+dressing day after day, while the Probationer helped him--the Senior
+disliked burned cases--and talked of skin grafting if a new powder
+he had discovered did no good. _Internes_ are always trying out new
+things, looking for the great discovery.
+
+The powder did no good. The day came when, the dressing over and the
+white coverings drawn up smoothly again over her slender body, the
+Avenue Girl voiced the question that her eyes had asked each time.
+
+"Am I going to lie in this hole all my life?" she demanded.
+
+The _interne_ considered.
+
+"It isn't healing--not very fast anyhow," he said. "If we could get
+a little skin to graft on you'd be all right in a jiffy. Can't you
+get some friends to come in? It isn't painful and it's over in a
+minute."
+
+"Friends? Where would I get friends of that sort?"
+
+"Well, relatives then--some of your own people?"
+
+The Avenue Girl shut her eyes as she did when the dressing hurt her.
+
+"None that I'd care to see," she said. And the Probationer knew she
+lied. The _interne_ shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"If you think of any let me know. We'll get them here," he said
+briskly, and turned to see the Probationer rolling up her sleeve.
+
+"Please!" she said, and held out a bare white arm. The _interne_
+stared at it stupefied. It was very lovely.
+
+"I am not at all afraid," urged the Probationer, "and my blood is
+good. It would grow--I know it would."
+
+The _interne_ had hard work not to stoop and kiss the blue veins
+that rose to the surface in the inner curve of her elbow. The
+dressing screens were up and the three were quite alone. To keep his
+voice steady he became stern.
+
+"Put your sleeve down and don't be a foolish girl!" he, commanded.
+"Put your sleeve down!" His eyes said: "You wonder! You beauty! You
+brave little girl!"
+
+Because the Probationer seemed to take her responsibilities rather
+to heart, however, and because, when he should have been thinking of
+other things, such as calling up the staff and making reports, he
+kept seeing that white arm and the resolute face above it, the
+_interne_ worked out a plan.
+
+"I've fixed it, I think," he said, meeting her in a hallway where
+he had no business to be, and trying to look as if he had not known
+she was coming. "Father Feeny was in this morning and I tackled him.
+He's got a lot of students--fellows studying for the priesthood--and
+he says any daughter of the church shall have skin if he has to flay
+'em alive."
+
+"But--is she a daughter of the church?" asked the Probationer. "And
+even if she were, under the circumstances----"
+
+"What circumstances?" demanded the _interne_. "Here's a poor girl
+burned and suffering. The father is not going to ask whether she's
+of the anointed."
+
+The Probationer was not sure. She liked doing things in the open and
+with nothing to happen later to make one uncomfortable; but she
+spoke to the Senior and the Senior was willing. Her chief trouble,
+after all, was with the Avenue Girl herself.
+
+"I don't want to get well," she said wearily when the thing was put
+up to her. "What's the use? I'd just go back to the same old thing;
+and when it got too strong for me I'd end up here again or in the
+morgue."
+
+"Tell me where your people live, then, and let me send for them."
+
+"Why? To have them read in my face what I've been, and go back home
+to die of shame?"
+
+The Probationer looked at the Avenue Girl's face.
+
+"There--there is nothing in your face to hurt them," she said,
+flushing--because there were some things the Probationer had never
+discussed, even with herself. "You--look sad. Honestly, that's all."
+
+The Avenue Girl held up her thin right hand. The forefinger was
+still yellow from cigarettes.
+
+"What about that?" she sneered.
+
+"If I bleach it will you let me send for your people?"
+
+"I'll--perhaps," was the most the Probationer could get.
+
+Many people would have been discouraged. Even the Senior was a bit
+cynical. It took a Probationer still heartsick for home to read in
+the Avenue Girl's eyes the terrible longing for the things she had
+given up--for home and home folks; for a clean slate again. The
+Probationer bleached and scrubbed the finger, and gradually a little
+of her hopeful spirit touched the other girl.
+
+"What day is it?" the Avenue Girl asked once.
+
+"Friday."
+
+"That's baking day at home. We bake in an out-oven. Did you ever
+smell bread as it comes from an out-oven?" Or: "That's a pretty
+shade of blue you nurses wear. It would be nice for working in the
+dairy, wouldn't it?"
+
+"Fine!" said the Probationer, and scrubbed away to hide the triumph
+in her eyes.
+
+
+III
+
+That was the day the Dummy stole the parrot. The parrot belonged to
+the Girl; but how did he know it? So many things he should have
+known the Dummy never learned; so many things he knew that he seemed
+never to have learned! He did not know, for instance, of Father
+Feeny and the Holy Name students; but he knew of the Avenue Girl's
+loneliness and heartache, and of the cabal against her. It is one of
+the black marks on record against him that he refused to polish the
+plate on Old Maggie's bed, and that he shook his fist at her more
+than once when the Senior was out of the ward.
+
+And he knew of the parrot. That day, then, a short, stout woman with
+a hard face appeared in the superintendent's office and demanded a
+parrot.
+
+"Parrot?" said the superintendent blandly.
+
+"Parrot! That crazy man you keep here walked into my house to-day
+and stole a parrot--and I want it."
+
+"The Dummy! But what on earth----"
+
+"It was my parrot," said the woman. "It belonged to one of my
+boarders. She's a burned case up in one of the wards--and she owed
+me money. I took it for a debt. You call that man and let him look
+me in the eye while I say parrot to him."
+
+"He cannot speak or hear."
+
+"You call him. He'll understand me!"
+
+They found the Dummy coming stealthily down from the top of the
+stable and haled him into the office. He was very calm--quite
+impassive. Apparently he had never seen the woman before; as she
+raged he smiled cheerfully and shook his head.
+
+"As a matter of fact," said the superintendent, "I don't believe he
+ever saw the bird; but if he has it we shall find it out and you'll
+get it again."
+
+They let him go then; and he went to the chapel and looked at a dove
+above the young John's head. Then he went up to the kitchen and
+filled his pockets with lettuce leaves. He knew nothing at all of
+parrots or how to care for them.
+
+Things, you see, were moving right for the Avenue Girl. The stain
+was coming off--she had been fond of the parrot and now it was close
+at hand; and Father Feeny's lusty crowd stood ready to come into a
+hospital ward and shed skin that they generally sacrificed on the
+football field. But the Avenue Girl had two years to account
+for--and there was the matter of an alibi.
+
+"I might tell the folks at home anything and they'd believe it
+because they'd want to believe it," said the Avenue Girl. "But
+there's the neighbours. I was pretty wild at home. And--there's a
+fellow who wanted to marry me--he knew how sick I was of the old
+place and how I wanted my fling. His name was Jerry. We'd have to
+show Jerry."
+
+The Probationer worried a great deal about this matter of the alibi.
+It had to be a clean slate for the folks back home, and especially
+for Jerry. She took her anxieties out walking several times on her
+off-duty, but nothing seemed to come of it. She walked on the Avenue
+mostly, because it was near and she could throw a long coat over her
+blue dress. And so she happened to think of the woman the girl had
+lived with.
+
+"She got her into all this," thought the Probationer. "She's just
+got to see her out."
+
+It took three days' off-duty to get her courage up to ringing the
+doorbell of the house with the bowed shutters, and after she had
+rung it she wanted very much to run and hide; but she thought of the
+girl and everything going for nothing for the want of an alibi, and
+she stuck. The negress opened the door and stared at her.
+
+"She's dead, is she?" she asked.
+
+"No. May I come in? I want to see your mistress."
+
+The negress did not admit her, however. She let her stand in the
+vestibule and went back to the foot of a staircase.
+
+"One of these heah nurses from the hospital!" she said. "She wants
+to come in and speak to you."
+
+"Let her in, you fool!" replied a voice from above stairs.
+
+The rest was rather confused. Afterward the Probationer remembered
+putting the case to the stout woman who had claimed the parrot and
+finding it difficult to make her understand.
+
+"Don't you see?" she finished desperately. "I want her to go
+home--to her own folks. She wants it too. But what are we going to
+say about these last two years?"
+
+The stout woman sat turning over her rings. She was most
+uncomfortable. After all, what had she done? Had she not warned them
+again and again about having lighted cigarettes lying round.
+
+"She's in bad shape, is she?"
+
+"She may recover, but she'll be badly scarred--not her face, but her
+chest and shoulders."
+
+That was another way of looking at it. If the girl was scarred----
+
+"Just what do you want me to do?" she asked. Now that it was down
+to brass tacks and no talk about home and mother, she was more
+comfortable.
+
+"If you could just come over to the hospital while her people are
+there and--and say she'd lived with you all the time----"
+
+"That's the truth all right!"
+
+"And--that she worked for you, sewing--she sews very well, she
+says. And--oh, you'll know what to say; that she's been--all right,
+you know; anything to make them comfortable and happy."
+
+Now the stout woman was softening--not that she was really hard, but
+she had developed a sort of artificial veneer of hardness, and good
+impulses had a hard time crawling through.
+
+"I guess I could do that much," she conceded. "She nursed me when I
+was down and out with the grippe and that worthless nigger was drunk
+in the kitchen. But you folks over there have got a parrot that
+belongs to me. What about that?"
+
+The Probationer knew about the parrot. The Dummy had slipped it
+into the ward more than once and its profanity had delighted the
+patients. The Avenue Girl had been glad to see it too; and as it sat
+on the bedside table and shrieked defiance and oaths the Dummy had
+smiled benignly. John and the dove--the girl and the parrot!
+
+"I am sorry about the parrot. I--perhaps I could buy him from you."
+
+She got out her shabby little purse, in which she carried her
+munificent monthly allowance of eight dollars and a little money she
+had brought from home.
+
+"Twenty dollars takes him. That's what she owed me."
+
+The Probationer had seventeen dollars and eleven cents. She spread
+it out in her lap and counted it twice.
+
+"I'm afraid that's all," she said. She had hoped the second count
+would show up better. "I could bring the rest next month."
+
+The Probationer folded the money together and held it out. The stout
+woman took it eagerly.
+
+"He's yours," she said largely. "Don't bother about the balance.
+When do you want me?"
+
+"I'll send you word," said the Probationer, and got up. She was
+almost dizzy with excitement and the feeling of having no money at
+all in the world and a parrot she did not want. She got out into the
+air somehow and back to the hospital. She took a bath immediately
+and put on everything fresh, and felt much better--but very
+poor. Before she went on duty she said a little prayer about
+thermometers--that she should not break hers until she had money for
+a new one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Father Feeny came and lined up six budding priests outside the door
+of the ward. He was a fine specimen of manhood and he had asked no
+questions at all. The Senior thought she had better tell him
+something, but he put up a white hand.
+
+"What does it matter, sister?" he said cheerfully. "Yesterday is
+gone and to-day is a new day. Also there is to-morrow"--his Irish
+eyes twinkled--"and a fine day it will be by the sunset."
+
+Then he turned to his small army.
+
+"Boys," he said, "it's a poor leader who is afraid to take chances
+with his men. I'm going first"--he said fir-rst. "It's a small
+thing, as I've told you--a bit of skin and it's over. Go in smiling
+and come out smiling! Are you ready, sir?" This to the _interne_.
+
+That was a great day in the ward. The inmates watched Father Feeny
+and the _interne_ go behind the screens, both smiling, and they
+watched the father come out very soon after, still smiling but a
+little bleached. And they watched the line patiently waiting outside
+the door, shortening one by one. After a time the smiles were rather
+forced, as if waiting was telling on them; but there was no
+deserter--only one six-foot youth, walking with a swagger to
+contribute his little half inch or so of cuticle, added a sensation
+to the general excitement by fainting halfway up the ward; and he
+remained in blissful unconsciousness until it was all over.
+
+Though the _interne_ had said there was no way back, the first step
+had really been taken; and he was greatly pleased with himself and
+with everybody because it had been his idea. The Probationer tried
+to find a chance to thank him; and, failing that, she sent a
+grateful little note to his room:
+
+      Is Mimi the Austrian to have a baked apple?
+                              [Signed]   WARD A.
+
+      P.S.--It went through wonderfully! She is so cheerful
+      since it is over. How can I ever thank you?
+
+The reply came back very quickly:
+
+      Baked apple, without milk, for Mimi. WARD A.
+                              [Signed]    D.L.S.
+
+      P.S.--Can you come up on the roof for a little air?
+
+She hesitated over that for some time. A really honest-to-goodness
+nurse may break a rule now and then and nothing happen; but
+a probationer is only on trial and has to be exceedingly
+careful--though any one might go to the roof and watch the sunset.
+She decided not to go. Then she pulled her soft hair down over her
+forehead, where it was most becoming, and fastened it with tiny
+hairpins, and went up after all--not because she intended to, but
+because as she came out of her room the elevator was going up--not
+down. She was on the roof almost before she knew it.
+
+The _interne_ was there in fresh white ducks, smoking. At first they
+talked of skin grafting and the powder that had not done what was
+expected of it. After a time, when the autumn twilight had fallen on
+them like a benediction, she took her courage in her hands and told
+of her visit to the house on the Avenue, and about the parrot and
+the plot.
+
+The _interne_ stood very still. He was young and intolerant. Some
+day he would mellow and accept life as it is--not as he would have
+it. When she had finished he seemed to have drawn himself into a
+shell, turtle fashion, and huddled himself together. The shell was
+pride and old prejudice and the intolerance of youth. "She had to
+have an alibi!" said the Probationer.
+
+"Oh, of course," very stiffly.
+
+"I cannot see why you disapprove. Something had to be done."
+
+"I cannot see that you had to do it; but it's your own affair, of
+course. Only----"
+
+"Please go on."
+
+"Well, one cannot touch dirt without being soiled."
+
+"I think you will be sorry you said that," said the Probationer
+stiffly. And she went down the staircase, leaving him alone. He was
+sorry, of course; but he would not say so even to himself. He
+thought of the Probationer, with her eager eyes and shining hair and
+her warm little heart, ringing the bell of the Avenue house and
+making her plea--and his blood ran hot in him. It was just then
+that the parrot spoke on the other side of the chimney.
+
+"Gimme a bottle of beer!" it said. "Nice cold beer! Cold beer!"
+
+The _interne_ walked furiously toward the sound. Must this girl of
+the streets and her wretched associates follow him everywhere? She
+had ruined his life already. He felt that it was ruined. Probably
+the Probationer would never speak to him again.
+
+The Dummy was sitting on a bench, with the parrot on his knee
+looking rather queer from being smuggled about under a coat and fed
+the curious things that the Dummy thought a bird should eat. It had
+a piece of apple pie in its claw now.
+
+"Cold beer!" said the parrot, and eyed the _interne_ crookedly.
+
+The Dummy had not heard him, of course. He sat looking over the
+parapet toward the river, with one knotted hand smoothing the bird's
+ruffled plumage and such a look of wretchedness in his eyes that it
+hurt to see it. God's fools, who cannot reason, can feel. Some
+instinct of despair had seized him for its own--some conception,
+perhaps, of what life would never mean to him. Before it, the
+_interne's_ wrath gave way to impotency.
+
+"Cold beer!" said the parrot wickedly.
+
+
+IV
+
+The Avenue Girl improved slowly. Morning and evening came the Dummy
+and smiled down at her, with reverence in his eyes. She could smile
+back now and sometimes she spoke to him. There was a change in the
+Avenue Girl. She was less sullen. In the back of her eyes each
+morning found a glow of hope--that died, it is true, by noontime;
+but it came again with the new day.
+
+"How's Polly this morning, Montmorency?" she would say, and give him
+a bit of toast from her breakfast for the bird. Or: "I wish you
+could talk, Reginald. I'd like to hear what Rose said when you took
+the parrot. It must have been a scream!"
+
+He brought her the first chrysanthemums of the fall and laid them on
+her pillow. It was after he had gone, while the Probationer was
+combing out the soft short curls of her hair, that she mentioned the
+Dummy. She strove to make her voice steady, but there were tears in
+her eyes.
+
+"The old goat's been pretty good to me, hasn't he?" she said.
+
+"I believe it is very unusual. I wonder"--the Probationer poised the
+comb--"perhaps you remind him of some one he used to know."
+
+They knew nothing, of course, of the boy John and the window.
+
+"He's about the first decent man I ever knew," said the Avenue
+Girl--"and he's a fool!"
+
+"Either a fool or very, very wise," replied the Probationer.
+
+The _interne_ and the Probationer were good friends again, but they
+had never quite got back to the place they had lost on the roof.
+Over the Avenue Girl's dressing their eyes met sometimes, and there
+was an appeal in the man's and tenderness; but there was pride too.
+He would not say he had not meant it. Any man will tell you that he
+was entirely right, and that she had been most unwise and needed a
+good scolding--only, of course, it is never the wise people who make
+life worth the living.
+
+And an important thing had happened--the Probationer had been
+accepted and had got her cap. She looked very stately in it, though
+it generally had a dent somewhere from her forgetting she had it on
+and putting her hat on over it. The first day she wore it she knelt
+at prayers with the others, and said a little Thank You! for getting
+through when she was so unworthy. She asked to be made clean and
+pure, and delivered from vanity, and of some use in the world. And,
+trying to think of the things she had been remiss in, she went out
+that night in a rain and bought some seed and things for the parrot.
+
+Prodigal as had been Father Feeny and his battalion, there was more
+grafting needed before the Avenue Girl could take her scarred body
+and soul out into the world again. The Probationer offered, but was
+refused politely.
+
+"You are a part of the institution now," said the _interne_, with
+his eyes on her cap. He was rather afraid of the cap. "I cannot
+cripple the institution."
+
+It was the Dummy who solved that question. No one knew how he knew
+the necessity or why he had not come forward sooner; but come he did
+and would not be denied. The _interne_ went to a member of the staff
+about it.
+
+"The fellow works round the house," he explained; "but he's taken a
+great fancy to the girl and I hardly know what to do."
+
+"My dear boy," said the staff, "one of the greatest joys in the
+world is to suffer for a woman. Let him go to it."
+
+So the Dummy bared his old-young arm--not once, but many times.
+Always as the sharp razor nicked up its bit of skin he looked at the
+girl and smiled. In the early evening he perched the parrot on his
+bandaged arm and sat on the roof or by the fountain in the
+courtyard. When the breeze blew strong enough the water flung over
+the rim and made little puddles in the hollows of the cement
+pavement. Here belated sparrows drank or splashed their dusty
+feathers, and the parrot watched them crookedly.
+
+The Avenue Girl grew better with each day, but remained
+wistful-eyed. The ward no longer avoided her, though she was never
+one of them. One day the Probationer found a new baby in the
+children's ward; and, with the passion of maternity that is the real
+reason for every good woman's being, she cuddled the mite in her
+arms. She visited the nurses in the different wards.
+
+"Just look!" she would say, opening her arms. "If I could only steal
+it!"
+
+The Senior, who had once been beautiful and was now calm and placid,
+smiled at her. Old Maggie must peer and cry out over the child.
+Irish Delia must call down a blessing on it. And so up the ward to
+the Avenue Girl; the Probationer laid the baby in her arms.
+
+"Just a minute," she explained. "I'm idling and I have no business
+to. Hold it until I give the three o'clocks." Which means the
+three-o'clock medicines.
+
+When she came back the Avenue Girl had a new look in her eyes; and
+that day the little gleam of hope, that usually died, lasted and
+grew.
+
+At last came the day when the alibi was to be brought forward. The
+girl had written home and the home folks were coming. In his strange
+way the Dummy knew that a change was near. The kaleidoscope would
+shift again and the Avenue Girl would join the changing and
+disappearing figures that fringed the inner circle of his heart.
+
+One night he did not go to bed in the ward bed that was his only
+home, beside the little stand that held his only possessions. The
+watchman missed him and found him asleep in the chapel in one of the
+seats, with the parrot drowsing on the altar.
+
+Rose--who was the stout woman--came early. She wore a purple dress,
+with a hat to match, and purple gloves. The ward eyed her with scorn
+and a certain deference. She greeted the Avenue Girl effusively
+behind the screens that surrounded the bed.
+
+"Well, you do look pinched!" she said. "Ain't it a mercy it didn't
+get to your face! Pretty well chewed up, aren't you?"
+
+"Do you want to see it?"
+
+"Good land! No! Now look here, you've got to put me wise or I'll
+blow the whole thing. What's my little stunt? The purple's all right
+for it, isn't it?"
+
+"All you need to do," said the Avenue Girl wearily, "is to say that
+I've been sewing for you since I came to the city. And--if you can
+say anything good----"
+
+"I'll do that all right," Rose affirmed. She put a heavy silver bag
+on the bedside table and lowered herself into a chair. "You leave it
+to me, dearie. There ain't anything I won't say."
+
+The ward was watching with intense interest. Old Maggie, working the
+creaking bandage machine, was palpitating with excitement. From her
+chair by the door she could see the elevator and it was she who
+announced the coming of destiny.
+
+"Here comes the father," she confided to the end of the ward. "Guess
+the mother couldn't come."
+
+It was not the father though. It was a young man who hesitated in
+the doorway, hat in hand--a tall young man, with a strong and not
+unhandsome face. The Probationer, rather twitchy from excitement and
+anxiety, felt her heart stop and race on again. Jerry, without a
+doubt!
+
+The meeting was rather constrained. The girl went whiter than her
+pillows and half closed her eyes; but Rose, who would have been
+terrified at the sight of an elderly farmer, was buoyantly relieved
+and at her ease.
+
+"I'm sorry," said Jerry. "I--we didn't realise it had been so bad.
+The folks are well; but--I thought I'd better come. They're
+expecting you back home."
+
+"It was nice of you to come," said the girl, avoiding his eyes.
+"I--I'm getting along fine."
+
+"I guess introductions ain't necessary," put in Rose briskly. "I'm
+Mrs. Sweeney. She's been living with me--working for me, sewing.
+She's sure a fine sewer! She made this suit I'm wearing."
+
+Poor Rose, with "custom made" on every seam of the purple! But Jerry
+was hardly listening. His eyes were on the girl among the pillows.
+
+"I see," said Jerry slowly. "You haven't said yet, Elizabeth. Are
+you going home?"
+
+"If--they want me."
+
+"Of course they want you!" Again Rose: "Why shouldn't they? You've
+been a good girl and a credit to any family. If they say anything
+mean to you you let me know."
+
+"They'll not be mean to her. I'm sure they'll want to write and
+thank you. If you'll just give me your address, Mrs. Sweeney----"
+
+He had a pencil poised over a notebook. Rose hesitated. Then she
+gave her address on the Avenue, with something of bravado in her
+voice. After all, what could this country-store clerk know of the
+Avenue? Jerry wrote it down carefully.
+
+"Sweeney--with an e?" he asked politely.
+
+"With three e's," corrected Rose, and got up with dignity.
+
+"Well, good-bye, dearie," she said. "You've got your friends now and
+you don't need me. I guess you've had your lesson about going to
+sleep with a cig--about being careless with fire. Drop me a postal
+when you get the time."
+
+She shook hands with Jerry and rustled and jingled down the ward,
+her chin well up. At the door she encountered Old Maggie, her arms
+full of bandages.
+
+"How's the Avenue?" asked Old Maggie.
+
+Rose, however, like all good actresses, was still in the part
+as she made her exit. She passed Old Maggie unheeding, severe
+respectability in every line of her figure, every nod of her purple
+plumes. She was still in the part when she encountered the
+Probationer.
+
+"It's going like a house afire!" she said. "He swallowed it
+all--hook and bait! And--oh, yes, I've got something for you." She
+went down into her silver bag and pulled out a roll of bills. "I've
+felt meaner'n a dog every time I've thought of you buying that
+parrot. I've got a different view of life--maybe--from yours; but
+I'm not taking candy from a baby."
+
+When the Probationer could speak Rose was taking herself and the
+purple into the elevator and waving her a farewell.
+
+"Good-bye!" she said. "If ever you get stuck again just call on me."
+
+With Rose's departure silence fell behind the screen. The girl broke
+it first.
+
+"They're all well, are they?"
+
+"All well. Your mother's been kind of poorly. She thought you'd
+write to her." The girl clenched her hands under the bedclothing.
+She could not speak just then. "There's nothing much happened. The
+post office burned down last summer. They're building a new one.
+And--I've been building. I tore down the old place."
+
+"Are you going to be married, Jerry?"
+
+"Some day, I suppose. I'm not worrying about it. It was something to
+do; it kept me from--thinking."
+
+The girl looked at him and something gripped her throat. He knew!
+Rose might have gone down with her father, but Jerry knew! Nothing
+was any use. She knew his rigid morality, his country-bred horror of
+the thing she was. She would have to go back--to Rose and the
+others. He would never take her home.
+
+Down at the medicine closet the Probationer was carbolising
+thermometers and humming a little song. Everything was well. The
+Avenue Girl was with her people and at seven o'clock the Probationer
+was going to the roof--to meet some one who was sincerely repentant
+and very meek.
+
+In the convalescent ward next door they were singing softly--one of
+those spontaneous outbursts that have their origin in the hearts of
+people and a melody all their own:
+
+          _'Way down upon de S'wanee Ribber,
+             Far, far away,
+           Dere's wha my heart is turnin' ebber--
+             Dere's wha de old folks stay._
+
+It penetrated back of the screen, where the girl lay in white
+wretchedness--and where Jerry, with death in his eyes, sat rigid in
+his chair.
+
+"Jerry?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I--I guess I've been pretty far away."
+
+"Don't tell me about it!" A cry, this.
+
+"You used to care for me, Jerry. I'm not expecting that now; but if
+you'd only believe me when I say I'm sorry----"
+
+"I believe you, Elizabeth."
+
+"One of the nurses here says----Jerry, won't you look at me?" With
+some difficulty he met her eyes. "She says that because one starts
+wrong one needn't go wrong always. I was ashamed to write. She made
+me do it."
+
+She held out an appealing hand, but he did not take it. All his life
+he had built up a house of morality. Now his house was crumbling and
+he stood terrified in the wreck. "It isn't only because I've been
+hurt that I--am sorry," she went on. "I loathed it! I'd have
+finished it all long ago, only--I was afraid."
+
+"I would rather have found you dead!"
+
+There is a sort of anesthesia of misery. After a certain amount of
+suffering the brain ceases to feel. Jerry watched the white curtain
+of the screen swaying in the wind, settled his collar, glanced at
+his watch. He was quite white. The girl's hand still lay on the
+coverlet. Somewhere back in the numbed brain that would think only
+little thoughts he knew that if he touched that small, appealing
+hand the last wall of his house would fall.
+
+It was the Dummy, after all, who settled that for him. He came with
+his afternoon offering of cracked ice just then and stood inside the
+screen, staring. Perhaps he had known all along how it would end,
+that this, his saint, would go--and not alone--to join the vanishing
+circle that had ringed the inner circle of his heart. Just at the
+time it rather got him. He swayed a little and clutched at the
+screen; but the next moment he had placed the bowl on the stand and
+stood smiling down at the girl.
+
+"The only person in the world who believes in me!" said the girl
+bitterly. "And he's a fool!"
+
+The Dummy smiled into her eyes. In his faded, childish eyes there
+was the eternal sadness of his kind, eternal tenderness, and the
+blur of one who has looked much into a far distance. Suddenly he
+bent over and placed the man's hand over the girl's.
+
+The last wall was down! Jerry buried his face in the white
+coverlet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _interne_ was pacing the roof anxiously. Golden sunset had faded
+to lavender--to dark purple--to night.
+
+The Probationer came up at last--not a probationer now, of course;
+but she had left off her cap and was much less stately.
+
+"I'm sorry," she explained; "but I've been terribly busy. It went
+off so well!"
+
+"Of course--if you handled it."
+
+"You know--don't you?--it was the lover who came. He looks so strong
+and good--oh, she is safe now!"
+
+"That's fine!" said the _interne_ absently. They were sitting on the
+parapet now and by sliding his hand along he found her fingers.
+"Isn't it a glorious evening?" He had the fingers pretty close by
+that time; and suddenly gathering them up he lifted the hand to his
+lips.
+
+"Such a kind little hand!" he said over it. "Such a dear, tender
+little hand! My hand!" he said, rather huskily.
+
+Down in the courtyard the Dummy sat with the parrot on his knee. At
+his feet the superintendent's dog lay on his side and dreamed of
+battle. The Dummy's eyes lingered on the scar the Avenue Girl had
+bandaged--how long ago!
+
+His eyes wandered to the window with the young John among the
+lilies. In the stable were still the ambulance horses that talked to
+him without words. And he had the parrot. If he thought at all it
+was that his Father was good and that, after all, he was not alone.
+The parrot edged along his knee and eyed him with saturnine
+affection.
+
+
+
+
+THE MIRACLE
+
+
+I
+
+Big Mary was sweeping the ward with a broom muffled in a white bag.
+In the breeze from the open windows, her blue calico wrapper
+ballooned about her and made ludicrous her frantic thrusts after the
+bits of fluff that formed eddies under the beds and danced in the
+spring air.
+
+She finished her sweeping, and, with the joyous scraps captured in
+her dust-pan, stood in the doorway, critically surveying the ward.
+It was brilliantly clean and festive; on either side a row of beds,
+fresh white for the day; on the centre table a vase of Easter
+lilies, and on the record-table near the door a potted hyacinth. The
+Nurse herself wore a bunch of violets tucked in her apron-band. One
+of the patients had seen the Junior Medical give them to her. The
+Eastern sun, shining across the beds, made below them, on the
+polished floor, black islands of shadow in a gleaming sea of light.
+
+And scattered here and there, rocking in chairs or standing at
+windows, enjoying the Sunday respite from sewing or the
+bandage-machine, women, grotesque and distorted of figure, in
+attitudes of weariness and expectancy, with patient eyes awaited
+their crucifixion. Behind them, in the beds, a dozen perhaps who had
+come up from death and held the miracle in their arms.
+
+The miracles were small and red, and inclined to feeble and
+ineffectual wrigglings. Fists were thrust in the air and brought
+down on smiling, pale mother faces. With tight-closed eyes and open
+mouths, each miracle squirmed and nuzzled until the mother would
+look with pleading eyes at the Nurse. And the Nurse would look
+severe and say:
+
+"Good gracious, Annie Petowski, surely you don't want to feed that
+infant again! Do you want the child to have a dilated stomach?"
+
+Fear of that horrible and mysterious condition, a dilated stomach,
+would restrain Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara
+for a time. With the wisdom of the serpent, she would give the child
+her finger to suck--a finger so white, so clean, so soft in the last
+week that she was lost in admiration of it. And the child would take
+hold, all its small body set rigid in lines of desperate effort.
+Then it would relax suddenly, and spew out the finger, and the quiet
+hospital air would be rent with shrieks of lost illusion. Then Annie
+Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara would watch the
+Nurse with open hostility and defiance, and her rustling exit from
+the ward would be followed by swift cessation of cries, and, close
+to Annie or Jennie or Maggie's heart, there would be small ecstatic
+gurglings--and peace.
+
+In her small domain the Nurse was queen. From her throne at the
+record-table, she issued proclamations of baths and fine combs, of
+clean bedding and trimmed nails, of tea and toast, of regular hours
+for the babies. From this throne, also, she directed periodic
+searches of the bedside stands, unearthing scraps of old toast,
+decaying fruit, candy, and an occasional cigarette. From the throne,
+too, she sent daily a blue-wrappered and pig-tailed brigade to the
+kitchen, armed with knives, to attack the dinner potatoes.
+
+But on this Easter morning, the queen looked tired and worn. Her
+crown, a starched white cap, had slipped back on her head, and her
+blue-and-white dress was stained and spotted. Even her fresh apron
+and sleevelets did not quite conceal the damage. She had come in for
+a moment at the breakfast hour, and asked the Swede, Ellen Ollman,
+to serve the breakfast for her; and at half past eight she had
+appeared again for a moment, and had turned down one of the beds and
+put hot-water bottles in it.
+
+The ward ate little breakfast. It was always nervous when a case was
+"on." Excursions down the corridor by one or another of the
+blue-wrappered brigade brought back bits of news:
+
+"The doctor is smoking a cigarette in the hall;" or, "Miss Jones,
+the day assistant, has gone in;" and then, with bated breath, "The
+doctor with the red mustache has come"--by which it was known that
+things were going badly, the staff man having been summoned.
+
+Suggestions of Easter began to appear even in this isolated ward,
+denied to all visitors except an occasional husband, who was usually
+regarded with a mixture of contempt and scepticism by the other
+women. But now the lilies came, and after them a lame young woman
+who played the organ in the chapel on Sundays, and who afterward
+went from ward to ward, singing little songs and accompanying
+herself on the mandolin she carried with her. The lame young woman
+seated herself in the throne-chair and sang an Easter anthem, and
+afterward limped around and placed a leaflet and a spray of
+lilies-of-the-valley on each bedside stand.
+
+She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as "Liz"
+in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse. Elizabeth
+always read the tracts. She had been there four times, and knew all
+the nurses and nearly all the doctors. "Liz" had been known, in a
+shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the
+hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white
+gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the
+queen herself in regalness and authority.
+
+The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed.
+"Shall I put one here?" she asked, fingering a tract.
+
+Liz meditated majestically.
+
+"Well, I guess I would," she said. "Not that it'll do any good."
+
+"Why?"
+
+Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.
+
+"She's not getting on very well," she said; "and, even if she gets
+through, she won't read the tract. She held her fingers in her ears
+last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here. She's young. Says she
+hopes she and the kid'll both die."
+
+The mandolin-player was not unversed in the psychology of the ward.
+
+"Then she--isn't married?" she asked, and because she was young, she
+flushed painfully.
+
+Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her
+eyes.
+
+"Well, no," she admitted; "I guess that's what's worrying her. She's
+a fool, she is. She can put the kid in a home. That's what I do.
+Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble? Wouldn't
+he be always throwing it up to her?"
+
+The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy
+of life.
+
+"Have--have you a baby here?" she asked timidly.
+
+"Have I!" said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed. She
+turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red
+atom, so like the others that only mother love could have
+distinguished it.
+
+"This is mine," she said airily. "Funny little mutt, isn't he?"
+
+The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.
+
+"He--he's very little," she said.
+
+"Little!" said Liz. "He holds the record here for the last six
+months--eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived. The
+little devil!"
+
+She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil's sleeping
+form. The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing
+to say.
+
+"Does--does he look like his father?" she asked timidly. But
+apparently Liz did not hear. She had moved down the ward. The
+mandolin-player heard only a snicker from Annie Petowski's bed, and,
+vaguely uncomfortable, she moved toward the door.
+
+Liz was turning down the cover of the empty bed, and the Nurse, with
+tired but shining eyes, was wheeling in the operating table.
+
+The mandolin-player stepped aside to let the table pass. From the
+blankets she had a glimpse of a young face, bloodless and wan--of
+hurt, defiant blue eyes. She had never before seen life so naked, so
+relentless. She shrank back against the wall, a little sick. Then
+she gathered up her tracts and her mandolin, and limped down the
+hall.
+
+The door of the mysterious room was open, and from it came a shrill,
+high wail, a rising and falling note of distress--the voice of a new
+soul in protest. She went past with averted face.
+
+Back in the ward Liz leaned over the table and, picking the girl up
+bodily, deposited her tenderly in the warm bed. Then she stood back
+and smiled down at her, with her hands on her hips.
+
+"Well," she said kindly, "it's over, and here you are! But it's no
+picnic, is it?"
+
+The girl on the bed turned her head away. The coarsening of her
+features in the last month or two had changed to an almost bloodless
+refinement. With her bright hair, she looked as if she had been
+through the furnace of pain and had come out pure gold. But her eyes
+were hard.
+
+"Go away," she said petulantly.
+
+Liz leaned down and pulled the blanket over her shoulders.
+
+"You sleep now," she said soothingly. "When you wake up you can have
+a cup of tea."
+
+The girl threw the cover off and looked up despairingly into Liz's
+face.
+
+"I don't want to sleep," she said. "My God, Liz, it's going to live
+and so am I!"
+
+
+II
+
+Now, the Nurse had been up all night, and at noon, after she had
+oiled the new baby and washed out his eyes and given him a
+teaspoonful of warm water, she placed Liz in charge of the ward, and
+went to her room to put on a fresh uniform. The first thing she did,
+when she got there, was to go to the mirror, with the picture of her
+mother tucked in its frame, and survey herself. When she saw her cap
+and the untidiness of her hair and her white collar all spotted, she
+frowned.
+
+Then she took the violets out of her belt and put them carefully in
+a glass of water, and feeling rather silly, she leaned over and
+kissed them. After that she felt better.
+
+She bathed her face in hot water and then in cold, which brought her
+colour back, and she put on everything fresh, so that she rustled
+with each step, which is proper for trained nurses; and finally she
+tucked the violets back where they belonged, and put on a new cap,
+which is also proper for trained nurses on gala occasions.
+
+If she had not gone back to the mirror to see that the general
+effect was as crisp as it should be, things would have been
+different for Liz, and for the new mother back in the ward. But she
+did go back; and there, lying on the floor in front of the bureau,
+all folded together, was a piece of white paper exactly as if it has
+been tucked in her belt with the violets.
+
+She opened it rather shakily, and it was a leaf from the ward
+order-book, for at the top it said:
+
+      Annie Petowski--may sit up for one hour.
+
+And below that:
+
+      Goldstein baby--bran baths.
+
+And below that:
+
+      I love you. E.J.
+
+"E.J." was the Junior Medical.
+
+So the Nurse went back to the ward, and sat down, palpitating, in
+the throne-chair by the table, and spread her crisp skirts, and
+found where the page had been torn out of the order-book.
+
+And as the smiles of sovereigns are hailed with delight by their
+courts, so the ward brightened until it seemed to gleam that Easter
+afternoon. And a sort of miracle happened: none of the babies had
+colic, and the mothers mostly slept. Also, one of the ladies of the
+House Committee looked in at the door and said:
+
+"How beautiful you are here, and how peaceful! Your ward is always a
+sort of benediction."
+
+The lady of the House Committee looked across and saw the new
+mother, with the sunshine on her yellow braids, and her face refined
+from the furnace of pain.
+
+"What a sweet young mother!" she said, and rustled out, leaving an
+odor of peau d'Espagne.
+
+The girl lay much as Liz had left her. Except her eyes, there was
+nothing in her face to show that despair had given place to wild
+mutiny. But Liz knew; Liz had gone through it all when "the first
+one" came; and so, from the end of the ward, she rocked and watched.
+
+The odor of peau d'Espagne was still in the air, eclipsing the
+Easter lilies, when Liz got up and sauntered down to the girl's bed.
+
+"How are you now, dearie?" she asked, and, reaching under the
+blankets, brought out the tiny pearl-handled knife with which the
+girl had been wont to clean her finger-nails. The girl eyed her
+savagely, but said nothing; nor did she resist when Liz brought out
+her hands and examined the wrists. The left had a small cut on it.
+
+"Now listen to me," said Liz. "None of that, do you hear? You ain't
+the only one that's laid here and wanted to end it all. And what
+happened? Inside of a month they're well and strong again, and they
+put the kid somewhere, and the folks that know what's happened get
+used to it, and the ones that don't know don't need to know. Don't
+be a fool!"
+
+She carried the knife off, but the girl made no protest. There were
+other ways.
+
+The Nurse was very tired, for she had been up almost all night. She
+sat at the record-table with her Bible open, and, in the intervals
+of taking temperatures, she read it. But mostly she read about Annie
+Petowski being allowed to sit up, and the Goldstein baby having bran
+baths, and the other thing written below!
+
+At two o'clock came the Junior Medical, in a frock-coat and grey
+trousers. He expected to sing "The Palms" at the Easter service
+downstairs in the chapel that afternoon, and, according to
+precedent, the one who sings "The Palms" on Easter in the chapel
+must always wear a frock-coat.
+
+Very conscious, because all the ward was staring at his
+gorgeousness, he went over to the bed where the new mother lay. Then
+he came back and stood by the table, looking at a record.
+
+"Have you taken her temperature?" he said, businesslike and erect.
+
+"Ninety-eight."
+
+"Her pulse is strong?"
+
+"Yes; she's resting quietly."
+
+"Good.--And--did you get my note?"
+
+This, much as if he had said, "Did you find my scarf-pin?" or
+anything merely casual; for Liz was hovering near.
+
+"Yes." The nurse's red lips were trembling, but she smiled up at
+him. Liz came nearer. She was only wishing him Godspeed with his
+wooing, but it made him uncomfortable.
+
+"Watch her closely," he said, "she's pretty weak and despondent."
+And he looked at Liz.
+
+"Elizabeth," said the Nurse, "won't you sit by Claribel and fan
+her?"
+
+Claribel was the new mother. Claribel is, of course, no name for a
+mother, but she had been named when she was very small.
+
+Liz went away and sat by the girl's bed, and said a little prayer to
+the effect that they were both so damned good to everybody, she
+hoped they'd hit it off. But perhaps the prayer of the wicked
+availeth nothing.
+
+"You know I meant that," he said, from behind a record. "I--I love
+you with all my heart--and if only you----"
+
+The nurse shook down a thermometer and examined it closely. "I love
+you, too!" she said. And, walking shakily to one of the beds, she
+put the thermometer upside down in Maggie McNamara's mouth.
+
+The Junior Medical went away with his shoulders erect in his
+frock-coat, and his heavy brown hair, which would never part
+properly and had to be persuaded with brilliantine, bristling with
+happiness.
+
+And the Nurse-Queen, looking over her kingdom for somebody to lavish
+her new joy on, saw Claribel lying in bed, looking at the ceiling
+and reading there all the tragedy of her broken life, all her
+despair.
+
+So she rustled out to the baby-room, where the new baby had never
+batted an eye since her bath and was lying on her back with both
+fists clenched on her breast, and she did something that no trained
+nurse is ever supposed to do.
+
+She lifted the baby, asleep and all, and carried her to her mother.
+
+But Claribel's face only darkened when she saw her.
+
+"Take the brat away," she said, and went on reading tragedies on the
+ceiling.
+
+Liz came and proffered her the little mite with every art she knew.
+She showed her the wrinkled bits of feet, the tiny, ridiculous
+hands, and how long the hair grew on the back of her head. But when
+Liz put the baby on her arm, she shuddered and turned her head away.
+So finally Liz took it back to the other room, and left it there,
+still sleeping.
+
+The fine edge of the Nurse's joy was dulled. It is a characteristic
+of great happiness to wish all to be well with the world; and here
+before her was dry-eyed despair. It was Liz who finally decided her.
+
+"I guess I'll sit up with her to-night," she said, approaching the
+table with the peculiar gait engendered of heel-less hospital
+carpet-slippers and Mother Hubbard wrappers. "I don't like the way
+she watches the ceiling."
+
+"What do you mean, Elizabeth?" asked the Nurse.
+
+"Time I had the twins--that's before your time," said Liz--"we had
+one like that. She went out the window head first the night after
+the baby came, and took the kid with her."
+
+The Nurse rose with quick decision.
+
+"We must watch her," she said. "Perhaps if I could find--I think
+I'll go to the telephone. Watch the ward carefully, Elizabeth, and
+if Annie Petowski tries to feed her baby before three o'clock, take
+it from her. The child's stuffed like a sausage every time I'm out
+for five minutes."
+
+Nurses know many strange things: they know how to rub an aching back
+until the ache is changed to a restful thrill, and how to change the
+bedding and the patient's night-dress without rolling the patient
+over more than once, which is a high and desirable form of
+knowledge. But also they get to know many strange people; their
+clean starchiness has a way of rubbing up against the filth of the
+world and coming away unsoiled. And so the Nurse went downstairs to
+the telephone, leaving Liz to watch for nefarious feeding.
+
+The Nurse called up Rose Davis; and Rosie, who was lying in bed with
+the Sunday papers scattered around her and a cigarette in her
+manicured fingers, reached out with a yawn and, taking the
+telephone, rested it on her laced and ribboned bosom.
+
+"Yes," she said indolently.
+
+The nurse told her who she was, and Rosie's voice took on a warmer
+tinge.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said. "How are you?... Claribel? Yes; what about
+her?... What!"
+
+"Yes," said the Nurse. "A girl--seven pounds."
+
+"My Gawd! Well, what do you think of that! Excuse me a moment; my
+cigarette's set fire to the sheet. All right--go ahead."
+
+"She's taking it pretty hard, and I--I thought you might help her.
+She--she----"
+
+"How much do you want?" said Rose, a trifle coldly. She turned in
+the bed and eyed the black leather bag on the stand at her elbow.
+"Twenty enough?"
+
+"I don't think it's money," said the Nurse, "although she needs that
+too; she hasn't any clothes for the baby. But--she's awfully
+despondent--almost desperate. Have you any idea who the child's
+father is?"
+
+Rosie considered, lighting a new cigarette with one hand and
+balancing the telephone with the other.
+
+"She left me a year ago," she said. "Oh, yes; I know now. What time
+is it?"
+
+"Two o'clock."
+
+"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Rosie. "I'll get the fellow on
+the wire and see what he's willing to do. Maybe he'll give her a
+dollar or two a week."
+
+"Do you think you could bring him to see her?"
+
+"Say, what do you think I am--a missionary?" The Nurse was wise, so
+she kept silent. "Well, I'll tell you what I will do. If I can bring
+him, I will. How's that yellow-haired she-devil you've got over
+there? I've got that fixed all right. She pulled a razor on me
+first--I've got witnesses. Well, if I can get Al, I'll do it. So
+long."
+
+It did not occur to the Nurse to deprecate having used an evil
+medium toward a righteous end. She took life much as she found it.
+And so she tiptoed past the chapel again, where a faint odour of
+peau d'Espagne came stealing out into the hall, and where the
+children from the children's ward, in roller-chairs and on crutches,
+were singing with all their shrill young voices, earnest eyes
+uplifted.
+
+The white Easter lilies on the altar sent their fragrance out over
+the gathering, over the nurses, young and placid, over the hopeless
+and the hopeful, over the faces where death had passed and left its
+inevitable stamp, over bodies freshly risen on this Easter Sunday
+to new hope and new life--over the Junior Medical, waiting with the
+manuscript of "The Palms" rolled in his hand and his heart singing a
+hymn of happiness.
+
+The Nurse went up to her ward, and put a screen around Claribel,
+and, with all her woman's art, tidied the immaculate white bed and
+loosened the uncompromising yellow braids, so that the soft hair
+fell across Claribel's bloodless forehead and softened the defiance
+in her blue eyes. She brought the pink hyacinth in its pot, too, and
+placed it on the bedside table. Then she stood off and looked at her
+work. It was good.
+
+Claribel submitted weakly. She had stopped staring at the wall, and
+had taken to watching the open window opposite with strange
+intentness. Only when the Nurse gave a final pat to the bedspread
+she spoke.
+
+"Was it a boy--or a girl?" she asked.
+
+"Girl," said the nurse briskly. "A little beauty, perfect in every
+way."
+
+"A girl--to grow up and go through this hell!" she muttered, and her
+eyes wandered back to the window.
+
+But the Nurse was wise with the accumulated wisdom of a sex that has
+had to match strength with wile for ages, and she was not yet ready.
+She went into the little room where eleven miracles lay in eleven
+cribs, and, although they all looked exactly alike, she selected
+Claribel's without hesitation, and carried it to the mysterious room
+down the hall--which was no longer a torture-chamber, but a
+resplendently white place, all glass and tile and sunlight, and
+where she did certain things that are not prescribed in the hospital
+rules.
+
+First of all, she opened a cupboard and took out a baby dress of
+lace and insertion,--and everybody knows that such a dress is used
+only when a hospital infant is baptised,--and she clothed Claribel's
+baby in linen and fine raiment, and because they are very, very red
+when they are so new, she dusted it with a bit of talcum--to break
+the shock, as you may say. It was very probable that Al had never
+seen so new a baby, and it was useless to spoil the joy of
+parenthood unnecessarily. For it really was a fine child, and
+eventually it would be white and beautiful.
+
+The baby smelled of violet, for the christening-robe was kept in a
+sachet.
+
+Finally she gave it another teaspoonful of warm water and put it
+back in its crib. And then she rustled starchily back to the
+throne-chair by the record-table, and opened her Bible at the place
+where it said that Annie Petowski might sit up, and the Goldstein
+baby--bran baths, and the other thing written just below.
+
+
+III
+
+The music poured up the well of the staircase; softened by distance,
+the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty basses of the medical
+staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty.
+
+Liz sat on the top step of the stairs, with her baby in her arms;
+and, as the song went on, Liz's eyes fell to her child and stayed
+there.
+
+At three o'clock the elevator-man brought Rosie Davis along the
+hall--Rosie, whose costume betrayed haste, and whose figure, under a
+gaudy motor-coat, gave more than a suggestion of being unsupported
+and wrapper-clad. She carried a clinking silver chatelaine, however,
+and at the door she opened it and took out a quarter, extending it
+with a regal gesture to the elevator-man.
+
+"Here, old sport," she said, "go and blow yourself to a drink. It's
+Easter."
+
+Such munificence appalled the ward.
+
+Rosie was not alone. Behind her, uncomfortable and sullen, was Al.
+The ward, turning from the episode of the quarter, fixed on him
+curious and hostile eyes; and Al, glancing around the ward from the
+doorway, felt their hostility, and plucked Rosie's arm.
+
+"Gee, Rose, I'm not going in there," he said. But Rosie pulled him
+in and presented him to the Nurse.
+
+Behind the screen, Claribel, shut off from her view of the open
+window, had taken to staring at the ceiling again.
+
+When the singing came up the staircase from the chapel, she had
+moaned and put her fingers in her ears.
+
+"Well, I found him," said Rosie cheerfully. "Had the deuce of a time
+locating him." And the Nurse, apprising in one glance his stocky
+figure and heavy shoulders, his ill-at-ease arrogance, his weak, and
+just now sullen but not bad-tempered face, smiled at him.
+
+"We have a little girl here who will be glad to see you," she said,
+and took him to the screen. "Just five minutes, and you must do the
+talking."
+
+Al hesitated between the visible antagonism of the ward and the
+mystery of the white screen. A vision of Claribel as he had seen her
+last, swollen with grief and despair, distorted of figure and
+accusing of voice, held him back. A faint titter of derision went
+through the room. He turned on Rosie's comfortable back a look of
+black hate and fury. Then the Nurse gave him a gentle shove, and he
+was looking at Claribel--a white, Madonna-faced Claribel, lying now
+with closed eyes, her long lashes sweeping her cheek.
+
+The girl did not open her eyes at his entrance. He put his hat
+awkwardly on the foot of the bed, and, tiptoeing around, sat on the
+edge of the stiff chair.
+
+"Well, how are you, kid?" he asked, with affected ease.
+
+She opened her eyes and stared at him. Then she made a little clutch
+at her throat, as if she were smothering.
+
+"How did you--how did you know I was here?"
+
+"Saw it in the paper, in the society column." She winced at that,
+and some fleeting sense of what was fitting came to his aid. "How
+are you?" he asked more gently. He had expected a flood of
+reproaches, and he was magnanimous in his relief.
+
+"I've been pretty bad; I'm better."
+
+"Oh, you'll be around soon, and going to dances again. The Maginnis
+Social Club's having a dance Saturday night in Mason's Hall."
+
+The girl did not reply. She was wrestling with a problem that is as
+old as the ages, although she did not know it--why this tragedy of
+hers should not be his. She lay with her hands crossed quietly on
+her breast and one of the loosened yellow braids was near his hand.
+He picked it up and ran it through his fingers.
+
+"Hasn't hurt your looks any," he said awkwardly. "You're looking
+pretty good."
+
+With a jerk of her head she pulled the braid out of his fingers.
+
+"Don't," she said and fell to staring at the ceiling, where she had
+written her problem.
+
+"How's the--how's the kid?"--after a moment.
+
+"I don't know--or care."
+
+There was nothing strange to Al in this frame of mind. Neither did
+he know or care.
+
+"What are you goin' to do with it?"
+
+"Kill it!"
+
+Al considered this a moment. Things were bad enough now, without
+Claribel murdering the child and making things worse.
+
+"I wouldn't do that," he said soothingly. "You can put it somewhere,
+can't you? Maybe Rosie'll know."
+
+"I don't want it to live."
+
+For the first time he realised her despair. She turned on him her
+tormented eyes, and he quailed.
+
+"I'll find a place for it, kid," he said. "It's mine, too. I guess
+I'm it, all right."
+
+"Yours!" She half rose on her elbow, weak as she was. "Yours! Didn't
+you throw me over when you found I was going to have it? Yours! Did
+you go through hell for twenty-four hours to bring it into the
+world? I tell you, it's mine--mine! And I'll do what I want with it.
+I'll kill it, and myself too!"
+
+"You don't know what you're saying!"
+
+She had dropped back, white and exhausted.
+
+"Don't I?" she said, and fell silent.
+
+Al felt defrauded, ill-treated. He had done the right thing; he had
+come to see the girl, which wasn't customary in those circles where
+Al lived and worked and had his being; he had acknowledged his
+responsibility, and even--why, hang it all----
+
+"Say the word and I'll marry you," he said magnanimously.
+
+"I don't want to marry you."
+
+He drew a breath of relief. Nothing could have been fairer than his
+offer, and she had refused it. He wished Rosie had been there to
+hear.
+
+And just then Rosie came. She carried the baby, still faintly
+odorous of violets, held tight in unaccustomed arms. She looked
+awkward and conscious, but her amused smile at herself was half
+tender.
+
+"Hello, Claribel," she said. "How are you? Just look here, Al! What
+do you think of this?"
+
+Al got up sheepishly and looked at the child.
+
+"Boy or girl?" he asked politely.
+
+"Girl; but it's the living image of you," said Rose--for Rose and
+the Nurse were alike in the wiles of the serpent.
+
+"Looks like me!" Al observed caustically. "Looks like an over-ripe
+tomato!"
+
+But he drew himself up a trifle. Somewhere in his young and
+hardened soul the germs of parental pride, astutely sowed, had taken
+quick root.
+
+"Feel how heavy she is," Rose commanded. And Al held out two arms
+unaccustomed to such tender offices.
+
+"Heavy! She's about as big as a peanut."
+
+"Mind her back," said Rose, remembering instructions.
+
+After her first glance Claribel had not looked at the child. But
+now, in its father's arms, it began to whimper. The mother stirred
+uneasily, and frowned.
+
+"Take it away!" she ordered. "I told them not to bring it here."
+
+The child cried louder. Its tiny red face, under the powder, turned
+purple. It beat the air with its fists. Al, still holding it in his
+outstretched arms, began vague motions to comfort it, swinging it up
+and down and across. But it cried on, drawing up its tiny knees in
+spasms of distress. Claribel put her fingers in her ears.
+
+"You'll have to feed it!" Rose shouted over the din.
+
+The girl comprehended without hearing, and shook her head in sullen
+obstinacy.
+
+"What do you think of that for noise?" said Al, not without pride.
+"She's like me, all right. When I'm hungry, there's hell to pay if
+I'm not fed quick. Here,"--he bent down over Claribel,--"you might
+as well have dinner now, and stop the row."
+
+Not ungently, he placed the squirming mass in the baptismal dress
+beside the girl on the bed. With the instinct of ages, the baby
+stopped wailing and opened her mouth.
+
+"The little cuss!" cried Al, delighted. "Ain't that me all over?
+Little angel-face the minute I get to the table!"
+
+Unresisting now, Claribel let Rose uncover her firm white breast.
+The mother's arm, passively extended by Rose to receive the small
+body, contracted around it unconsciously.
+
+She turned and looked long at the nuzzling, eager mouth, at the red
+hand lying trustfully open on her breast, at the wrinkled face, the
+indeterminate nose, the throbbing fontanelle where the little life
+was already beating so hard.
+
+"A girl, Rose!" she said. "My God, what am I going to do with her?"
+
+Rose was not listening. The Junior Medical's turn had come at last.
+Downstairs in the chapel, he was standing by the organ, his head
+thrown back, his heavy brown hair (which would never stay parted
+without the persuasion of brilliantine) bristling with earnestness.
+
+       "_O'er all the way, green palms and blossoms gay_,"
+
+he sang, and his clear tenor came welling up the staircase to Liz,
+and past her to the ward, and to the group behind the screen.
+
+       "_Are strewn this day in festal preparation,
+         Where Jesus comes to wipe our tears away--
+         E'en now the throng to welcome Him prepare._"
+
+On the throne-chair by the record-table, the Nurse sat and listened.
+And because it was Easter and she was very happy and because of the
+thrill in the tenor voice that came up the stairs to her, and
+because of the page in the order-book about bran baths and the rest
+of it, she cried a little, surreptitiously, and let the tears drop
+down on a yellow hospital record.
+
+The song was almost done. Liz, on the stairs, had fed her baby
+twenty minutes too soon, and now it lay, sleeping and sated, in her
+lap. Liz sat there, brooding over it, and the last line of the song
+came up the staircase.
+
+      "_Blessed is He who comes bringing sal-va-a-a-ation!_"
+
+the Junior Medical sang.
+
+The services were over. Downstairs the small crowd dispersed slowly.
+The minister shook hands with the nurses at the door, and the Junior
+Medical rolled up his song and wondered how soon he could make
+rounds upstairs again.
+
+Liz got up, with her baby in her arms, and padded in to the
+throne-chair by the record-table.
+
+"He can sing some, can't he!" she said.
+
+"He has a beautiful voice." The Nurse's eyes were shining.
+
+Liz moved off. Then she turned and came back.
+
+"I--I know you'll tell me I'm a fool," she said; "but I've decided
+to keep the kid, this time. I guess I'll make out, somehow."
+
+Behind the screen, Rosie had lighted a cigarette and was smoking,
+sublimely unconscious of the blue smoke swirl that rose in telltale
+clouds high above her head. The baby had dropped asleep, and
+Claribel lay still. But her eyes were not on the ceiling; they were
+on the child.
+
+Al leaned forward and put his lips to the arm that circled the baby.
+
+"I'm sorry, kid," he said. "I guess it was the limit, all right. Do
+you hate me?"
+
+She looked at him, and the hardness and defiance died out of her
+eyes. She shook her head.
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you--still--like me a little?"
+
+"Yes," in a whisper.
+
+"Then what's the matter with you and me and the little mutt getting
+married and starting all over--eh?"
+
+He leaned over and buried his face with a caressing movement in the
+hollow of her neck.
+
+Rose extinguished her cigarette on the foot of the bed, and, careful
+of appearances, put the butt in her chatelaine.
+
+"I guess you two don't need me any more," she said yawning. "I'm
+going back home to bed."
+
+
+
+
+"ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!"
+
+
+I
+
+There are certain people who will never understand this story,
+people who live their lives by rule of thumb. Little lives they are,
+too, measured by the letter and not the spirit. Quite simple too.
+Right is right and wrong is wrong.
+
+That shadowy No Man's Land between the trenches of virtue and sin,
+where most of us fight our battles and are wounded, and even die,
+does not exist for them.
+
+The boy in this story belonged to that class. Even if he reads it he
+may not recognise it. But he will not read it or have it read to
+him. He will even be somewhat fretful if it comes his way.
+
+"If that's one of those problem things," he will say, "I don't want
+to hear it. I don't see why nobody writes adventure any more."
+
+Right is right and wrong is wrong. Seven words for a creed, and all
+of life to live!
+
+This is not a war story. But it deals, as must anything that
+represents life in this year of our Lord of Peace, with war. With
+war in its human relations. Not with guns and trenches, but with
+men and women, with a boy and a girl.
+
+For only in the mass is war vast. To the man in the trench it
+reduces itself to the man on his right, the man on his left, the man
+across, beyond the barbed wire, and a woman.
+
+The boy was a Canadian. He was twenty-two and not very tall. His
+name in this story is Cecil Hamilton. He had won two medals for
+life-saving, each in a leather case. He had saved people from
+drowning. When he went abroad to fight he took the medals along. Not
+to show. But he felt that the time might come when he would not be
+sure of himself. A good many men on the way to war have felt that
+way. The body has a way of turning craven, in spite of high
+resolves. It would be rather comforting, he felt, to have those
+medals somewhere about him at that time. He never looked at them
+without a proud little intake of breath and a certain swelling of
+the heart.
+
+On the steamer he found that a medal for running had slipped into
+one of the cases. He rather chuckled over that. He had a sense of
+humour, in spite of his seven-word creed. And a bit of superstition,
+for that night, at dusk, he went out on to the darkened deck and
+flung it overboard.
+
+The steamer had picked him up at Halifax--a cold dawn, with a few
+pinched faces looking over the rail. Forgive him if he swaggered up
+the gangway. He was twenty-two, he was a lieutenant, and he was a
+fighting man.
+
+The girl in the story saw him then. She was up and about, in a short
+sport suit, with a white tam-o'-shanter on her head and a white
+woolen scarf tucked round her neck. Under her belted coat she wore a
+middy blouse, and when she saw Lieutenant Cecil Hamilton, with
+his eager eyes--not unlike her own, his eyes were young and
+inquiring--she reached into a pocket of the blouse and dabbed her
+lips with a small stick of cold cream.
+
+Cold air has a way of drying lips.
+
+He caught her at it, and she smiled. It was all over for him then,
+poor lad!
+
+Afterward, when he was in the trenches, he wondered about that. He
+called it "Kismet" to himself. It was really a compound, that first
+day or two, of homesickness and a little furtive stirring of anxiety
+and the thrill of new adventure that was in his blood.
+
+On the second afternoon out they had tea together, she in her
+steamer chair and he calmly settled next to her, in a chair
+belonging to an irritated English lawyer. Afterward he went down to
+his cabin, hung round with his new equipment, and put away the
+photograph of a very nice Toronto girl, which had been propped up
+back of his hairbrushes.
+
+They got rather well acquainted that first day.
+
+"You know," he said, with his cup in one hand and a rather stale
+cake in the other, "it's awfully bully of you to be so nice to me."
+
+She let that go. She was looking, as a matter of fact, after a tall
+man with heavily fringed eyes and English clothes, who had just gone
+by.
+
+"You know," he confided--he frequently prefaced his speeches with
+that--"I was horribly lonely when I came up the gangway. Then I saw
+you, and you were smiling. It did me a lot of good."
+
+"I suppose I really should not have smiled." She came back to him
+with rather an effort. "But you caught me, you know. It wasn't
+rouge. It was cold cream. I'll show you."
+
+She unbuttoned her jacket, against his protest, and held out the
+little stick. He took it and looked at it.
+
+"You don't need even this," he said rather severely. He disapproved
+of cosmetics. "You have a lovely mouth."
+
+"It's rather large. Don't you think so?"
+
+"It's exactly right."
+
+He was young, and as yet more interested in himself than in anything
+in the world. So he sat there and told her who he was, and what he
+hoped to do and, rather to his own astonishment, about the medals.
+
+"How very brave you are!" she said.
+
+That made him anxious. He hoped she did not think he was swanking.
+It was only that he did not make friends easily, and when he did
+meet somebody he liked he was apt to forget and talk too much about
+himself. He was so afraid that he gulped down his tepid tea in a
+hurry and muttered something about letters to write, and got himself
+away. The girl stared after him with a pucker between her eyebrows.
+And the tall man came and took the place he vacated.
+
+Things were worrying the girl--whose name, by the way, was Edith. On
+programs it was spelled "Edythe," but that was not her fault. Yes,
+on programs--Edythe O'Hara. The business manager had suggested
+deHara, but she had refused. Not that it mattered much. She had been
+in the chorus. She had a little bit of a voice, rather sweet, and
+she was divinely young and graceful.
+
+In the chorus she would have remained, too, but for one of those
+queer shifts that alter lives. A girl who did a song and an
+eccentric dance had wrenched her knee, and Edith had gone on in her
+place. Something of her tomboy youth remained in her, and for a few
+minutes, as she frolicked over the stage, she was a youngster,
+dancing to her shadow.
+
+She had not brought down the house, but a man with heavily fringed
+eyes, who watched her from the wings, made a note of her name. He
+was in America for music-hall material for England, and he was
+shrewd after the manner of his kind. Here was a girl who frolicked
+on the stage. The English, accustomed to either sensuous or sedate
+dancing, would fall hard for her, he decided. Either that, or she
+would go "bla." She was a hit or nothing.
+
+And that, in so many words, he told her that afternoon.
+
+"Feeling all right?" he asked her.
+
+"Better than this morning. The wind's gone down, hasn't it?"
+
+He did not answer her. He sat on the side of the chair and looked
+her over.
+
+"You want to keep well," he warned her. "The whole key to your doing
+anything is vitality. That's the word--Life."
+
+She smiled. It seemed so easy. Life? She was full-fed with the joy
+of it. Even as she sat, her active feet in their high-heeled shoes
+were aching to be astir.
+
+"Working in the gymnasium?" he demanded.
+
+"Two hours a day, morning and evening. Feel."
+
+She held out her arm to him, and he felt its small, rounded muscle,
+with a smile. But his heavily fringed eyes were on her face, and he
+kept his hold until she shook it off.
+
+"Who's the soldier boy?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Lieutenant Hamilton. He's rather nice. Don't you think so?"
+
+"He'll do to play with on the trip. You'll soon lose him in London."
+
+The winter darkness closed down round them. Stewards were busy
+closing ports and windows with fitted cardboards. Through the night
+the ship would travel over the dangerous lanes of the sea with only
+her small port and starboard lights. A sense of exhilaration
+possessed Edith. This hurling forward over black water, this sense
+of danger, visualised by precautions, this going to something new
+and strange, set every nerve to jumping. She threw back her rug, and
+getting up went to the rail. Lethway, the manager, followed her.
+
+"Nervous, aren't you?"
+
+"Not frightened, anyhow."
+
+It was then that he told her how he had sized the situation up. She
+was a hit or nothing.
+
+"If you go all right," he said, "you can have the town. London's for
+you or against you, especially if you're an American. If you go
+flat----"
+
+"Then what?"
+
+She had not thought of that. What would she do then? Her salary was
+not to begin until the performances started. Her fare and expenses
+across were paid, but how about getting back? Even at the best her
+salary was small. That had been one of her attractions to Lethway.
+
+"I'll have to go home, of course," she said. "If they don't like me,
+and decide in a hurry, I--I may have to borrow money from you to get
+back."
+
+"Don't worry about that." He put a hand over hers as it lay on the
+rail, and when she made no effort to release it he bent down and
+kissed her warm fingers. "Don't you worry about that," he repeated.
+
+She did worry, however. Down in her cabin, not so tidy as the
+boy's--littered with her curiously anomalous belongings, a great
+bunch of violets in the wash bowl, a cheap toilet set, elaborate
+high-heeled shoes, and a plain muslin nightgown hanging to the
+door--down there she opened her trunk and got out her contract.
+There was nothing in it about getting back home.
+
+For a few minutes she was panicky. Her hands shook as she put the
+document away. She knew life with all the lack of illusion of two
+years in the chorus. Even Lethway--not that she minded his casual
+caress on the deck. She had seen a lot of that. It meant nothing.
+Stage directors either bawled you out or petted you. That was part
+of the business.
+
+But to-night, all day indeed, there had been something in Lethway's
+face that worried her. And there were other things.
+
+The women on the boat replied coldly to her friendly advances. She
+had spoken to a nice girl, her own age or thereabouts, and the
+girl's mother or aunt or chaperon, whoever it was, had taken her
+away. It had puzzled her at the time. Now she knew. The crowd that
+had seen her off, from the Pretty Coquette Company--that had queered
+her, she decided. That and Lethway.
+
+None of the girls had thought it odd that she should cross the ocean
+with Lethway. They had been envious, as a matter of fact. They had
+brought her gifts, the queer little sachets and fruit and boxes of
+candy that littered the room. In that half hour before sailing they
+had chattered about her, chorus unmistakably, from their smart,
+cheap little hats to their short skirts and fancy shoes. Her
+roommate, Mabel, had been the only one she had hated to leave. And
+Mabel had queered her, too, with her short-bobbed yellow hair.
+
+She did a reckless thing that night, out of pure defiance. It was a
+winter voyage in wartime. The night before the women had gone down,
+sedately dressed, to dinner. The girl she had tried to speak to had
+worn a sweater. So Edith dressed for dinner.
+
+She whitened her neck and arms with liquid powder, and slicked up
+her brown hair daringly smooth and flat. Then she put on her one
+evening dress, a black net, and pinned on her violets. She rouged
+her lips a bit too.
+
+The boy, meeting her on the companionway, gasped.
+
+That night he asked permission to move over to her table, and after
+that the three of them ate together, Lethway watching and saying
+little, the other two chattering. They were very gay. They gambled
+to the extent of a quarter each, on the number of fronds, or
+whatever they are, in the top of a pineapple that Cecil ordered in,
+and she won. It was delightful to gamble, she declared, and put the
+fifty cents into a smoking-room pool.
+
+The boy was clearly infatuated. She looked like a debutante, and,
+knowing it, acted the part. It was not acting really. Life had only
+touched her so far, and had left no mark. When Lethway lounged away
+to an evening's bridge Cecil fetched his military cape and they went
+on deck.
+
+"I'm afraid it's rather lonely for you," he said. "It's always like
+this the first day or two. Then the women warm up and get friendly."
+
+"I don't want to know them. They are a stupid-looking lot. Did you
+ever see such clothes?"
+
+"You are the only person who looks like a lady to-night," he
+observed. "You look lovely. I hope you don't mind my saying it?"
+
+She was a downright young person, after all. And there was something
+about the boy that compelled candour. So, although she gathered
+after a time that he did not approve of chorus girls, was even
+rather skeptical about them and believed that the stage should be an
+uplifting influence, she told him about herself that night.
+
+It was a blow. He rallied gallantly, but she could see him
+straggling to gain this new point of view.
+
+"Anyhow," he said at last, "you're not like the others." Then
+hastily: "I don't mean to offend you when I say that, you know. Only
+one can tell, to look at you, that you are different." He thought
+that sounded rather boyish, and remembered that he was going to the
+war, and was, or would soon be, a fighting man. "I've known a lot of
+girls," he added rather loftily. "All sorts of girls."
+
+It was the next night that Lethway kissed her. He had left her alone
+most of the day, and by sheer gravitation of loneliness she and the
+boy drifted together. All day long they ranged the ship, watched a
+boxing match in the steerage, fed bread to the hovering gulls from
+the stern. They told each other many things. There had been a man in
+the company who had wanted to marry her, but she intended to have a
+career. Anyhow, she would not marry unless she loved a person very
+much.
+
+He eyed her wistfully when she said that.
+
+At dusk he told her about the girl in Toronto.
+
+"It wasn't an engagement, you understand. But we've been awfully
+good friends. She came to see me off. It was rather awful. She
+cried. She had some sort of silly idea that I'll get hurt."
+
+It was her turn to look wistful. Oh, they were getting on! When he
+went to ask the steward to bring tea to the corner they had found,
+she looked after him. She had been so busy with her own worries that
+she had not thought much of the significance of his neatly belted
+khaki. Suddenly it hurt her. He was going to war.
+
+She knew little about the war, except from the pictures in
+illustrated magazines. Once or twice she had tried to talk about it
+with Mabel, but Mabel had only said, "It's fierce!" and changed the
+subject.
+
+The uniforms scattered over the ship and the precautions taken at
+night, however, were bringing this thing called war very close to
+her. It was just beyond that horizon toward which they were heading.
+And even then it was brought nearer to her.
+
+Under cover of the dusk the girl she had tried to approach came up
+and stood beside her. Edith was very distant with her.
+
+"The nights make me nervous," the girl said. "In the daylight it is
+not so bad. But these darkened windows bring it all home to me--the
+war, you know."
+
+"I guess it's pretty bad."
+
+"It's bad enough. My brother has been wounded. I am going to him."
+
+Even above the sound of the water Edith caught the thrill in her
+voice. It was a new tone to her, the exaltation of sacrifice.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said. And some subconscious memory of Mabel made
+her say: "It's fierce!"
+
+The girl looked at her.
+
+"That young officer you're with, he's going, of course. He seems
+very young. My brother was older. Thirty."
+
+"He's twenty-two."
+
+"He has such nice eyes," said the girl. "I wish----"
+
+But he was coming back, and she slipped away.
+
+During tea Cecil caught her eyes on him more than once. He had taken
+off his stiff-crowned cap, and the wind blew his dark hair round.
+
+"I wish you were not going to the war," she said unexpectedly. It
+had come home to her, all at once, the potentialities of that trim
+uniform. It made her a little sick.
+
+"It's nice of you to say that."
+
+There was a new mood on her, of confession, almost of consecration.
+He asked her if he might smoke. No one in her brief life had ever
+before asked her permission to smoke.
+
+"I'll have to smoke all I can," he said. "The fellows say cigarettes
+are scarce in the trenches. I'm taking a lot over."
+
+He knew a girl who smoked cigarettes, he said. She was a nice girl
+too. He couldn't understand it. The way he felt about it, maybe
+a cigarette for a girl wasn't a crime. But it led to other
+things--drinking, you know, and all that.
+
+"The fellows don't respect a girl that smokes," he said. "That's the
+plain truth. I've talked to her a lot about it."
+
+"It wasn't your friend in Toronto, was it?"
+
+"Good heavens, no!" He repudiated the idea with horror.
+
+It was the girl who had to readjust her ideas of life that day. She
+had been born and raised in that neutral ground between the lines of
+right and wrong, and now suddenly her position was attacked and she
+must choose sides. She chose.
+
+"I've smoked a cigarette now and then. If you think it is wrong I'll
+not do it any more."
+
+He was almost overcome, both at the confession and at her
+renunciation. To tell the truth, among the older Canadian officers
+he had felt rather a boy. Her promise reinstated him in his own
+esteem. He was a man, and a girl was offering to give something up
+if he wished it. It helped a lot.
+
+That evening he laid out his entire equipment in his small cabin,
+and invited her to see it. He put his mother's picture behind his
+brushes, where the other one had been, and when all was ready he
+rang for a stewardess.
+
+"I am going to show a young lady some of my stuff," he explained.
+"And as she is alone I wish you'd stay round, will you? I want her
+to feel perfectly comfortable."
+
+The stewardess agreed, and as she was an elderly woman, with a son
+at the front, a boy like Cecil, she went back to her close little
+room over the engines and cried a little, very quietly.
+
+It was unfortunate that he did not explain the presence of the
+stewardess to the girl. For when it was all over, and she had stood
+rather awed before his mother's picture, and rather to his surprise
+had smoothed her hair with one of his brushes, she turned to him
+outside the door.
+
+"That stewardess has a lot of nerve," she said. "The idea of
+standing in the doorway, rubbering!"
+
+"I asked her," he explained. "I thought you'd prefer having some one
+there."
+
+She stared at him.
+
+
+II
+
+Lethway had won the ship's pool that day. In the evening he played
+bridge, and won again. He had been drinking a little. Not much, but
+enough to make him reckless.
+
+For the last rubber or two the thought of Edith had obsessed him,
+her hand on the rail as he had kissed it, her cool eyes that were at
+once so wise and so ignorant, her lithe body in the short skirt and
+middy blouse. He found her more alluring, so attired, than she had
+been in the scant costume of what to him was always "the show."
+
+He pondered on that during all of a dummy hand, sitting low in his
+chair with his feet thrust far under the table. The show business
+was going to the bad. Why? Because nobody connected with it knew
+anything about human nature. He formulated a plan, compounded of
+liquor and real business acumen, of dressing a chorus, of suggesting
+the feminine form instead of showing it, of veiling it in chiffons
+of soft colours and sending a draft of air from electric fans in the
+wings to set the chiffons in motion.
+
+"Like the Aurora," he said to himself. "Only not so beefy. Ought to
+be a hit. Pretty? It will be the real thing!"
+
+The thought of Edith in such a costume, playing like a dryad over
+the stage, stayed with him when the dummy hand had been played and
+he had been recalled to the game by a thump on the shoulder. Edith
+in soft, pastel-coloured chiffons, dancing in bare feet to light
+string music. A forest setting, of course. Pan. A goat or two. All
+that sort of thing.
+
+On his way down to his cabin he passed her door. He went on,
+hesitated, came back and knocked.
+
+Now Edith had not been able to sleep. Her thrifty soul, trained
+against waste, had urged her not to fling her cigarettes overboard,
+but to smoke them.
+
+"And then never again," she said solemnly.
+
+The result was that she could not get to sleep. Blanketed to the
+chin she lay in her bunk, reading. The book had been Mabel's
+farewell offering, a thing of perverted ideals, or none, of cheap
+sentiment, of erotic thought overlaid with words. The immediate
+result of it, when she yawned at last and turned out the light over
+her bed, was a new light on the boy.
+
+"Little prig!" she said to herself, and stretched her round arms
+luxuriously above her head.
+
+Then Lethway rapped. She sat up and listened. Then, grumbling, she
+got out and opened the door an inch or two. The lights were low
+outside and her own cabin dark. But she knew him.
+
+"Are we chased?" she demanded. In the back of her mind, fear of
+pursuit by a German submarine was dogging her across the Atlantic.
+
+"Sure we are!" he said. "What are you so stingy about the door for?"
+
+She recognised his condition out of a not inconsiderable experience
+and did her best to force the door shut, but he put his foot over
+the sill and smiled.
+
+"Please go away, Mr. Lethway."
+
+"I'll go if you'll kiss me good night."
+
+She calculated the situation, and surrendered. There was nothing
+else to do. But when she upturned her face he slipped past her and
+into the room. Just inside the door, swinging open and shut with
+every roll of the ship, he took her in his arms and kissed her, not
+once but many times.
+
+She did not lose her head. She had an arm free and she rang the
+bell. Then she jerked herself loose.
+
+"I have rung for the stewardess," she said furiously. "If you are
+here when she comes I'll ask for help."
+
+"You young devil!" was all he said, and went, slamming the door
+behind him. His rage grew as he reached his own cabin. Damn the
+girl, anyhow! He had not meant anything. Here he was, spending money
+he might never get back to give her a chance, and she called the
+stewardess because he kissed her!
+
+As for the girl, she went back to bed. For a few moments sheer rage
+kept her awake. Then youth and fatigue triumphed and she fell
+asleep. Her last thought was of the boy, after all. "He wouldn't do
+a thing like that," she reflected. "He's a gentleman. He's the real
+thing. He's----"
+
+Her eyes closed.
+
+Lethway apologised the next day, apologised with an excess of manner
+that somehow made the apology as much of an insult as the act. But
+she matched him at that game--took her cue from him, even went him
+one better as to manner. When he left her he had begun to feel that
+she was no unworthy antagonist. The game would be interesting. And
+she had the advantage, if she only knew it. Back of his desire to
+get back at her, back of his mocking smile and half-closed eyes, he
+was just a trifle mad about her since the night before.
+
+That is the way things stood when they reached the Mersey. Cecil was
+in love with the girl. Very earnestly in love. He did not sleep at
+night for thinking about her. He remembered certain semi-harmless
+escapades of his college days, and called himself unworthy and
+various other things. He scourged himself by leaving her alone in
+her steamer chair and walking by at stated intervals. Once, in a
+white sweater over a running shirt, he went to the gymnasium and
+found her there. She had on a "gym" suit of baggy bloomers and the
+usual blouse. He backed away from the door hastily.
+
+At first he was jealous of Lethway. Then that passed. She confided
+to him that she did not like the manager. After that he was sorry
+for him. He was sorry for any one she did not like. He bothered
+Lethway by walking the deck with him and looking at him with what
+Lethway refused to think was compassion.
+
+But because, contrary to the boy's belief, none of us is quite good
+or quite evil, he was kind to the boy. The khaki stood for something
+which no Englishman could ignore.
+
+"Poor little devil!" he said on the last day in the smoking room,
+"he's going to a bad time, all right. I was in Africa for eight
+years. Boer war and the rest of it. Got run through the thigh in a
+native uprising, and they won't have me now. But Africa was cheery
+to this war."
+
+He asked the boy into the smoking room, which he had hitherto
+avoided. He had some queer idea that he did not care to take his
+uniform in there. Absurd, of course. It made him rather lonely in
+the hours Edith spent in her cabin, preparing variations of costume
+for the evening out of her small trunk. But he was all man, and he
+liked the society of men; so he went at last, with Lethway, and
+ordered vichy!
+
+He had not allowed himself to think much beyond the end of the
+voyage. As the ship advanced, war seemed to slip beyond the edge of
+his horizon. Even at night, as he lay and tossed, his thoughts were
+either of the next day, when he would see Edith again, or of that
+indefinite future when he would return, covered with honors, and go
+to her, wherever she was.
+
+He never doubted the honors now. He had something to fight for. The
+medals in their cases looked paltry to him, compared with what was
+coming. In his sleep he dreamed of the V.C., dreams he was too
+modest to put into thoughts in waking hours.
+
+Then they reached the Mersey. On the last evening of the voyage he
+and Edith stood on the upper deck. It was a zone of danger. From
+each side of the narrowing river flashlights skimmed the surface of
+the water, playing round but never on the darkened ship. Red and
+green lights blinked signals. Their progress was a devious one
+through the mine-strewn channel. There was a heavy sea even there,
+and the small lights on the mast on the pilot boat, as it came to a
+stop, described great arcs that seemed, first to starboard, then to
+port, to touch the very tips of the waves.
+
+"I'm not crazy about this," the girl said, as the wind tugged at her
+skirts. "It frightens me. Brings the war pretty close, doesn't it?"
+
+Emotion swelled his heart and made him husky--love and patriotism,
+pride and hope, and a hot burst of courage.
+
+"What if we strike a mine?" she asked.
+
+"I wouldn't care so much. It would give me a chance to save you."
+
+Overhead they were signalling the shore with a white light. Along
+with the new emotions that were choking him came an unaccustomed
+impulse of boastfulness.
+
+"I can read that," he said when she ignored his offer to save her.
+"Of course it's code, but I can spell it out."
+
+He made a move to step forward and watch the signaler, but she put
+her hand on his arm.
+
+"Don't go. I'm nervous, Cecil," she said.
+
+She had called him by his first name. It shook him profoundly, that
+and the touch of her hand on his arm.
+
+"Oh, I love you, love you!" he said hoarsely. But he did not try to
+take her in his arms, or attempt to caress the hand that still clung
+to him. He stood very erect, looking at the shadowy outline of her.
+Then, her long scarf blowing toward him, he took the end of it and
+kissed that very gravely.
+
+"I would die for you," he said.
+
+Then Lethway joined them.
+
+
+III
+
+London was not kind to him. He had felt, like many Canadians, that
+in going to England he was going home. But England was cold.
+
+Not the people on the streets. They liked the Canadians and they
+cheered them when their own regiments went by unhailed. It appealed
+to their rampant patriotism that these men had come from across the
+sea to join hands with them against common foe. But in the clubs,
+where his letters admitted the boy, there was a different
+atmosphere. Young British officers were either cool or, much worse,
+patronising. They were inclined to suspect that his quiet confidence
+was swanking. One day at luncheon he drank a glass of wine, not
+because he wanted it but because he did not like to refuse. The
+result was unfortunate. It loosened his tongue a bit, and he
+mentioned the medals.
+
+Not noisily, of course. In an offhand manner, to his next neighbor.
+It went round the table, and a sort of icy silence, after that,
+greeted his small sallies. He never knew what the trouble was, but
+his heart was heavy in him.
+
+And it rained.
+
+It was always raining. He had very little money beyond his pay, and
+the constant hiring of taxicabs worried him. Now and then he saw
+some one he knew, down from Salisbury for a holiday, but they had
+been over long enough to know their way about. They had engagements,
+things to buy. He fairly ate his heart out in sheer loneliness.
+
+There were two hours in the day that redeemed the others. One was
+the hour late in the afternoon when, rehearsal over, he took Edith
+O'Hara to tea. The other was just before he went to bed, when he
+wrote her the small note that reached her every morning with her
+breakfast.
+
+In the seven days before he joined his regiment at Salisbury he
+wrote her seven notes. They were candid, boyish scrawls, not love
+letters at all. This was one of them:
+
+      _Dear Edith_: I have put in a rotten evening and am just
+      going to bed. I am rather worried because you looked so
+      tired to-day. Please don't work too hard.
+
+      I am only writing to say how I look forward each night to
+      seeing you the next day. I am sending with this a small
+      bunch of lilies of the valley. They remind me of you.
+                                                  CECIL.
+
+The girl saved those letters. She was not in love with him, but he
+gave her something no one else had ever offered: a chivalrous
+respect that pleased as well as puzzled her.
+
+Once in a tea shop he voiced his creed, as it pertained to her, over
+a plate of muffins.
+
+"When we are both back home, Edith," he said, "I am going to ask you
+something."
+
+"Why not now?"
+
+"Because it wouldn't be quite fair to you. I--I may be killed, or
+something. That's one thing. Then, it's because of your people."
+
+That rather stunned her. She had no people. She was going to tell
+him that, but she decided not to. She felt quite sure that he
+considered "people" essential, and though she felt that, for any
+long period of time, these queer ideas and scruples of his would be
+difficult to live up to, she intended to do it for that one week.
+
+"Oh, all right," she said, meekly enough.
+
+She felt very tender toward him after that, and her new gentleness
+made it all hard for him. She caught him looking at her wistfully at
+times, and it seemed to her that he was not looking well. His eyes
+were hollow, his face thin. She put her hand over his as it lay on
+the table.
+
+"Look here," she said, "you look half sick, or worried, or
+something. Stop telling me to take care of myself, and look after
+yourself a little better."
+
+"I'm all right," he replied. Then soon after: "Everything's strange.
+That's the trouble," he confessed. "It's only in little things that
+don't matter, but a fellow feels such a duffer."
+
+On the last night he took her to dinner--a small French restaurant
+in a back street in Soho. He had heard about it somewhere. Edith
+classed it as soon as she entered. It was too retiring, too demure.
+Its very location was clandestine.
+
+But he never knew. He was divided that night between joy at getting
+to his regiment and grief at leaving her. Rather self-engrossed, she
+thought.
+
+They had a table by an open grate fire, with a screen "to shut off
+the draft," the waiter said. It gave the modest meal a delightfully
+homey air, their isolation and the bright coal fire. For the first
+time they learned the joys of mussels boiled in milk, of French
+_soufflé_ and other things.
+
+At the end of the evening he took her back to her cheap hotel in a
+taxicab. She expected him to kiss her. Her experience of taxicabs
+had been like that. But he did not. He said very little on the way
+home, but sat well back and eyed her wistful eyes. She chattered to
+cover his silence--of rehearsals, of--with reservations--of Lethway,
+of the anticipated London opening. She felt very sad herself. He had
+been a tie to America, and he had been much more than that. Though
+she did not realise it, he had had a profound effect on her. In
+trying to seem what he thought her she was becoming what he thought
+her. Her old reckless attitude toward life was gone, or was going.
+
+The day before she had refused an invitation to a night club, and
+called herself a fool for doing it. But she had refused.
+
+Not that he had performed miracles with her. She was still frankly a
+dweller on the neutral ground. But to that instinct that had kept
+her up to that time what she would have called "straight" had been
+added a new refinement. She was no longer the reckless and romping
+girl whose abandon had caught Lethway's eye.
+
+She had gained a soul, perhaps, and lost a livelihood.
+
+When they reached the hotel he got out and went in with her. The
+hall porter was watching and she held out her hand. But he shook his
+head.
+
+"If I touched your hand," he said, "I would have to take you in my
+arms. Good-bye, dear."
+
+"Good-bye," she said. There were tears in her eyes. It was through a
+mist that she saw him, as the elevator went up, standing at salute,
+his eyes following her until she disappeared from sight.
+
+
+IV
+
+Things were going wrong with Lethway. The management was ragging
+him, for one thing.
+
+"Give the girl time," he said almost viciously, at the end of a
+particularly bad rehearsal. "She's had a long voyage and she's
+tired. Besides," he added, "these acts never do go at rehearsal.
+Give me a good house at the opening and she'll show you what she can
+do."
+
+But in his soul he was worried. There was a change in Edith O'Hara.
+Even her voice had altered. It was not only her manner to him. That
+was marked enough, but he only shrugged his shoulders over it. Time
+enough for that when the production was on.
+
+He had engaged a hoyden, and she was by way of becoming a lady.
+During the first week or so he had hoped that it was only the
+strangeness of her surroundings. He had been shrewd enough to lay
+some of it, however, to Cecil's influence.
+
+"When your soldier boy gets out of the way," he sneered one day in
+the wings, "perhaps you'll get down to earth and put some life in
+your work."
+
+But to his dismay she grew steadily worse. Her dancing was delicate,
+accurate, even graceful, but the thing the British public likes to
+think typically American, a sort of breezy swagger, was gone. To
+bill her in her present state as the Madcap American would be sheer
+folly.
+
+Ten days before the opening he cabled for another girl to take her
+place.
+
+He did not tell her. Better to let her work on, he decided. A German
+submarine might sink the ship on which the other girl was coming,
+and then where would they be?
+
+Up to the last, however, he had hopes of Edith. Not that he cared to
+save her. But he hated to acknowledge a failure. He disliked to
+disavow his own judgment.
+
+He made a final effort with her, took her one day to luncheon at
+Simpson's, and in one of the pewlike compartments, over mutton and
+caper sauce, he tried to "talk a little life into her."
+
+"What the devil has come over you?" he demanded savagely. "You were
+larky enough over in New York. There are any number of girls in
+London who can do what you are doing now, and do it better."
+
+"I'm doing just what I did in New York."
+
+"The hell you are! I could do what you're doing with a jointed doll
+and some wires. Now see here, Edith," he said, "either you put some
+go into the thing, or you go. That's flat."
+
+Her eyes filled.
+
+"I--maybe I'm worried," she said. "Ever since I found out that I've
+signed up, with no arrangement about sending me back, it's been on
+my mind."
+
+"Don't you worry about that."
+
+"But if they put some one on in my place?"
+
+"You needn't worry about that either. I'll look after you. You know
+that. If I hadn't been crazy about you I'd have let you go a week
+ago. You know that too."
+
+She knew the tone, knew instantly where she stood. Knew, too, that
+she would not play the first night in London. She went rather white,
+but she faced him coolly.
+
+"Don't look like that," he said. "I'm only telling you that if you
+need a friend I'll be there."
+
+It was two days before the opening, however, when the blow fell. She
+had not been sleeping, partly from anxiety about herself, partly
+about the boy. Every paper she picked up was full of the horrors of
+war. There were columns filled with the names of those who had
+fallen. Somehow even his uniform had never closely connected the boy
+with death in her mind. He seemed so young.
+
+She had had a feeling that his very youth would keep him from
+danger. War to her was a faintly conceived struggle between men, and
+he was a boy.
+
+But here were boys who had died, boys at nineteen. And the lists of
+missing startled her. One morning she read in the personal column a
+query, asking if any one could give the details of the death of a
+young subaltern. She cried over that. In all her care-free life
+never before had she wept over the griefs of others.
+
+Cecil had sent her his photograph taken in his uniform. Because he
+had had it taken to give her he had gazed directly into the eye of
+the camera. When she looked at it it returned her glance. She took
+to looking at it a great deal.
+
+Two days before the opening she turned from a dispirited rehearsal
+to see Mabel standing in the wings. Then she knew. The end had come.
+
+Mabel was jaunty, but rather uneasy.
+
+"You poor dear!" she said, when Edith went to her. "What on earth's
+happened? The cable only said--honest, dearie, I feel like a dog!"
+
+"They don't like me. That's all," she replied wearily, and picked
+up her hat and jacket from a chair. But Mabel was curious.
+Uncomfortable, too, as she had said. She slipped an arm round
+Edith's waist.
+
+"Say the word and I'll throw them down," she cried. "It looks like
+dirty work to me. And you're thin. Honest, dearie, I mean it."
+
+Her loyalty soothed the girl's sore spirit.
+
+"I don't know what's come over me," she said. "I've tried hard
+enough. But I'm always tired. I--I think it's being so close to the
+war."
+
+Mabel stared at her. There was a war. She knew that. The theatrical
+news was being crowded to a back page to make space for disagreeable
+diagrams and strange, throaty names.
+
+"I know. It's fierce, isn't it?" she said.
+
+Edith took her home, and they talked far into the night. She had
+slipped Cecil's picture into the wardrobe before she turned on the
+light. Then she explained the situation.
+
+"It's pep they want, is it?" said Mabel at last. "Well, believe me,
+honey, I'll give it to them. And as long as I've got a cent it's
+yours."
+
+They slept together in Edith's narrow bed, two slim young figures
+delicately flushed with sleep. As pathetic, had they known it, as
+those other sleepers in their untidy billets across the channel.
+Almost as hopeless too. Dwellers in the neutral ground.
+
+
+V
+
+Now war, after all, is to each fighting man an affair of small
+numbers, an affair of the men to his right and his left, of the
+A.M.S.C. in the rear and of a handful of men across. On his days of
+rest the horizon is somewhat expanded. It becomes then a thing of
+crowded and muddy village streets, of food and drink and tobacco and
+a place to sleep.
+
+Always, of course, it is a thing of noises.
+
+This is not a narrative of war. It matters very little, for
+instance, how Cecil's regiment left Salisbury and went to Soissons,
+in France. What really matters is that at last the Canadian-made
+motor lorries moved up their equipment, and that, after digging
+practice trenches in the yellow clay of old battlefields, they were
+moved up to the front.
+
+Once there, there seemed to be a great deal of time. It was the lull
+before Neuve Chapelle. Cecil's spirit grew heavy with waiting. Once,
+back on rest at his billet, he took a long walk over the half-frozen
+side roads and came without warning on a main artery. Three traction
+engines were taking to the front the first of the great British
+guns, so long awaited. He took the news back to his mess. The
+general verdict was that there would be something doing now.
+
+Cecil wrote a letter to Edith that day. He had written before, of
+course, but this was different. He wrote first to his mother, just
+in case anything happened, a long, boyish letter with a misspelled
+word here and there. He said he was very happy and very comfortable,
+and that if he did get his he wanted her to know that it was all
+perfectly cheerful and not anything like the war correspondents said
+it was. He'd had a bully time all his life, thanks to her. He hadn't
+let her know often enough how he felt about her, and she knew he was
+a dub at writing. There were a great many things worse than "going
+out" in a good fight. "It isn't at all as if you could see the
+blooming thing coming," he wrote. "You never know it's after you
+until you've got it, and then you don't."
+
+The letter was not to be sent unless he was killed. So he put in a
+few anecdotes to let her know exactly how happy and contented he
+was. Then he dropped the whole thing in the ten inches of mud and
+water he was standing in, and had to copy it all over.
+
+To Edith he wrote a different sort of letter. He told her that he
+loved her. "It's almost more adoration than love," he wrote, while
+two men next to him were roaring over a filthy story. "I mean by
+that, that I feel every hour of every day how far above me you are.
+It's like one of these _fusées_ the Germans are always throwing up
+over us at night. It's perfectly dark, and then something bright and
+clear and like a star, only nearer, is overhead. Everything looks
+different while it floats there. And so, my dear, my dear,
+everything has been different to me since I knew you."
+
+Rather boyish, all of it, but terribly earnest. He said he had
+wanted to ask her to marry him, but that the way he felt about it, a
+fellow had no right to ask a girl such a thing when he was going to
+a war. If he came back he would ask her. And he would love her all
+his life.
+
+The next day, at dawn, he went out with eighty men to an outpost
+that had been an abandoned farm. It was rather a forlorn hope. They
+had one machine gun. At nine o'clock the enemy opened fire on them
+and followed it by an attack. The major in charge went down early.
+At two Cecil was standing in the loft of the farmhouse, firing with
+a revolver on men who beneath him, outside, were placing dynamite
+under a corner of the building.
+
+To add to the general hopelessness, their own artillery, believing
+them all dead, opened fire on the building. They moved their wounded
+to the cellar and kept on fighting.
+
+At eight o'clock that night Cecil's right arm was hanging helpless,
+and the building was burning merrily. There were five of them left.
+They fixed bayonets and charged the open door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the boy opened his eyes he was lying in six inches of manure in
+a box car. One of his men was standing over him, keeping him from
+being trampled on. There was no air and no water. The ammonia fumes
+from the manure were stifling.
+
+The car lurched and jolted along. Cecil opened his eyes now and
+then, and at first he begged for water. When he found there was none
+he lay still. The men hammered on the door and called for air. They
+made frantic, useless rushes at the closed and barred door. Except
+Cecil, all were standing. They were herded like cattle, and there
+was no room to lie or sit.
+
+He lay there, drugged by weakness. He felt quite sure that he was
+dying, and death was not so bad. He voiced this feebly to the man
+who stood over him.
+
+"It's not so bad," he said.
+
+"The hell it's not!" said the man.
+
+For the time Edith was effaced from his mind. He remembered the
+wounded men left in the cellar with the building burning over them.
+That, and days at home, long before the war.
+
+Once he said "Mother." The soldier who was now standing astride of
+him, the better to keep off the crowding men, thought he was asking
+for water again.
+
+Thirty hours of that, and then air and a little water. Not enough
+water. Not all the water in all the cool streams of the earth would
+have slaked the thirst of his wound.
+
+The boy was impassive. He was living in the past. One day he recited
+at great length the story of his medals. No one listened.
+
+And all the time his right arm lay or hung, as he was prone or
+erect, a strange right arm that did not belong to him. It did not
+even swell. When he touched it the fingers were cold and bluish. It
+felt like a dead hand.
+
+Then, at the end of it all, was a bed, and a woman's voice, and
+quiet.
+
+The woman was large and elderly, and her eyes were very kind. She
+stirred something in the boy that had been dead of pain.
+
+"Edith!" he said.
+
+
+VI
+
+Mabel had made a hit. Unconscious imitator that she was, she stole
+Edith's former recklessness, and added to it something of her own
+dash and verve. Lethway, standing in the wings, knew she was not and
+never would be Edith. She was not fine enough. Edith at her best
+had frolicked. Mabel romped, was almost wanton. He cut out the
+string music at the final rehearsal. It did not fit.
+
+On the opening night the brass notes of the orchestra blared and
+shrieked. Mabel's bare feet flew, her loose hair, cut to her ears
+and held only by a band over her forehead, kept time in ecstatic
+little jerks. When at last she pulled off the fillet and bowed to
+the applause, her thick short hair fell over her face as she jerked
+her head forward. They liked that. It savoured of the abandoned. She
+shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her
+scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish
+body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its passion, its
+fire.
+
+Edith had been spring, palpitant with gladness.
+
+Lethway, looking with tired eyes from the wings, knew that he had
+made a commercial success. But back of his sordid methods there was
+something of the soul of an artist. And this rebelled.
+
+But he made a note to try flame-coloured chiffon for Mabel. Edith
+was to have danced in the pale greens of a water nymph.
+
+On the night of her triumph Mabel returned late to Edith's room,
+where she was still quartered. She was moving the next day to a
+small apartment. With the generosity of her class she had urged
+Edith to join her, and Edith had perforce consented.
+
+"How did it go?" Edith asked from the bed.
+
+"Pretty well," said Mabel. "Nothing unusual."
+
+She turned up the light, and from her radiant reflection in the
+mirror Edith got the truth. She lay back with a dull, sickening
+weight round her heart. Not that Mabel had won, but that she herself
+had failed.
+
+"You're awfully late."
+
+"I went to supper. Wish you'd been along, dearie. Terribly swell
+club of some sort." Then her good resolution forgotten: "I made them
+sit up and take notice, all right. Two invitations for supper
+to-morrow night and more on the way. And when I saw I'd got the
+house going to-night, and remembered what I was being paid for it,
+it made me sick."
+
+"It's better than nothing."
+
+"Why don't you ask Lethway to take you on in the chorus? It would do
+until you get something else."
+
+"I have asked him. He won't do it."
+
+Mabel was still standing in front of the mirror. She threw her head
+forward so her short hair covered her face, and watched the effect
+carefully. Then she came over and sat on the bed.
+
+"He's a dirty dog," she said.
+
+The two girls looked at each other. They knew every move in the game
+of life, and Lethway's methods were familiar ones.
+
+"What are you going to do about it?" Mabel demanded at last.
+"Believe me, old dear, he's got a bad eye. Now listen here," she
+said with impulsive generosity. "I've got a scheme. I'll draw enough
+ahead to send you back. I'll do it to-morrow, while the drawing's
+good."
+
+"And queer yourself at the start?" said Edith scornfully. "Talk
+sense, Mabel, I'm up against it, but don't you worry. I'll get
+something."
+
+But she did not get anything. She was reduced in the next week to
+entire dependence on the other girl. And, even with such miracles of
+management as they had both learned, it was increasingly difficult
+to get along.
+
+There was a new element too. Edith was incredulous at first, but at
+last she faced it. There was a change in Mabel. She was not less
+hospitable nor less generous. It was a matter of a point of view.
+Success was going to her head. Her indignation at certain phases of
+life was changing to tolerance. She found Edith's rampant virtue a
+trifle wearing. She took to staying out very late, and coming in
+ready to meet Edith's protest with defiant gaiety. She bought
+clothes too.
+
+"You'll have to pay for them sometime," Edith reminded her.
+
+"I should worry. I've got to look like something if I'm going to go
+out at all."
+
+Edith, who had never thought things out before, had long hours to
+think now. And the one thing that seemed clear and undeniable was
+that she must not drive Mabel into debt. Debt was the curse of most
+of the girls she knew. As long as they were on their own they could
+manage. It was the burden of unpaid bills, lightly contracted, that
+drove so many of them wrong.
+
+That night, while Mabel was asleep, she got up and cautiously
+lighted the gas. Then she took the boy's photograph out of its
+hiding place and propped it on top of her trunk. For a long time she
+sat there, her chin in her hands, and looked at it.
+
+It was the next day that she saw his name among the missing.
+
+She did not cry, not at first. The time came when it seemed to her
+she did nothing else. But at first she only stared. She was too
+young and too strong to faint, but things went gray for her.
+
+And gray they remained--through long spring days and eternal
+nights--days when Mabel slept all morning, rehearsed or played in
+the afternoons, was away all evening and far into the night. She did
+not eat or sleep. She spent money that was meant for food on papers
+and journals and searched for news. She made a frantic but
+ineffectual effort to get into the War Office.
+
+She had received his letter two days after she had seen his name
+among the missing. She had hardly dared to open it, but having read
+it, for days she went round with a strange air of consecration that
+left Mabel uneasy.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't look like that!" she said one morning. "You get
+on my nerves."
+
+But as time went on the feeling that he was dead overcame everything
+else. She despaired, rather than grieved. And following despair came
+recklessness. He was dead. Nothing else mattered. Lethway, meeting
+her one day in Oxford Circus, almost passed her before he knew her.
+He stopped her then.
+
+"Haven't been sick, have you?"
+
+"Me? No."
+
+"There's something wrong."
+
+She did not deny it and he fell into step beside her.
+
+"Doing anything?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head. With all the power that was in her she was
+hating his tall figure, his heavy-lashed eyes, even the familiar
+ulster he wore.
+
+"I wish you were a sensible young person," he said. But something in
+the glance she gave him forbade his going on. It was not an ugly
+glance. Rather it was cold, appraising--even, if he had known it,
+despairing.
+
+Lethway had been busy. She had been in the back of his mind rather
+often, but other things had crowded her out. This new glimpse of her
+fired him again, however. And she had a new quality that thrilled
+even through the callus of his soul. The very thing that had
+foredoomed her to failure in the theatre appealed to him strongly--a
+refinement, a something he did not analyse.
+
+When she was about to leave him he detained her with a hand on her
+arm.
+
+"You know you can always count on me, don't you?" he said.
+
+"I know I can't," she flashed back at him with a return of her old
+spirit.
+
+"I'm crazy about you."
+
+"Old stuff!" she said coolly, and walked off. But there was a tug of
+fear at her heart. She told Mabel, but it was typical of the change
+that Mabel only shrugged her shoulders.
+
+It was Lethway's shrewdness that led to his next move. He had tried
+bullying, and failed. He had tried fear, with the same lack of
+effect. Now he tried kindness.
+
+She distrusted him at first, but her starved heart was crying out
+for the very thing he offered her. As the weeks went on, with no
+news of Cecil, she accepted his death stoically at last. Something
+of her had died. But in a curious way the boy had put his mark on
+her. And as she grew more like the thing he had thought her to be
+the gulf between Mabel and herself widened. They had, at last, only
+in common their room, their struggle, the contacts of their daily
+life.
+
+And Lethway was now always in the background. He took her for quiet
+meals and brought her home early. He promised her that sometime he
+would see that she got back home.
+
+"But not just yet," he added as her colour rose. "I'm selfish,
+Edith. Give me a little time to be happy."
+
+That was a new angle. It had been a part of the boy's quiet creed to
+make others happy.
+
+"Why don't you give me something to do, since you're so crazy to
+have me hanging about?"
+
+"Can't do it. I'm not the management. And they're sore at you. They
+think you threw them down." He liked to air his American slang.
+
+Edith cupped her chin in her hand and looked at him. There was no
+mystery about the situation, no shyness in the eyes with which she
+appraised him. She was beginning to like him too.
+
+That night when she got back to Mabel's apartment her mood was
+reckless. She went to the window and stood looking at the crooked
+and chimney-potted skyline that was London.
+
+"Oh, what's the use?" she said savagely, and gave up the fight.
+
+When Mabel came home she told her.
+
+"I'm going to get out," she said without preamble.
+
+She caught the relief in Mabel's face, followed by a purely
+conventional protest.
+
+"Although," she hedged cautiously, "I don't know, dearie. People
+look at things sensibly these days. You've got to live, haven't you?
+They're mighty quick to jail a girl who tries to jump in the river
+when she's desperate."
+
+"I'll probably end there. And I don't much care."
+
+Mabel gave her a good talking to about that. Her early training had
+been in a church which regarded self-destruction as a cardinal sin.
+Then business acumen asserted itself:
+
+"He'll probably put you on somewhere. He's crazy about you, Ede."
+
+But Edith was not listening. She was standing in front of her opened
+trunk tearing into small pieces something that had been lying in the
+tray.
+
+
+VII
+
+Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that
+had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use
+his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land
+but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried
+feebly to move his right arm.
+
+But it was gone.
+
+At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there
+beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But
+when he looked it was not there.
+
+There was not one shock of discovery, but many. For each time he
+roused from sleep he had forgotten, and must learn the thing again.
+
+The elderly German woman stayed close. She was wise, and war had
+taught her many things. So when he opened his eyes she was always
+there. She talked to him very often of his mother, and he listened
+with his eyes on her face--eyes like those of a sick child.
+
+In that manner they got by the first few days.
+
+"It won't make any difference to her," he said once. "She'd take me
+back if I was only a fragment." Then bitterly: "That's all I am--a
+fragment! A part of a man!"
+
+After a time she knew that there was a some one else, some one he
+was definitely relinquishing. She dared not speak to him about it.
+His young dignity was militant. But one night, as she dozed beside
+him in the chair, he reached the limit of his repression and told
+her.
+
+"An actress!" she cried, sitting bolt upright. "_Du lieber_--an
+actress!"
+
+"Not an actress," he corrected her gravely. "A--a dancer. But good.
+She's a very good girl. Even when I was--was whole"--raging
+bitterness there--"I was not good enough for her."
+
+"No actress is good. And dancers!"
+
+"You don't know what you are talking about," he said roughly, and
+turned his back to her. It was almost insulting to have her assist
+him to his attitude of contempt, and to prop him in it with pillows
+behind his back. Lying there he tried hard to remember that this
+woman belonged to his hereditary foes. He was succeeding in hating
+her when he felt her heavy hand on his head.
+
+"Poor boy! Poor little one!" she said. And her voice was husky.
+
+When at last he was moved from the hospital to the prison camp she
+pinned the sleeve of his ragged uniform across his chest and kissed
+him, to his great discomfiture. Then she went to the curtained
+corner that was her quarters and wept long and silently.
+
+The prison camp was overcrowded. Early morning and late evening
+prisoners were lined up to be counted. There was a medley of
+languages--French, English, Arabic, Russian. The barracks were built
+round a muddy inclosure in which the men took what exercise they
+could.
+
+One night a boy with a beautiful tenor voice sang Auld Lang Syne
+under the boy's window. He stood with his hand on the cuff of his
+empty sleeves and listened. And suddenly a great shame filled him,
+that with so many gone forever, with men dying every minute of
+every hour, back at the lines, he had been so obsessed with himself.
+He was still bitter, but the bitterness was that he could not go
+back again and fight.
+
+When he had been in the camp a month he helped two British officers
+to escape. One of them had snubbed him in London months before. He
+apologised before he left.
+
+"You're a man, Hamilton," he said. "All you Canadians are men. I've
+some things to tell when I get home."
+
+The boy could not go with them. There would be canals to swim
+across, and there was his empty sleeve and weakness. He would never
+swim again, he thought. That night, as he looked at the empty beds
+of the men who had gone, he remembered his medals and smiled grimly.
+
+He was learning to use his left hand. He wrote letters home with it
+for soldiers who could not write. He went into the prison hospital
+and wrote letters for those who would never go home. But he did not
+write to the girl.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went back at last, when the hopelessly wounded were exchanged. To
+be branded "hopelessly wounded" was to him a stain, a stigma. It put
+him among the clutterers of the earth. It stranded him on the shore
+of life. Hopelessly wounded!
+
+For, except what would never be whole, he was well again. True,
+confinement and poor food had kept him weak and white. His legs had
+a way of going shaky at nightfall. But once he knocked down an
+insolent Russian with his left hand, and began to feel his own man
+again. That the Russian was weak from starvation did not matter. The
+point to the boy was that he had made the attempt.
+
+Providence has a curious way of letting two lives run along, each
+apparently independent of the other. Parallel lines they seem,
+hopeless of meeting. Converging lines really, destined, through long
+ages, by every deed that has been done to meet at a certain point
+and there fuse.
+
+Edith had left Mabel, but not to go to Lethway. When nothing else
+remained that way was open. She no longer felt any horror--only a
+great distaste. But two weeks found her at her limit. She, who had
+rarely had more than just enough, now had nothing.
+
+And no glory of sacrifice upheld her. She no longer believed that by
+removing the burden of her support she could save Mabel. It was
+clear that Mabel would not be saved. To go back and live on her,
+under the circumstances, was but a degree removed from the other
+thing that confronted her.
+
+There is just a chance that, had she not known the boy, she would
+have killed herself. But again the curious change he had worked in
+her manifested itself. He thought suicide a wicked thing.
+
+"I take it like this," he had said in his eager way: "life's a thing
+that's given us for some purpose. Maybe the purpose gets
+clouded--I'm afraid I'm an awful duffer at saying what I mean. But
+we've got to work it out, do you see? Or--or the whole scheme is
+upset."
+
+It had seemed very clear then.
+
+Then, on a day when the rare sun made even the rusty silk hats of
+clerks on tops of omnibuses to gleam, when the traffic glittered on
+the streets and the windows of silversmiths' shops shone painful to
+the eye, she met Lethway again.
+
+The sun had made her reckless. Since the boy was gone life was
+wretchedness, but she clung to it. She had given up all hope of
+Cecil's return, and what she became mattered to no one else.
+
+Perhaps, more than anything else, she craved companionship. In
+all her crowded young life she had never before been alone.
+Companionship and kindness. She would have followed to heel, like
+a dog, for a kind word.
+
+Then she met Lethway. They walked through the park. When he left her
+her once clear, careless glance had a suggestion of furtiveness in
+it.
+
+That afternoon she packed her trunk and sent it to an address he
+had given her. In her packing she came across the stick of cold
+cream, still in the pocket of the middy blouse. She flung it, as
+hard as she could, across the room.
+
+She paid her bill with money Lethway had given her. She had exactly
+a sixpence of her own. She found herself in Trafalgar Square late in
+the afternoon. The great enlisting posters there caught her eye,
+filled her with bitterness.
+
+"Your king and your country need you," she read. She had needed the
+boy, too, but this vast and impersonal thing, his mother country,
+had taken him from her--taken him and lost him. She wanted to stand
+by the poster and cry to the passing women to hold their men back.
+As she now knew she hated Lethway, she hated England.
+
+She wandered on. Near Charing Cross she spent the sixpence for a
+bunch of lilies of the valley, because he had said once that she was
+like them. Then she was for throwing them in the street, remembering
+the thing she would soon be.
+
+"For the wounded soldiers," said the flower girl. When she
+comprehended that, she made her way into the station. There was a
+great crowd, but something in her face made the crowd draw back and
+let her through. They nudged each other as she passed.
+
+"Looking for some one, poor child!" said a girl and, following her,
+thrust the flowers she too carried into Edith's hand. She put them
+with the others, rather dazed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To Cecil the journey had been a series of tragedies. Not his own.
+There were two hundred of them, officers and men, on the boat across
+the Channel. Blind, maimed, paralysed, in motley garments, they were
+hilariously happy. Every throb of the turbine engines was a thrust
+toward home. They sang, they cheered.
+
+Now and then some one would shout: "Are we downhearted?" And
+crutches and canes would come down on the deck to the unanimous
+shout: "No!"
+
+Folkestone had been trying, with its parade of cheerfulness, with
+kindly women on the platform serving tea and buns. In the railway
+coach to London, where the officers sat, a talking machine played
+steadily, and there were masses of flowers, violets and lilies of
+the valley. At Charing Cross was a great mass of people, and as they
+slowly disembarked he saw that many were crying. He was rather
+surprised. He had known London as a cold and unemotional place. It
+had treated him as an alien, had snubbed and ignored him.
+
+He had been prepared to ask nothing of London, and it lay at his
+feet in tears.
+
+Then he saw Edith.
+
+Perhaps, when in the fullness of years the boy goes over to the
+life he so firmly believes awaits him, the one thing he will carry
+with him through the open door will be the look in her eyes when she
+saw him. Too precious a thing to lose, surely, even then. Such
+things make heaven.
+
+"What did I tell you?" cried the girl who had given Edith her
+flowers. "She has found him. See, he has lost his arm. Look
+out--catch him!"
+
+But he did not faint. He went even whiter, and looking at Edith he
+touched his empty sleeve.
+
+"As if that would make any difference to her!" said the girl, who
+was in black. "Look at her face! She's got him."
+
+Neither Edith nor the boy could speak. He was afraid of unmanly
+tears. His dignity was very dear to him. And the tragedy of his
+empty sleeve had her by the throat. So they went out together and
+the crowd opened to let them by.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nine o'clock that night Lethway stormed through the stage
+entrance of the theatre and knocked viciously at the door of Mabel's
+dressing room. Receiving no attention, he opened the door and went
+in.
+
+The room was full of flowers, and Mabel, ready to go on, was having
+her pink toes rouged for her barefoot dance.
+
+"You've got a nerve!" she said coolly.
+
+"Where's Edith?"
+
+"I don't know and I don't care. She ran away, when I was stinting
+myself to keep her. I'm done. Now you go out and close that door,
+and when you want to enter a lady's dressing room, knock."
+
+He looked at her with blazing hatred.
+
+"Right-o!" was all he said. And he turned and left her to her
+flowers.
+
+At exactly the same time Edith was entering the elevator of a small,
+very respectable hotel in Kensington. The boy, smiling, watched her
+in.
+
+He did not kiss her, greatly to the disappointment of the hall
+porter. As the elevator rose the boy stood at salute, the fingers of
+his left hand to the brim of his shabby cap. In his eyes, as they
+followed her, was all that there is of love--love and a new
+understanding.
+
+She had told him, and now he knew. His creed was still the same.
+Right was right and wrong was wrong. But he had learned of that
+shadowy No Man's Land between the lines, where many there were who
+fought their battles and were wounded, and even died.
+
+As he turned and went out two men on crutches were passing along the
+quiet street. They recognised him in the light of the doorway, and
+stopped in front of him. Their voices rang out in cheerful unison:
+
+"Are we downhearted? No!"
+
+Their crutches struck the pavement with a resounding thump.
+
+
+
+
+THE GAME
+
+
+I
+
+The Red Un was very red; even his freckles were red rather than
+copper-coloured. And he was more prodigal than most kings, for he
+had two crowns on his head. Also his hair grew in varying
+directions, like a wheatfields after a storm. He wore a coat without
+a tail, but with brass buttons to compensate, and a celluloid collar
+with a front attached. It was the Red Un's habit to dress first and
+wash after, as saving labour; instead of his neck he washed his
+collar.
+
+The Red Un was the Chief Engineer's boy and rather more impressive
+than the Chief, who was apt to decry his own greatness. It was the
+Red Un's duty to look after the Chief, carry in his meals, make his
+bed, run errands, and remind him to get his hair cut now and then.
+It was the Red Un's pleasure to assist unassumingly in the
+surveillance of that part of the ship where the great god, Steam,
+ruled an underworld of trimmers and oilers and stokers and assistant
+engineers--and even, with reservations, the Chief. The Red Un kept a
+sharp eye on the runs and read the Chief's log daily--so much coal
+in the bunkers; so much water in the wells; so many engine-room
+miles in twenty-four hours--which, of course, are not sea miles
+exactly, there being currents and winds, and God knows what, to
+waste steam on.
+
+The Red Un, like the assistants, was becoming a bear on the speed
+market. He had learned that, just when the engines get heated enough
+to work like demons, and there is a chance to break a record and get
+a letter from the management, some current or other will show up--or
+a fog, which takes the very tripe out of the cylinders and sends the
+bridge yapping for caution.
+
+The Red Un was thirteen; and he made the Chief's bed by pulling the
+counterpane neatly and smoothly over the chaos underneath--and got
+away with it, the Chief being weary at night. Also, in odd moments
+he made life miserable for the crew. Up to shortly before, he had
+had to use much energy and all his wits to keep life in his starved
+little body; and even keeping an eye on the log and the Chief's
+hair, and slipping down into the engine room, where he had no manner
+of business, hardly used up his activities. However, he did not lie
+and he looked the Chief square in the eye, as man to man.
+
+The Chief had salvaged him out of the Hudson, when what he had taken
+for a bobbing red tomato had suddenly revealed a blue face and two
+set and desperate eyes. After that the big Scot had forgotten all
+about him, except the next day when he put on his shoes, which had
+shrunk in the drying. The liner finished coaling about that time,
+took on passengers, luggage, steamer baskets and a pilot, and,
+having stowed the first two, examined the cards on the third and
+dropped the last, was pointed, nose to the east wind, for the race.
+
+The arrow on the twin dials pointed to Stand By! for the long
+voyage--three thousand miles or so without a stop. The gong, and
+then Half Ahead!--great elbows thrust up and down, up and down; the
+grunt of power overcoming inertia, followed by the easy swing of
+limitless strength. Full Ahead!--and so off again for the great
+struggle--man's wits and the engines and the mercy of God against
+the upreaching of the sea.
+
+The Chief, who sometimes dreamed his greatness, but who ignored it
+waking, snapped his watch shut.
+
+"Eleven-eleven!" he said to the Senior Second. "Well, here's luck!"
+That is what he said aloud; to himself he always said a bit of a
+prayer, realising perhaps even more than the bridge how little man's
+wits count in the great equation. He generally said something to the
+effect that "After all, it's up to Thee, O Lord!"
+
+He shook hands with the Senior Second, which also was his habit; and
+he smiled too, but rather grimly. They were playing a bit of a
+game, you see; and so far the Chief had won all the tricks--just an
+amusing little game and nothing whatever to do with a woman; the
+Second was married, but the Chief had put all such things out of his
+head years before, when he was a youngster and sailing to the Plate.
+Out of his head, quite certainly; but who dreams of greatness for
+himself alone? So the Chief, having glanced about and run his hand
+caressingly over various fearful and pounding steel creatures, had
+climbed up the blistering metal staircase to his room at the top and
+was proceeding to put down eleven-eleven and various other things
+that the first cabin never even heard of, when he felt that he was
+being stared at from behind.
+
+Now and then, after shore leave, a drunken trimmer or stoker gets up
+to the Chief's room and has to be subdued by the power of executive
+eye or the strength of executive arm. As most Chiefs are Scots, the
+eye is generally sufficient. So the Chief, mightily ferocious,
+turned about, eye set, as one may say, to annihilate a six-foot
+trimmer in filthy overalls and a hangover, and saw--a small
+red-haired boy in a Turkish towel.
+
+The boy quailed rather at the eye, but he had the courage of nothing
+to lose--not even a pair of breeches--and everything to gain.
+
+"Please," said the apparition, "the pilot's gone, and you can't put
+me off!"
+
+The Chief opened his mouth and shut it again. The mouth, and the
+modification of an eye set for a six-foot trimmer to an eye for a
+four-foot-ten urchin in a Turkish towel, produced a certain
+softening. The Red Un, who was like the Chief in that he earned his
+way by pitting his wits against relentless Nature, smiled a
+little--a surface smile, with fear just behind.
+
+"The Captain's boy's my size; I could wear his clothes," he
+suggested.
+
+Now, back in that time when the Chief had kept a woman's picture in
+his breast pocket instead of in a drawer of his desk, there had been
+small furtive hopes, the pride of the Scot to perpetuate his line,
+the desire of a man for a manchild. The Chief had buried all that in
+the desk drawer with the picture; but he had gone overboard in his
+best uniform to rescue a wharf-rat, and he had felt a curious sense
+of comfort when he held the cold little figure in his arms and was
+hauled on deck, sputtering dirty river water and broad Scotch, as
+was his way when excited.
+
+"And where ha' ye been skulking since yesterday?" he demanded.
+
+"In the bed where I was put till last night. This morning early----"
+he hesitated.
+
+"Don't lie! Where were ye?"
+
+"In a passenger's room, under a bed. When the passengers came aboard
+I had to get out."
+
+"How did ye get here?"
+
+This met with silence. Quite suddenly the Chief recognised the
+connivance of the crew, perhaps, or of a kindly stewardess.
+
+"Who told you this was my cabin?" A smile this time, rather like the
+Senior Second's when the Chief and he had shaken hands.
+
+"A nigger!" he said. "A coloured fella in a white suit."
+
+There was not a darky on the boat. The Red Un, whose code was the
+truth when possible, but any lie to save a friend--and that's the
+code of a gentleman--sat, defiantly hopeful, arranging the towel to
+cover as much as possible of his small person.
+
+"You're lying! Do you know what we do with liars on this ship? We
+throw them overboard!"
+
+"Then I'm thinking," responded the Turkish towel, "that you'll be
+needing another Chief Engineer before long!"
+
+Now, as it happened, the Chief had no boy that trip. The previous
+one had been adopted after the last trip by a childless couple who
+had liked the shape of his nose and the way his eyelashes curled on
+his cheek. The Chief looked at the Red Un; it was perfectly clear
+that no one would ever adopt him for the shape of his nose, and he
+apparently lacked lashes entirely. He rose and took a bathrobe from
+a hook on the door.
+
+"Here," he said; "cover your legs wi' that, and say a prayer if ye'
+know wan. The Captain's a verra hard man wi' stowaways."
+
+The Captain, however, who was a gentleman and a navigator and had a
+sense of humour also, was not hard with the Red Un. It being
+impracticable to take the boy to him, the great man made a special
+visit to the boy. The Red Un, in the Chief's bathrobe, sat on a
+chair, with his feet about four inches from the floor, and returned
+the Captain's glare with wide blue eyes.
+
+"Is there any reason, young man, why I shouldn't order you to the
+lockup for the balance of this voyage?" the Captain demanded, extra
+grim, and trying not to smile.
+
+"Well," said the Red Un, wiggling his legs nervously, "you'd have to
+feed me, wouldn't you? And I might as well work for my keep."
+
+This being a fundamental truth on which most economics and all
+governments are founded, and the Captain having a boy of his own at
+home, he gave a grudging consent, for the sake of discipline, to the
+Red Un's working for his keep as the Chief's boy, and left. Outside
+the door he paused.
+
+"The little devil's starved," he said. "Put some meat on those
+ribs, Chief, and--be a bit easy with him!"
+
+This last was facetious, the Chief being known to have the heart of
+a child.
+
+So the Red Un went on the payroll of the line, and requisition was
+made on the storekeeper for the short-tailed coat and the long
+trousers, and on the barber for a hair-cut. And in some curious way
+the Red Un and the Chief hit it off. It might have been a matter of
+red blood or of indomitable spirit.
+
+Spirit enough and to spare had the Red Un. On the trip out he had
+licked the Captain's boy and the Purser's boy; on the incoming trip
+he had lashed the Doctor's boy to his triumphant mast, and only
+three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting
+hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his
+attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.
+
+He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every
+corner of the ship--called the engines by name and the men by
+epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior
+Second's best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the
+eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge.
+
+"Aw, gwan!" he said to the Captain's boy. "Where'd you and your Old
+Man be but for us? In a blasted steel tank, floating about on the
+bloomin' sea! What's a ship without insides?"
+
+The Captain's boy, who was fourteen, and kept his bath sponge in a
+rubber bag, and shaved now and then with the Captain's razor,
+retorted in kind.
+
+"You fellows below think you're the whole bally ship!" he said
+loftily. "Insides is all right--we need 'em in our business. But
+what'd your steel tank do, with the engines goin', if she
+wasn't bein' navigated? Steamin' in circles, like a tinklin'
+merry-go-round!"
+
+It was some seconds after this that the Purser, a well-intentioned
+but interfering gentleman with a beard, received the kick that put
+him in dry dock for two days.
+
+
+II
+
+They were three days out of New York on the Red Un's second round
+trip when the Second, still playing the game and almost despairing,
+made a strategic move. The Red Un was laying out the Chief's
+luncheon on his desk--a clean napkin for a cloth; a glass; silver; a
+plate; and the menu from the first-cabin dining saloon. The menu was
+propped against a framed verse:
+
+          _But I ha' lived and I ha' worked!
+           All thanks to Thee, Most High._
+
+And as he placed the menu, the Red Un repeated the words from
+McAndrew's hymn. It had rather got him at first; it was a new
+philosophy of life. To give thanks for life was understandable, even
+if unnecessary. But thanks for work! There was another framed card
+above the desk, more within the Red Un's ken: "Cable crossing! Do
+not anchor here!"
+
+The card worked well with the first class, resting in the Chief's
+cabin after the arduous labours of seeing the engines.
+
+The Chief was below, flat on his back in a manhole looking for a
+staccato note that did not belong in his trained and orderly chorus.
+There was grease in his sandy hair, and the cranks were only a few
+inches from his nose. By opening the door the Red Un was able to
+command the cylinder tops, far below, and the fiddley, which is the
+roof of hell or a steel grating over the cylinders to walk
+on--depending on whether one is used to it or not. The Chief was
+naturally not in sight.
+
+This gave the Red Un two minutes' leeway--two minutes for
+exploration. A drawer in the desk, always heretofore locked, was
+unfastened--that is, the bolt had been shot before the drawer was
+entirely closed. The Red Un was jealous of that drawer. In two
+voyages he had learned most of the Chief's history and, lacking one
+of his own, had appropriated it to himself. Thus it was not unusual
+for him to remark casually, as he stood behind the Chief's chair at
+dinner: "We'd better send this here postcard to Cousin Willie, at
+Edinburgh."
+
+"Ou-ay!" the Chief would agree, and tear off the postcard of the
+ship that topped each day's menu; but, so far, all hints as to this
+one drawer had been futile; it remained the one barrier to their
+perfect confidence, the fly in the ointment of the Red Un's content.
+
+Now, at last---- Below, a drop of grease in the Chief's eye set him
+wiping and cursing; over his head hammered, banged and lunged his
+great babies; in the stokehole a gaunt and grimy creature, yclept
+the Junior Second, stewed in his own sweat and yelled for steam.
+
+The Red Un opened the drawed quickly and thrust in a hand. At first
+he thought it was empty, working as he did by touch, his eye on the
+door. Then he found a disappointing something--the lid of a
+cigar-box! Under that was a photograph. Here was luck! Had the Red
+Un known it, he had found the only two secrets in his Chief's open
+life. But the picture was disappointing--a snapshot of a young
+woman, rather slim, with the face obscured by a tennis racket,
+obviously thrust into the picture at the psychological moment. Poor
+spoil this--a cigar-box lid and a girl without a face! However,
+marred as it was, it clearly meant something to the Chief. For on
+its reverse side was another stanza from McAndrew's hymn:
+
+          _Ye know how hard an idol dies,
+             An' what that meant to me--
+           E'en tak' it for a sacrifice
+             Acceptable to Thee._
+
+The Red Un thrust it back into the drawer, with the lid. If she was
+dead what did it matter? He was a literal youth--so far, his own
+words had proved sufficient for his thoughts; it is after thirty
+that a man finds his emotions bigger than his power of expressing
+them, and turns to those that have the gift. The Chief was over
+thirty.
+
+It was as he shut the drawer that he realised he was not alone. The
+alley door was open and in it stood the Senior Second. The Red Un
+eyed him unpleasantly.
+
+"Sneaking!" said the Second.
+
+"None of your blamed business!" replied the Red Un.
+
+The Second, who was really an agreeable person, with a sense of
+humour, smiled. He rather liked the Red Un.
+
+"Do you know, William," he observed--William was the Red Un's
+name--"I'd be willing to offer two shillings for an itemised
+account of what's in that drawer?"
+
+"Fill it with shillings," boasted the Red Un, "and I'll not tell
+you."
+
+"Three?" said the Second cheerfully.
+
+"No."
+
+"Four?"
+
+"Why don't you look yourself?"
+
+"Just between gentlemen, that isn't done, young man. But if you
+volunteered the information, and I saw fit to make you a present of,
+say, a pipe, with a box of tobacco----"
+
+"What do you want to know for?"
+
+"I guess you know."
+
+The Red Un knew quite well. The Chief and the two Seconds were still
+playing their game, and the Chief was still winning; but even the
+Red Un did not know how the Chief won--and as for the two Seconds
+and the Third and the Fourth, they were quite stumped.
+
+This was the game: In bad weather, when the ports are closed and
+first-class passengers are yapping for air, it is the province of
+the engine room to see that they get it. An auxiliary engine pumps
+cubic feet of atmosphere into every cabin through a series of
+airtrunks.
+
+So far so good. But auxiliaries take steam; and it is exceedingly
+galling to a Junior or Senior, wagering more than he can afford on
+the run in his watch, to have to turn valuable steam to
+auxiliaries--"So that a lot of blooming nuts may smoke in their
+bunks!" as the Third put it.
+
+The first move in the game is the Chief's, who goes to bed and
+presumably to sleep. After that it's the engine-room move, which
+gives the first class time to settle down and then shuts off the
+airpumps. Now there is no noise about shutting off the air in the
+trunks. It flows or it does not flow. The game is to see whether the
+Chief wakens when the air stops or does not. So far he had always
+wakened.
+
+It was uncanny. It was worse than that--it was damnable! Did not the
+Old Man sleep at all?--not that he was old, but every Chief is the
+Old Man behind his back. Everything being serene, and the
+engine-room clock marking twelve-thirty, one of the Seconds would
+shut off the air very gradually; the auxiliary would slow down,
+wheeze, pant and die--and within two seconds the Chief's bell would
+ring and an angry voice over the telephone demand what the several
+kinds of perdition had happened to the air! Another trick in the
+game to the Chief!
+
+It had gone past joking now: had moved up from the uncanny to the
+impossible, from the impossible to the enraging. Surreptitious
+search of the Chief's room had shown nothing but the one locked
+drawer. They had taken advantage of the Chief's being laid up in
+Antwerp with a boil on his neck to sound the cabin for hidden wires.
+They had asked the ship's doctor anxiously how long a man could do
+without sleep. The doctor had quoted Napoleon.
+
+       *       *       *       *        *
+
+"If at any time," observed the Second pleasantly, "you would like
+that cigarette case the barber is selling, you know how to get it."
+
+"Thanks, old man," said the Red Un loftily, with his eye on the
+wall.
+
+The Second took a step forward and thought better of it.
+
+"Better think about it!"
+
+"I was thinking of something else," said the Red Un, still staring
+at the wall. The Second followed his eye. The Red Un was gazing
+intently at the sign which said: "Cable crossing! Do not anchor
+here!"
+
+As the Second slammed out, the Chief crawled from his manhole and
+struggled out of his greasy overalls. Except for his face, he was
+quite tidy. He ran an eye down the port tunnel, where the shaft
+revolved so swiftly that it seemed to be standing still, to where at
+the after end came the racing of the screw as it lifted, bearded
+with scud, out of the water.
+
+"It looks like weather to-night," he observed, with a twinkle, to
+the Fourth. "There'll aye be air wanted." But the Fourth was gazing
+at a steam gauge.
+
+
+III
+
+The Red Un's story, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts--his
+temptation, his fall and his redemption. All lives are so divided: a
+step back; a plunge; and then, in desperation and despair, a little
+climb up God's ladder.
+
+Seven days the liner lay in New York--seven days of early autumn
+heat, of blistering decks, of drunken and deserting trimmers, of
+creaking gear and grime of coal-dust. The cabin which held the Red
+Un and the Purser's boy was breathless. On Sunday the four ship's
+boys went to Coney Island and lay in the surf half the afternoon.
+The bliss of the water on their thin young legs and scrawny bodies
+was Heaven. They did not swim; they lay inert, letting the waves
+move them about, and out of the depths of a deep content making
+caustic comments about the human form as revealed by the relentless
+sea.
+
+"That's a pippin!" they would say; or, "My aunt! looks at his legs!"
+They voiced their opinions audibly and were ready to back them up
+with flight or fight.
+
+It was there that the Red Un saw the little girl. She had come from
+a machine, and her mother stood near. She was not a Coney Islander.
+She was first-cabin certainly--silk stockings on her thin ankles,
+sheer white frock; no jewelry. She took a snapshot of the four
+boys--to their discomfiture--and walked away while they were still
+writhing.
+
+"That for mine!" said the Red Un in one of his rare enthusiasms.
+
+They had supper--a sandwich and a glass of beer; they would have
+preferred pop, but what deep-water man on shore drinks pop?--and
+made their way back to the ship by moonlight. The Red Un was terse
+in his speech on the car: mostly he ate peanuts abstractedly. If he
+evolved any clear idea out of the chaos of his mind it was to wish
+she had snapped him in his uniform with the brass buttons.
+
+The heat continued; the men in the stokehole, keeping up only enough
+steam for the dynamos and donkey engines, took turns under the
+ventilators or crawled up to the boatdeck at dusk, too exhausted to
+dress and go ashore. The swimmers were overboard in the cool river
+with the first shadows of night; the Quartermaster, so old that he
+dyed his hair for fear he'd be superannuated, lowered his lean body
+hand over hand down a rope and sat by the hour on a stringpiece of
+the dock, with the water laving his hairy and tattooed old breast.
+
+The Red Un was forbidden the river. To be honest, he was rather
+relieved--not twice does a man dare the river god, having once been
+crowned with his slime and water-weed. When the boy grew very hot
+he slipped into a second-cabin shower, and stood for luxurious
+minutes with streams running off his nose and the ends of his
+fingers and splashing about his bony ankles.
+
+Then, one night, some of the men took as many passengers' lifebelts
+and went in. The immediate result was fun combined with safety; the
+secondary result was placards over the ship and the dock, forbidding
+the use of the ship's lifebelts by the crew.
+
+From that moment the Red Un was possessed for the river and a
+lifebelt. So were the other three. The signs were responsible.
+Permitted, a ship's lifebelt was a subterfuge of the cowardly,
+white-livered skunks who were afraid of a little water; forbidden, a
+ship's lifebelt took on the qualities of enemy's property--to be
+reconnoitred, assaulted, captured and turned to personal advantage.
+
+That very night, then, four small bodies, each naked save for a
+lifebelt, barrelshaped and extending from breast almost to knee,
+slipped over the side of the ship with awkward splashes and
+proceeded to disport themselves in the river. Scolding tugs sent
+waves for them to ride; ferries crawled like gigantic bugs with a
+hundred staring eyes. They found the Quartermaster on a stringpiece
+immersed to the neck and smoking his pipe, and surrounded him--four
+small, shouting imps, floating barrels with splashing hands and
+kicking feet.
+
+"Gwan, ye little devils!" said the Quartermaster, clutching the
+stringpiece and looking about in the gloom for a weapon. The Red Un,
+quite safe and audacious in his cork jacket, turned over on his back
+and kicked.
+
+"Gwan yerself, Methuselah!" he sang.
+
+They stole the old man's pipe and passed it from mouth to mouth;
+they engaged him in innocent converse while one of them pinched his
+bare old toe under water, crab-fashion. And at last they prepared to
+shin up the rope again and sleep the sleep of the young, the
+innocent and the refreshed.
+
+The Chief was leaning over the rail, just above, smoking!
+
+He leaned against the rail and smoked for three hours! Eight eyes,
+watching him from below, failed to find anything in his face but
+contemplation; eight hands puckered like a washerwoman's; eight feet
+turned from medium to clean, from clean to bleached--and still the
+Chief smoked on. He watched the scolding tugs and the ferryboats
+that crawled over the top of the water; he stood in rapt
+contemplation of the electric signs in Jersey, while the ship's
+bells marked the passage of time to eternity, while the
+Quartermaster slept in his bed, while the odours of the river stank
+in their nostrils and the pressure of the ship's lifebelts weighed
+like lead on their clammy bodies.
+
+At eight bells--which is midnight--the Chief emptied his
+twenty-fourth pipe over the rail and smiled into the gloom beneath.
+
+"Ye'll better be coming up," he remarked pleasantly. "I'm for
+turning in mysel'."
+
+He wandered away; none of the watch was near. The ship was dark,
+save for her riding lights. Hand over puckered hand they struggled
+up and wriggled out of the belts; stark naked they ducked through
+passageways and alleys, and stowed their damp and cringing forms
+between sheets.
+
+The Red Un served the Chief's breakfast the next morning very
+carefully. The Chief's cantaloupe was iced; his kipper covered with
+a hot plate; the morning paper propped against McAndrew's hymn. The
+Red Un looked very clean and rather bleached.
+
+The Chief was busy; he read the night reports, which did not amount
+to much, the well soundings, and a letter from a man offering to
+show him how to increase the efficiency of his engines fifty per
+cent, and another offering him a rake-off on a new lubricant.
+
+Outwardly the Chief was calm--even cold. Inwardly he was rather
+uncomfortable: he could feel two blue eyes fixed on his back and
+remembered the day he had pulled them out of the river, and how
+fixed and desperate they were then. But what was it McAndrew said?
+"Law, order, duty an' restraint, obedience, discipline!"
+
+Besides, if the boys were going to run off with the belts some
+damned first-class passenger was likely to get a cabin minus a belt
+and might write to the management. The line had had bad luck; it did
+not want another black eye. He cleared his throat; the Red Un
+dropped a fork.
+
+"That sort of thing last night won't do, William."
+
+"N-No, sir."
+
+"Ye had seen the signs, of course?"
+
+"Yes, sir." The Red Un never lied to the Chief; it was useless.
+
+The Chief toyed with his kipper.
+
+"Ye'll understand I'd ha' preferred dealin' with the matter mysel';
+but it's--gone up higher."
+
+The Quartermaster, of course! The Chief rose and pretended to glance
+over the well soundings.
+
+"The four of ye will meet me in the Captain's room in fifteen
+minutes," he observed casually.
+
+The Captain was feeding his cat when the Red Un got there. The four
+boys lined up uncomfortably; all of them looked clean, subdued,
+apprehensive. If they were to be locked up in this sort of weather,
+and only three days to sailing time--even a fine would be better.
+The Captain stroked the cat and eyed them.
+
+"Well," he said curtly, "what have you four young imps been up to
+now?"
+
+The four young imps stood panicky. They looked as innocent as choir
+boys. The cat, eating her kipper, wheezed.
+
+"Please, sir," said the Captain's boy solicitously, "Peter has
+something in his throat."
+
+"Perhaps it's a ship's lifebelt," said the Captain grimly, and
+caught the Chief's eye.
+
+The line palpitated; under cover of its confusion the Chief,
+standing in the doorway with folded arms, winked swiftly at the
+Captain; the next moment he was more dour than ever.
+
+"You are four upsetters of discipline," said the Captain, suddenly
+pounding the table. "You four young monkeys have got the crew by the
+ears, and I'm sick of it! Which one of you put the fish in Mrs.
+Schmidt's bed?"
+
+Mrs. Schmidt was a stewardess. The Red Un stepped forward.
+
+"Who turned the deckhose into the Purser's cabin night before last?"
+
+"Please," said the Doctor's boy pallidly, "I made a mistake in the
+room. I thought----"
+
+"Who," shouted the Captain, banging again, "cut the Quartermaster's
+rope two nights ago and left him sitting under the dock for four
+hours?"
+
+The Purser's boy this time, white to the lips! Fresh panic seized
+them; it could hardly be mere arrest if he knew all this; he might
+order them hanged from a yardarm or shot at sunrise. He looked like
+the latter. The Red Un glanced at the Chief, who looked apprehensive
+also, as if the thing was going too far. The Captain may have read
+their thoughts, for he said:
+
+"You're limbs of Satan, all of you, and hanging's too good for you.
+What do you say, Chief? How can we make these young scamps lessons
+in discipline to the crew?"
+
+Everybody breathed again and looked at the Chief--who stood tall and
+sandy and rather young to be a Chief--in the doorway.
+
+"Eh, mon," he said, and smiled, "I'm aye a bit severe. Don't ask me
+to punish the bairns."
+
+The Captain sniffed.
+
+"Severe!" he observed. "You Scots are hard in the head, but soft in
+the disposition. Come, Chief--shall they walk the plank?"
+
+"Good deescipline," assented the Chief, "but it would leave us a bit
+shorthanded."
+
+"True," said the Captain gloomily.
+
+"I was thinkin'," remarked the Chief diffidently--one hates to think
+before the Captain; that's always supposed to be his job.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"That we could make a verra fine example of them and still retain
+their services. Ha' ye, by chance, seen a crow hangin' head down in
+the field, a warnin' to other mischief-makers?"
+
+"Ou-ay!" said the Captain, who had a Scotch mother. The line wavered
+again; the Captain's boy, who pulled his fingers when he was
+excited, cracked three knuckles.
+
+"It would be good deescipline," continued the Chief, "to stand the
+four o' them in ship's belt at the gangway, say for an hour, morning
+and evening--clad, ye ken, as they were during the said
+infreengements."
+
+"You're a great man, Chief!" said the Captain. "You hear that,
+lads'?"
+
+"With--with no trousers'?" gasped the Doctor's boy.
+
+"If you wore trousers last night. If not----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The thing was done that morning. Four small boys, clad only in
+ship's belts, above which rose four sheepish heads and freckled
+faces, below which shifted and wriggled eight bare legs, stood in
+line at the gangway and suffered agonies of humiliation at the hands
+of crew and dockmen, grinning customs inspectors, coalpassers, and a
+newspaper photographer hunting a human-interest bit for a Sunday
+paper. The cooks came up from below and peeped out at them; the
+ship's cat took up a position in line and came out in the Sunday
+edition as "a fellow conspirator."
+
+The Red Un, owing to an early training that had considered clothing
+desirable rather than essential, was not vitally concerned. The
+Quartermaster had charge of the line; he had drawn a mark with chalk
+along the deck, and he kept their toes to it by marching up and down
+in front of them with a broomhandle over his shoulder.
+
+"Toe up, you little varmints!" he would snap. "God knows I'd be glad
+to get a rap at you--keeping an old man down in the water half the
+night! Toe up!"
+
+Whereupon, aiming an unlucky blow at the Purser's boy, he hit the
+Captain's cat. The line snickered.
+
+It was just after that the Red Un, surmising a snap by the
+photographer on the dock and thwarting it by putting his thumb to
+his nose, received the shock of his small life. The little girl from
+Coney Island, followed by her mother, was on the pier--was showing
+every evidence of coming up the gangway to where he stood. Was
+coming! Panic seized the Red Un--panic winged with flight. He
+turned--to face the Chief. Appeal sprang to the Red Un's lips.
+
+"Please!" he gasped. "I'm sick, sick as h--, sick as a dog, Chief.
+I've got a pain in my chest--I----"
+
+Curiously enough, the Chief did not answer or even hear. He, too,
+was looking at the girl on the gangway and at her mother. The next
+moment the Chief was in full flight, ignominious flight, his face,
+bleached with the heat of the engine room and the stokehole, set as
+no emergency of broken shaft or flying gear had ever seen it. Broken
+shaft indeed! A man's life may be a broken shaft.
+
+The woman and the girl came up the gangway, exidently to inspect
+staterooms. The Quartermaster had rallied the Red Un back to the
+line and stood before him, brandishing his broomhandle. Black fury
+was in the boy's eye; hate had written herself on his soul. His
+Chief had ignored his appeal--had left him to his degradation--had
+deserted him.
+
+The girl saw the line, started, blushed, recognised the Red Un--and
+laughed!
+
+
+IV
+
+The great voyage began--began with the band playing and much waving
+of flags and display of handkerchiefs; began with the girl and her
+mother on board; began with the Chief eating his heart out over coal
+and oil vouchers and well soundings and other things; began with the
+Red Un in a new celluloid collar, lying awake at night to hate his
+master, adding up his injury each day to greater magnitude.
+
+The voyage began. The gong rang from the bridge. Stand By! said the
+twin dials. Half Ahead! Full Ahead! Full Ahead! Man's wits once more
+against the upreaching of the sea! The Chief, who knew that
+somewhere above was his woman and her child, which was not his,
+stood under a ventilator and said the few devout words with which he
+commenced each voyage:
+
+"With Thy help!" And then, snapping his watch: "Three minutes past
+ten!"
+
+The chief engineer of a liner is always a gentleman and frequently a
+Christian. He knows, you see, how much his engines can do and how
+little. It is not his engines alone that conquer the sea, nor his
+engines plus his own mother wit. It is engines plus wit plus _x_,
+and the _x_ is God's mercy. Being responsible for two quantities out
+of the three of the equation, he prays--if he does--with an eye on a
+gauge and an ear open for a cylinder knock.
+
+There was gossip in the engineers' mess those next days: the Old Man
+was going to pieces. A man could stand so many years of the strain
+and then where was he? In a land berth, growing fat and paunchy, and
+eating his heart out for the sea, or---- The sea got him one way or
+another!
+
+The Senior Second stood out for the Chief.
+
+"Wrong with him? There's nothing wrong with him," he declared. "If
+he was any more on the job than he is I'd resign. He's on the job
+twenty-four hours a day, nights included."
+
+There was a laugh at this; the mess was on to the game. Most of them
+were playing it.
+
+So now we have the Red Un looking for revenge and in idle moments
+lurking about the decks where the girl played. He washed his neck
+under his collar those days.
+
+And we have the Chief fretting over his engines, subduing drunken
+stokers, quelling the frequent disturbances of Hell Alley, which led
+to the firemen's quarters, eating little and smoking much, devising
+out of his mental disquietude a hundred possible emergencies
+and--keeping away from the passengers. The Junior Second took down
+the two parties who came to see the engine room and gave them
+lemonade when they came up. The little girl's mother came with the
+second party and neither squealed nor asked questions--only at the
+door into the stokeholes she stood a moment with dilated eyes. She
+was a little woman, still slim, rather tragic. She laid a hand on
+the Junior's arm.
+
+"The--the engineers do not go in there, do they?"
+
+"Yes, madam. We stand four-hour watches. That is the Senior Second
+Engineer on that pile of cinders."
+
+The Senior Second was entirely black, except for his teeth and the
+whites of his eyes. There was a little trouble in a coalbunker;
+they had just discovered it. There would be no visitors after this
+until the trouble was over.
+
+The girl's mother said nothing more. The Junior Second led them
+around, helping a pretty young woman about and explaining to her.
+
+"This," he said, smiling at the girl, "is a pump the men have
+nicknamed Marguerite, because she takes most of one man's time and
+is always giving trouble."
+
+The young woman tossed her head.
+
+"Perhaps she would do better if she were left alone," she suggested.
+
+The girl's mother said nothing, but, before she left, she took one
+long look about the engine room. In some such bedlam of noise and
+heat _he_ spent his life. She was wrong, of course, to pity him; one
+need not measure labour by its conditions or by its cost, but by the
+joy of achievement. The woman saw the engines--sinister, menacing,
+frightful; the man saw power that answered to his hand--conquest,
+victory. The beat that was uproar to her ears was as the throbbing
+of his own heart.
+
+It was after they had gone that the Chief emerged from the forward
+stokehole where the trouble was. He had not seen her; she would not
+have known him, probably, had they met face to face. He was quite
+black and the light of battle gleamed in his eyes.
+
+They fixed the trouble somehow. It was fire in a coalbunker, one of
+the minor exigencies. Fire requiring air they smothered it one way
+and another. It did not spread, but it did not quite die. And each
+day's run was better than the day before.
+
+The weather was good. The steerage, hanging over the bow, saw far
+below the undercurling spray, white under dark blue--the blue
+growing paler, paler still, until the white drops burst to the top
+and danced free in the sun. A Greek, going home to Crete to marry a
+wife, made all day long tiny boats of coloured paper, weighted with
+corks, and sailed them down into the sea.
+
+"They shall carry back to America my farewells!" he said, smiling.
+"This to Pappas, the bootblack, who is my friend. This to a girl
+back in America, with eyes--behold that darkest blue, my children;
+so are her eyes! And this black one to my sister, who has lost a
+child."
+
+The first class watched the spray also--as it rose to the lip of a
+glass.
+
+Now at last it seemed they would break a record. Then rain set in,
+without enough wind to make a sea, but requiring the starboard ports
+to be closed. The Senior Second, going on duty at midnight that
+night, found his Junior railing at fate and the airpumps going.
+
+"Shut 'em off!" said the Senior Second furiously.
+
+"Shut 'em off yourself. I've tried it twice."
+
+The Senior Second gave a lever a vicious tug and the pump stopped.
+Before it had quite lapsed into inertia the Chief's bell rang.
+
+"Can you beat it?" demanded the Junior sulkily. "The old fox!"
+
+The Senior cursed. Then he turned abruptly and climbed the steel
+ladder he had just descended. The Junior, who was anticipating a
+shower and bed, stared after him.
+
+The Senior thought quickly--that was why he was a Senior. He found
+the Red Un's cabin and hammered at the door. Then, finding it was
+not locked, he walked in. The Red Un lay perched aloft; the shirt of
+his small pajamas had worked up about his neck and his thin torso
+lay bare. In one hand he clutched the dead end of a cigarette. The
+Senior wakened him by running a forefinger down his ribs, much as a
+boy runs a stick along a paling fence.
+
+"Wha' ish it?" demanded the Red Un in sleepy soprano. And then "Wha'
+d'ye want?" in bass. His voice was changing; he sounded like two
+people in animated discussion most of the time.
+
+"You boys want to earn a sovereign?"
+
+The Purser's boy, who had refused to rouse to this point, sat up in
+bed.
+
+"Whaffor?" he asked.
+
+"Get the Chief here some way. You"--to the Purser's boy--"go and
+tell him the Red Un's ill and asking for him. You"--to the Red
+Un--"double up; cry; do something. Start him off for the
+doctor--anything, so you keep him ten minutes or so!"
+
+The Red Un was still drowsy, and between sleeping and waking we are
+what we are.
+
+"I won't do it!"
+
+The Senior Second held out a gold sovereign on his palm.
+
+"Don't be a bally little ass!" he said.
+
+The Red Un, waking full, now remembered that he hated the Chief; for
+fear he did not hate him enough, he recalled the lifebelt, and his
+legs, and the girl laughing.
+
+"All right!" he said. "Gwan, Pimples! What'll I have?
+Appendiceetis?"
+
+"Have a toothache," snapped the Senior Second. "Tear off a few
+yells--anything to keep him!"
+
+It worked rather well; plots have a way of being successful in
+direct proportion to their iniquity. Beneficent plots, like loving
+relatives dressed as Santa Claus, frequently go wrong; while it has
+been shown that the leakiest sort of scheme to wreck a bank will go
+through with the band playing.
+
+The Chief came and found the Red Un in agony, holding his jaw. Owing
+to the fact that he lay far back in an upper bunk, it took time to
+drag him into the light. It took more time to get his mouth open;
+once open, the Red Un pointed to a snag that should have given him
+trouble if it didn't, and set up a fresh outcry.
+
+Not until long after could the Red Un recall without shame his share
+in that night's work--recall the Chief, stubby hair erect, kind blue
+eyes searching anxiously for the offending tooth. Recall it? Would
+he ever forget the arm the Chief put about him, and him: "Ou-ay!
+laddie; it's a weeked snag!"
+
+The Chief, to whom God had denied a son of his flesh, had taken Red
+Un to his heart, you see--fatherless wharf-rat and childless
+engineer; the man acting on the dour Scot principle of chastening
+whomsoever he loveth, and the boy cherishing a hate that was really
+only hurt love.
+
+And as the Chief, who had dragged the Red Un out of eternity and was
+not minded to see him die of a toothache, took him back to his cabin
+the pain grew better, ceased, turned to fright. The ten minutes or
+so were over and what would they find? The Chief opened the door; he
+had in mind a drop of whisky out of the flask he never touched on a
+trip--whisky might help the tooth.
+
+On the threshold he seemed to scent something amiss. He glanced at
+the ceiling over his bunk, where the airtrunk lay, and then--he
+looked at the boy. He stooped down and put a hand on the boy's head,
+turning it to the light.
+
+"Tell me now, lad," he said quietly, "did ye or did ye no ha' the
+toothache?"
+
+"It's better now," sullenly.
+
+"Did ye or did ye no?"
+
+"No."
+
+The Chief turned the boy about and pushed him through the doorway
+into outer darkness. He said nothing. Down to his very depths he was
+hurt. To have lost the game was something; but it was more than
+that. Had he been a man of words he might have said that once again
+a creature he loved had turned on him to his injury. Being a Scot
+and a man of few words he merely said he was damned, and crawled
+back into bed.
+
+The game? Well, that was simple enough. Directly over his pillow, in
+the white-painted airtrunk, was a brass plate, fastened with four
+screws. In case of anything wrong with the ventilator the plate
+could be taken off for purposes of investigation.
+
+The Chief's scheme had been simplicity itself--so easy that the
+Seconds, searching for concealed wires and hidden alarm bells, had
+never thought of it. On nights when the air must be pumped, and
+officious Seconds were only waiting the Chief's first sleep to shut
+off steam and turn it back to the main engines, the Chief unlocked
+the bolted drawer in his desk. First he took out the woman's picture
+and gazed at it; quite frequently he read the words on the
+back--written out of a sore heart, be sure. And then he took out
+the cigar-box lid.
+
+When he had unscrewed the brass plate over his head he replaced it
+with the lid of the cigar-box. So long as the pumps in the engine
+room kept the air moving, the lid stayed up by suction.
+
+When the air stopped the lid fell down on his head; he roused enough
+to press a signal button and, as the air started viciously, to
+replace the lid. Then, off to the sleep of the just and the crafty
+again. And so on _ad infinitum_.
+
+Of course the game was not over because it was discovered and the
+lid gone. There would be other lids. But the snap, the joy, was gone
+out of it. It would never again be the same, and the worst of all
+was the manner of the betrayal.
+
+He slept but little the remainder of the night; and, because unrest
+travels best from soul to soul at night, when the crowding emotions
+of the day give it place, the woman slept little also. She was
+thinking of the entrance to the stokehole, where one crouched under
+the bellies of furnaces, and where the engineer on duty stood on a
+pile of hot cinders. Toward morning her room grew very close: the
+air from the ventilator seemed to have ceased.
+
+Far down in the ship, in a breathless little cabin far aft, the Red
+Un kicked the Purser's boy and cried himself to sleep.
+
+
+V
+
+The old ship made a record the next night that lifted the day's run
+to four hundred and twenty. She was not a greyhound, you see.
+Generally speaking, she was a nine-day boat. She averaged well under
+four hundred miles. The fast boats went by her and slid over the
+edge of the sea, throwing her bits of news by wireless over a
+shoulder, so to speak.
+
+The little girl's mother was not a good sailor. She sat almost all
+day in a steamer chair, reading or looking out over the rail. Each
+day she tore off the postal from the top of her menu and sent it to
+the girl's father. She missed him more than she had expected. He had
+become a habit; he was solid, dependable, loyal. He had never heard
+of the Chief.
+
+"Dear Daddy," she would write: "Having a splendid voyage so far, but
+wish you were here. The baby is having such a good time--so popular;
+and won two prizes to-day at the sports! With love, Lily."
+
+They were all rather like that. She would drop them in the mailbox,
+with a tug of tenderness for the man who worked at home. Then she
+would go back to her chair and watch the sea, and recall the heat of
+the engine room below, and wonder, wonder----
+
+It had turned warm again; the edges of the horizon were grey and at
+night a low mist lay over the water. Rooms were stifling, humid. The
+Red Un discarded pajamas and slept in his skin. The engine-room
+watch came up white round the lips and sprawled over the boat deck
+without speech. Things were going wrong in the Red Un's small world.
+The Chief hardly spoke to him--was grave and quiet, and ate almost
+nothing. The Red Un hated himself unspeakably and gave his share of
+the sovereign to the Purser's boy.
+
+The Chief was suffering from lack of exercise in the air as well as
+other things. The girl's mother was not sleeping--what with heat and
+the memories the sea had revived. On the fifth night out, while the
+ship slept, these two met on the deck in the darkness--two shadows
+out of the past. The deck was dark, but a ray from a window touched
+his face and she knew him. He had not needed light to know her;
+every line of her was written on his heart, and for him there was no
+one at home to hold in tenderness.
+
+"I think I knew you were here all the time," she said, and held out
+both hands.
+
+The Chief took one and dropped it. She belonged to the person at
+home. He had no thought of forgetting that!
+
+"I saw your name on the passenger list, but I have been very busy."
+He never lapsed into Scotch with her; she had not liked it. "Is
+your husband with you?"
+
+"He could not come just now. I have my daughter."
+
+Her voice fell rather flat. The Chief could not think of anything to
+say. Her child, and not his! He was a one-woman man, you see--and
+this was the woman.
+
+"I have seen her," he said presently. "She's like you, Lily."
+
+That was a wrong move--the Lily; for it gave her courage to put her
+hand on his arm.
+
+"It is so long since we have met," she said wistfully. "Yesterday,
+after I saw the--the place where you lived and--and work----" She
+choked; she was emotional, rather weak. Having made the situation
+she should have let it alone; but, after all, it is not what the
+woman is, but what the man thinks she is.
+
+The Chief stroked her fingers on his sleeve.
+
+"It's not bad, Lily," he said. "It's a man's job. I like it."
+
+"I believe you had forgotten me entirely!"
+
+The Chief winced. "Isn't that the best thing you could wish me?" he
+said.
+
+"Are you happy?"
+
+"'I ha' lived and I ha' worked!'" he quoted sturdily.
+
+Very shortly after that he left her; he made an excuse of being
+needed below and swung off, his head high.
+
+
+VI
+
+They struck the derelict when the mist was thickest, about two that
+morning. The Red Un was thrown out of his berth and landed, stark
+naked, on the floor. The Purser's boy was on the floor, too, in a
+tangle of bedding. There was a sickening silence for a moment,
+followed by the sound of opening doors and feet in the passage.
+There was very little speech. People ran for the decks. The Purser's
+boy ran with them.
+
+The Red Un never thought of the deck. One of the axioms of the
+engine room is that of every man to his post in danger. The Red Un's
+post was with his Chief. His bare feet scorched on the steel ladders
+and the hot floor plates; he had on only his trousers, held up with
+a belt.
+
+The trouble was in the forward stokehole. Water was pouring in from
+the starboard side--was welling up through the floor plates. The
+wound was ghastly, fatal! The smouldering in the bunker had weakened
+resistance there and her necrosed ribs had given away. The Red Un,
+scurrying through the tunnel, was met by a maddened rush of trimmers
+and stokers. He went down under them and came up bruised, bleeding,
+battling for place.
+
+"You skunks!" he blubbered. "You crazy cowards! Come back and help!"
+
+A big stoker stopped and caught the boy's arm.
+
+"You come on!" he gasped. "The whole thing'll go in a minute. She'll
+go down by the head!"
+
+He tried to catch the boy up in his arms, but the Red Un struck him
+on the nose.
+
+"Let me go, you big stiff!" he cried, and kicked himself free.
+
+Not all the men had gone. They were working like fiends. It was up
+to the bulkhead now. If it held--if it only held long enough to get
+the passengers off!
+
+Not an engineer thought of leaving his place, though they knew,
+better even than the deck officers, how mortally the ship was hurt.
+They called to their aid every resource of a business that is
+nothing but emergencies. Engines plus wit, plus the grace of
+God--and the engines were useless. Wits, then, plus Providence. The
+pumps made no impression on the roaring flood; they lifted floor
+plates to strengthen the bulkheads and worked until it was death to
+work longer. Then, fighting for every foot, the little band
+retreated to the after stokehole. Lights were out forward. The Chief
+was the last to escape. He carried an oil lantern, and squeezed
+through the bulkhead door with a wall of water behind him.
+
+The Red Un cried out, but too late. The Chief, blinded by his
+lantern, had stumbled into the pit where a floor plate had been
+lifted. When he found his leg was broken he cried to them to go on
+and leave him, but they got him out somehow and carried him with
+them as they fought and retreated--fought and retreated. He was
+still the Chief; he lay on the floor propped up against something
+and directed the fight. The something he leaned against was the
+strained body of the Red Un, who held him up and sniffled shamefaced
+tears. She was down by the head already and rolling like a dying
+thing. When the water came into the after stokehole they carried the
+Chief into the engine room--the lights were going there.
+
+There had been no panic on deck. There were boats enough and the
+lights gave every one confidence. It was impossible to see the
+lights going and believe the ship doomed. Those who knew felt the
+list of the decks and hurried with the lowering of the boats; the
+ones who saw only the lights wished to go back to their cabins for
+clothing and money.
+
+The woman sat in the Quartermaster's boat, with her daughter in her
+arms, and stared at the ship. The Quartermaster said the engineers
+were still below and took off his cap. In her feeble way the woman
+tried to pray, and found only childish, futile things to say; but in
+her mind there was a great wonder--that they, who had once been life
+each to the other, should part thus, and that now, as ever, the good
+part was hers! The girl looked up into her mother's face.
+
+"The redhaired little boy, mother--do you think he is safe?"
+
+"First off, likely," mumbled the Quartermaster grimly.
+
+All the passengers were off. Under the mist the sea rose and fell
+quietly; the boats and rafts had drawn off to a safe distance. The
+Greek, who had humour as well as imagination, kept up the spirits of
+those about him while he held a child in his arms.
+
+"Shall we," he inquired gravely, "think you--shall we pay extra to
+the company for this excursion?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The battle below had been fought and lost. It was of minutes now.
+The Chief had given the order: "Every one for himself!" Some of the
+men had gone, climbing to outer safety. The two Seconds had refused
+to leave the Chief. All lights were off by that time. The after
+stokehole was flooded and water rolled sickeningly in the
+engine-pits. Each second it seemed the ship must take its fearful
+dive into the quiet sea that so insistently reached up for her.
+With infinite labour the Seconds got the Chief up to the fiddley,
+twenty feet or less out of a hundred, and straight ladders instead
+of a steel staircase. Ten men could not have lifted him without
+gear, and there was not time!
+
+Then, because the rest was hopeless, they left him there, propped
+against the wall, with the lantern beside him. He shook hands with
+them; the Junior was crying; the Senior went last, and after he had
+gone up a little way he turned and came back.
+
+"I can't do it, Chief!" he said. "I'll stick it out with you." But
+the Chief drove him up, with the name of his wife and child. Far up
+the shaft he turned and looked down. The lantern glowed faintly
+below.
+
+The Chief sat alone on his grating. He was faint with pain. The
+blistering cylinders were growing cold; the steel floor beneath was
+awash. More ominous still, as the ship's head sank, came crackings
+and groanings from the engines below. They would fall through at the
+last, ripping out the bulkheads and carrying her down bow first.
+
+Pain had made the Chief rather dull. "'I ha' lived and I ha'
+worked!'" he said several times--and waited for the end. Into his
+stupor came the thought of the woman--and another thought of the
+Red Un. Both of them had sold him out, so to speak; but the woman
+had grown up with his heart and the boy was his by right of
+salvage--only he thought of the woman as he dreamed of her, not as
+he had seen her on the deck. He grew rather confused, after a time,
+and said: "I ha' loved and I ha' worked!"
+
+Just between life and death there comes a time when the fight seems
+a draw, or as if each side, exhausted, had called a truce. There is
+no more struggle, but it is not yet death. The ship lay so. The
+upreaching sea had not conquered. The result was inevitable, but not
+yet. And in the pause the Red Un came back, came crawling down the
+ladder, his indomitable spirit driving his craven little body.
+
+He had got as far as the boat and safety. The gripping devils of
+fear that had followed him up from the engine room still hung to his
+throat; but once on deck, with the silent men who were working
+against time and eternity, he found he could not do it. He was the
+Chief's boy--and the Chief was below and hurt!
+
+The truce still held. As the ship rolled, water washed about the
+foot of the ladder and lapped against the cylinders. The Chief tried
+desperately to drive him up to the deck and failed.
+
+"It's no place for you alone," said the Red Un. His voice had
+lost its occasional soprano note; the Red Un was a grown man.
+"I'm staying!" And after a hesitating moment he put his small,
+frightened paw on the Chief's arm.
+
+It was that, perhaps, that roused the Chief--not love of life, but
+love of the boy. To be drowned like a rat in a hole--that was not so
+bad when one had lived and worked. A man may not die better than
+where he has laboured; but this child, who would die with him rather
+than live alone! The Chief got up on his usable knee.
+
+"I'm thinking, laddie," he said, "we'll go fighting anyhow."
+
+The boy went first, with the lantern. And, painful rung by painful
+rung, the Chief did the impossible, suffering hells as he moved. For
+each foot he gained the Red Un gained a foot--no more. What he would
+not have endured for himself, the Chief suffered for the boy.
+Halfway up, he clung, exhausted.
+
+The boy leaned down and held out his hand.
+
+"I'll pull," he said. "Just hang on to me."
+
+Only once again did he speak during that endless climb in the
+silence of the dying ship, and what he said came in gasps. He was
+pulling indeed.
+
+"About--that airtrunk," he managed to say--"I'm--sorry, sir!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The dawn came up out of the sea, like resurrection. In the
+Quartermaster's boat the woman slept heavily, with tears on her
+cheeks. The Quartermaster looked infinitely old and very tired with
+living.
+
+It was the girl, after all, who spied them--two figures--one inert
+and almost lifeless; one very like a bobbing tomato, but revealing a
+blue face and two desperate eyes above a ship's lifebelt.
+
+The Chief came to an hour or so later and found the woman near, pale
+and tragic, and not so young as he had kept her in his heart. His
+eyes rested on hers a moment; the bitterness was gone, and the ache.
+He had died and lived again, and what was past was past.
+
+"I thought," said the woman tremulously--"all night I thought that
+you----"
+
+The Chief, coming to full consciousness, gave a little cry. His
+eyes, travelling past hers, had happened on a small and languid
+youngster curled up at his feet, asleep. The woman drew back--as
+from an intrusion.
+
+As she watched, the Red Un yawned, stretched and sat up. His eyes
+met the Chief's, and between them passed such a look of
+understanding as made for the two one world, one victory!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Love Stories, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
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+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
+    content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
+<meta content="pg2html (binary v0.17)"
+    name="generator" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of
+    Love Stories,
+    by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+</title>
+<style type="text/css">
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+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Love Stories, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Love Stories
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Release Date: March 26, 2005 [EBook #15473]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div style="height: 8em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+
+<hr class="long" />
+<h3>
+    THE WORKS OF
+</h3>
+<h2>
+MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
+</h2>
+<p><br /></p>
+<h1>
+LOVE STORIES
+</h1>
+<a name="image-0001"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/decoration.gif" width="56" height="60"
+alt="Title Page Decoration" />
+</center>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+<p class="center">
+<span class="sc">The Review of Reviews Company</span><br />
+ <i>Publishers</i> &nbsp;  &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="sc"> New York</span>
+</p>
+<p class="note">
+  Published by Arrangement with George H. Doran Company.
+</p>
+
+<hr class="long" />
+<p class="note2">
+<i>Copyright, 1919, By George H. Doran Company</i>
+</p>
+<p class="note2">
+<i>Copyright, 1912, 1913, 1916, by the Curtis Publishing Company</i><br />
+<i>Copyright, 1912, by The McClure Publications, Inc.</i><br />
+<i>Copyright, 1917, by The Metropolitan Magazine Co.</i>
+</p>
+
+<hr  class="long" />
+
+<h3> CONTENTS </h3>
+
+<p class="toc">i<br /><a href="#2H_4_0002">
+Twenty-Two
+</a></p>
+<p class="toc">ii<br /><a href="#2H_4_0003">
+Jane
+</a></p>
+<p class="toc">iii<br /><a href="#2H_4_0004">
+In the Pavilion
+</a></p>
+<p class="toc">iv<br /><a href="#2H_4_0005">
+God's Fool
+</a></p>
+<p class="toc">v<br /><a href="#2H_4_0006">
+The Miracle
+</a></p>
+<p class="toc">vi<br /><a href="#2H_4_0007">
+"Are We Downhearted? No!"
+</a></p>
+<p class="toc">vii<br /><a href="#2H_4_0008">
+The Game
+</a></p>
+
+<div style="height: 2em;"><br /><br /></div>
+
+
+<hr class="long" />
+
+
+<h3>
+    LOVE STORIES
+</h3>
+
+<hr class="long" />
+
+<a name="2H_4_0002"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+
+<h2>
+    TWENTY-TWO
+</h2>
+<p class="sec">
+I
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer's name was really Nella Jane Brown, but she was
+entered in the training school as N. Jane Brown. However, she meant
+when she was accepted to be plain Jane Brown. Not, of course, that
+she could ever be really plain.
+</p>
+<p>
+People on the outside of hospitals have a curious theory about
+nurses, especially if they are under twenty. They believe that they
+have been disappointed in love. They never think that they may
+intend to study medicine later on, or that they may think nursing is
+a good and honourable career, or that they may really like to care
+for the sick.
+</p>
+<p>
+The man in this story had the theory very hard.
+</p>
+<p>
+When he opened his eyes after the wall of the warehouse dropped, N.
+Jane Brown was sitting beside him. She had been practising counting
+pulses on him, and her eyes were slightly upturned and very earnest.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a strong odour of burnt rags in the air, and the man
+sniffed. Then he put a hand to his upper lip&mdash;the right hand. She
+was holding his left.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Did I lose anything besides this?" he inquired. His little
+moustache was almost entirely gone. A gust of fire had accompanied
+the wall.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Your eyebrows," said Jane Brown.
+</p>
+<p>
+The man&mdash;he was as young for a man as Jane Brown was for a
+nurse&mdash;the man lay quite still for a moment. Then:
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm sorry to undeceive you," he said. "But my right leg is off."
+</p>
+<p>
+He said it lightly, because that is the way he took things. But he
+had a strange singing in his ears.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm afraid it's broken. But you still have it." She smiled. She had
+a very friendly smile. "Have you any pain anywhere?"
+</p>
+<p>
+He was terribly afraid she would go away and leave him, so, although
+he was quite comfortable, owing to a hypodermic he had had, he
+groaned slightly. He was, at that time, not particularly interested
+in Jane Brown, but he did not want to be alone. He closed his eyes
+and said feebly:
+</p>
+<p>
+"Water!"
+</p>
+<p>
+She gave him a teaspoonful, bending over him and being careful not
+to spill it down his neck. Her uniform crackled when she moved. It
+had rather too much starch in it.
+</p>
+<p>
+The man, whose name was Middleton, closed his eyes. Owing to the
+morphia, he had at least a hundred things he wished to discuss. The
+trouble was to fix on one out of the lot.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I feel like a bit of conversation," he observed. "How about you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Then he saw that she was busy again. She held an old-fashioned
+hunting-case watch in her hand, and her eyes were fixed on his
+chest. At each rise and fall of the coverlet her lips moved. Mr.
+Middleton, who was feeling wonderful, experimented. He drew four
+very rapid breaths, and four very slow ones. He was rewarded by
+seeing her rush to a table and write something on a sheet of yellow
+paper.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Resparation, very iregular," was what she wrote. She was not a
+particularly good speller.
+</p>
+<p>
+After that Mr. Middleton slept for what he felt was a day and a
+night. It was really ten minutes by the hunting-case watch. Just
+long enough for the Senior Surgical Interne, known in the school as
+the S.S.I., to wander in, feel his pulse, approve of Jane Brown, and
+go out.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown had risen nervously when he came in, and had proffered
+him the order book and a clean towel, as she had been instructed. He
+had, however, required neither. He glanced over the record, changed
+the spelling of "resparation," arranged his tie at the mirror, took
+another look at Jane Brown, and went out. He had not spoken.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was when his white-linen clad figure went out that Middleton
+wakened and found it was the same day. He felt at once like
+conversation, and he began immediately. But the morphia did a
+curious thing to him. He was never afterward able to explain it. It
+made him create. He lay there and invented for Jane Brown a
+fictitious person, who was himself. This person, he said, was a
+newspaper reporter, who had been sent to report the warehouse fire.
+He had got too close, and a wall had come down on him. He invented
+the newspaper, too, but, as Jane Brown had come from somewhere else,
+she did not notice this.
+</p>
+<p>
+In fact, after a time he felt that she was not as really interested
+as she might have been, so he introduced a love element. He was, as
+has been said, of those who believe that nurses go into hospitals
+because of being blighted. So he introduced a Mabel, suppressing her
+other name, and boasted, in a way he afterward remembered with
+horror, that Mabel was in love with him. She was, he related,
+something or other on his paper.
+</p>
+<p>
+At the end of two hours of babbling, a businesslike person in a
+cap&mdash;the Probationer wears no cap&mdash;relieved Jane Brown, and spilled
+some beef tea down his neck.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, Mr. Middleton knew no one in that city. He had been motoring
+through, and he had, on seeing the warehouse burning, abandoned his
+machine for a closer view. He had left it with the engine running,
+and, as a matter of fact, it ran for four hours, when it died of
+starvation, and was subsequently interred in a city garage. However,
+he owned a number of cars, so he wasted no thought on that one. He
+was a great deal more worried about his eyebrows, and, naturally,
+about his leg.
+</p>
+<p>
+When he had been in the hospital ten hours it occurred to him to
+notify his family. But he put it off for two reasons: first, it
+would be a lot of trouble; second, he had no reason to think they
+particularly wanted to know. They all had such a lot of things to
+do, such as bridge and opening country houses and going to the
+Springs. They were really overwhelmed, without anything new, and
+they had never been awfully interested in him anyhow.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was not at all bitter about it.
+</p>
+<p>
+That night Mr. Middleton&mdash;but he was now officially "Twenty-two," by
+that system of metonymy which designates a hospital private patient
+by the number of his room&mdash;that night "Twenty-two" had rather a bad
+time, between his leg and his conscience. Both carried on
+disgracefully. His leg stabbed, and his conscience reminded him of
+Mabel, and that if one is going to lie, there should at least be a
+reason. To lie out of the whole cloth&mdash;&mdash;!
+</p>
+<p>
+However, toward morning, with what he felt was the entire
+pharmacop&oelig;ia inside him, and his tongue feeling like a tar roof, he
+made up his mind to stick to his story, at least as far as the young
+lady with the old-fashioned watch was concerned. He had a sort of
+creed, which shows how young he was, that one should never explain
+to a girl.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was another reason still. There had been a faint sparkle in
+the eyes of the young lady with the watch while he was lying to her.
+He felt that she was seeing him in heroic guise, and the thought
+pleased him. It was novel.
+</p>
+<p>
+To tell the truth, he had been getting awfully bored with himself
+since he left college. Everything he tried to do, somebody else
+could do so much better. And he comforted himself with this, that he
+would have been a journalist if he could, or at least have published
+a newspaper. He knew what was wrong with about a hundred newspapers.
+</p>
+<p>
+He decided to confess about Mabel, but to hold fast to journalism.
+Then he lay in bed and watched for the Probationer to come back.
+</p>
+<p>
+However, here things began to go wrong. He did not see Jane Brown
+again. There were day nurses and night nurses and reliefs, and
+<i>internes</i> and Staff and the Head Nurse and the First Assistant
+and&mdash;everything but Jane Brown. And at last he inquired for her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The first day I was in here," he said to Miss Willoughby, "there
+was a little girl here without a cap. I don't know her name. But I
+haven't seen her since."
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Willoughby, who, if she had been disappointed in love, had
+certainly had time to forget it, Miss Willoughby reflected.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Without a cap? Then it was only one of the probationers."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You don't remember which one?"
+</p>
+<p>
+But she only observed that probationers were always coming and
+going, and it wasn't worth while learning their names until they
+were accepted. And that, anyhow, probationers should never be sent
+to private patients, who are paying a lot and want the best.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Really," she added, "I don't know what the school is coming to.
+Since this war in Europe every girl wants to wear a uniform and be
+ready to go to the front if we have trouble. All sorts of silly
+children are applying. We have one now, on this very floor, not a
+day over nineteen."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Who is she?" asked Middleton. He felt that this was the one. She
+was so exactly the sort Miss Willoughby would object to.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Jane Brown," snapped Miss Willoughby. "A little, namby-pamby,
+mush-and-milk creature, afraid of her own shadow."
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, Jane Brown, at that particular moment, was sitting in her
+little room in the dormitory, with the old watch ticking on the
+stand so she would not over-stay her off duty. She was aching with
+fatigue from her head, with its smooth and shiny hair, to her feet,
+which were in a bowl of witch hazel and hot water. And she was
+crying over a letter she was writing.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown had just come from her first death. It had taken place in
+H ward, where she daily washed window-sills, and disinfected stands,
+and carried dishes in and out. And it had not been what she had
+expected. In the first place, the man had died for hours. She had
+never heard of this. She had thought of death as coming quickly&mdash;a
+glance of farewell, closing eyes, and&mdash;rest. But for hours and hours
+the struggle had gone on, a fight for breath that all the ward could
+hear. And he had not closed his eyes at all. They were turned up,
+and staring.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer had suffered horribly, and at last she had gone
+behind the screen and folded her hands and closed her eyes, and said
+very low:
+</p>
+<p>
+"Dear God&mdash;please take him quickly."
+</p>
+<p>
+He had stopped breathing almost immediately. But that may have been
+a coincidence.
+</p>
+<p>
+However, she was not writing that home. Between gasps she was
+telling the humours of visiting day in the ward, and of how kind
+every one was to her, which, if not entirely true, was not entirely
+untrue. They were kind enough when they had time to be, or when they
+remembered her. Only they did not always remember her.
+</p>
+<p>
+She ended by saying that she was quite sure they meant to accept her
+when her three months was up. It was frightfully necessary that she
+be accepted.
+</p>
+<p>
+She sent messages to all the little town, which had seen her off
+almost <i>en masse</i>. And she added that the probationers received the
+regular first-year allowance of eight dollars a month, and she could
+make it do nicely&mdash;which was quite true, unless she kept on breaking
+thermometers when she shook them down.
+</p>
+<p>
+At the end she sent her love to everybody, including even worthless
+Johnny Fraser, who cut the grass and scrubbed the porches; and, of
+course, to Doctor Willie. He was called Doctor Willie because his
+father, who had taken him into partnership long ago, was Doctor
+Will. It never had seemed odd, although Doctor Willie was now
+sixty-five, and a saintly soul.
+</p>
+<p>
+Curiously enough, her letter was dated April first. Under that very
+date, and about that time of the day, a health officer in a near-by
+borough was making an entry regarding certain coloured gentlemen
+shipped north from Louisiana to work on a railroad. Opposite the
+name of one Augustus Baird he put a cross. This indicated that
+Augustus Baird had not been vaccinated.
+</p>
+<p>
+By the sixth of April "Twenty-two" had progressed from splints to a
+plaster cast, and was being most awfully bored. Jane Brown had not
+returned, and there was a sort of relentless maturity about the
+nurses who looked after him that annoyed him.
+</p>
+<p>
+Lying there, he had a good deal of time to study them, and somehow
+his recollection of the girl with the hunting-case watch did not
+seem to fit her in with these kindly and efficient women. He could
+not, for instance, imagine her patronising the Senior Surgical
+Interne in a deferential but unmistakable manner, or good-naturedly
+bullying the First Assistant, who was a nervous person in shoes too
+small for her, as to their days off duty.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two began to learn things about the hospital. For instance,
+the day nurse, while changing his pillow slips, would observe that
+Nineteen was going to be operated on that day, and close her lips
+over further information. But when the afternoon relief, while
+giving him his toothbrush after lunch, said there was a most
+interesting gall-stone case in nineteen, and the night nurse, in
+reply to a direct question, told Nineteen's name, but nothing else,
+Twenty-two had a fair working knowledge of the day's events.
+</p>
+<p>
+He seemed to learn about everything but Jane Brown. He knew when a
+new baby came, and was even given a glimpse of one, showing, he
+considered, about the colour and general contour of a maraschino
+cherry. And he learned soon that the god of the hospital is the
+Staff, although worship did not blind the nurses to their
+weaknesses. Thus the older men, who had been trained before the day
+of asepsis and modern methods, were revered but carefully watched.
+They would get out of scrubbing their hands whenever they could, and
+they hated their beards tied up with gauze. The nurses, keen,
+competent and kindly, but shrewd, too, looked after these elderly
+recalcitrants; loved a few, hated some, and presented to the world
+unbroken ranks for their defence.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two learned also the story of the First Assistant, who was in
+love with one of the Staff, who was married, and did not care for
+her anyhow. So she wore tight shoes, and was always beautifully
+waved, and read Browning.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had a way of coming in and saying brightly, as if to reassure
+herself:
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good morning, Twenty-two. Well, God is still in His heaven, and
+all's well with the world."
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two got to feeling awfully uncomfortable about her. She used
+to bring him flowers and sit down a moment to rest her feet, which
+generally stung. And she would stop in the middle of a sentence and
+look into space, but always with a determined smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+He felt awfully uncomfortable. She was so neat and so efficient&mdash;and
+so tragic. He tried to imagine being hopelessly in love, and trying
+to live on husks of Browning. Not even Mrs. Browning.
+</p>
+<p>
+The mind is a curious thing. Suddenly, from thinking of Mrs.
+Browning, he thought of N. Jane Brown. Of course not by that
+ridiculous name. He had learned that she was stationed on that
+floor. And in the same flash he saw the Senior Surgical Interne
+swanking about in white ducks and just the object for a probationer
+to fall in love with. He lay there, and pulled the beginning of the
+new moustache, and reflected. The First Assistant was pinning a
+spray of hyacinth in her cap.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Look here," he said. "Why can't I be put in a wheeled chair and get
+about? One that I can manipulate myself," he added craftily.
+</p>
+<p>
+She demurred. Indeed, everybody demurred when he put it up to them.
+But he had gone through the world to the age of twenty-four, getting
+his own way about ninety-seven per cent. of the time. He got it this
+time, consisting of a new cast, which he named Elizabeth, and a
+roller-chair, and he spent a full day learning how to steer himself
+around.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then, on the afternoon of the third day, rolling back toward the
+elevator and the <i>terra incognita</i> which lay beyond, he saw a sign.
+He stared at it blankly, because it interfered considerably with a
+plan he had in mind. The sign was of tin, and it said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"No private patients allowed beyond here."
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two sat in his chair and stared at it. The plaster cast
+stretched out in front of him, and was covered by a grey blanket.
+With the exception of the trifling formality of trousers, he was
+well dressed in a sack coat, a shirt, waistcoat, and a sort of
+college-boy collar and tie, which one of the orderlies had purchased
+for him. His other things were in that extremely expensive English
+car which the city was storing.
+</p>
+<p>
+The plain truth is that Twenty-two was looking for Jane Brown. Since
+she had not come to him, he must go to her. He particularly wanted
+to set her right as to Mabel. And he felt, too, that that trick
+about respirations had not been entirely fair.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was, of course, not in the slightest degree in love with her. He
+had only seen her once, and then he had had a broken leg and a
+quarter grain of morphia and a burned moustache and no eyebrows left
+to speak of.
+</p>
+<p>
+But there was the sign. It was hung to a nail beside the elevator
+shaft. And far beyond, down the corridor, was somebody in a blue
+dress and no cap. It might be anybody, but again&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two looked around. The elevator had just gone down at its
+usual rate of a mile every two hours. In the convalescent parlour,
+where private patients <i>en negligée</i> complained about the hospital
+food, the nurse in charge was making a new cap. Over all the
+hospital brooded an after-luncheon peace.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two wheeled up under the sign and considered his average of
+ninety-seven per cent. Followed in sequence these events: (a)
+Twenty-two wheeled back to the parlour, where old Mr. Simond's cane
+leaned against a table, and, while engaging that gentleman in
+conversation, possessed himself of the cane. (b) Wheeled back to the
+elevator. (c) Drew cane from beneath blanket. (d) Unhooked sign with
+cane and concealed both under blanket. (e) Worked his way back along
+the forbidden territory, past I and J until he came to H ward.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown was in H ward.
+</p>
+<p>
+She was alone, and looking very professional. There is nothing quite
+so professional as a new nurse. She had, indeed, reached a point
+where, if she took a pulse three times, she got somewhat similar
+results. There had been a time when they had run something like
+this: 56&mdash;80&mdash;120&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown was taking pulses. It was a visiting day, and all the
+beds had fresh white spreads, tucked in neatly at the foot. In the
+exact middle of the centre table with its red cloth, was a vase of
+yellow tulips. The sun came in and turned them to golden flame.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown was on duty alone and taking pulses with one eye while
+she watched the visitors with the other. She did the watching better
+than she did the pulses. For instance, she was distinctly aware that
+Stanislas Krzykolski's wife, in the bed next the end, had just slid
+a half-dozen greasy cakes, sprinkled with sugar, under his pillow.
+She knew, however, that not only grease but love was in those cakes,
+and she did not intend to confiscate them until after Mrs.
+Krzykolski had gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+More visitors came. Shuffling and self-conscious mill-workers,
+walking on their toes; draggled women; a Chinese boy; a girl with a
+rouged face and a too confident manner. A hum of conversation hung
+over the long room. The sunlight came in and turned to glory, not
+only the tulips and the red tablecloth, but also the brass basins,
+the fireplace fender, and the Probationer's hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two sat unnoticed in the doorway. A young girl, very lame,
+with a mandolin, had just entered the ward. In the little stir of
+her arrival, Twenty-two had time to see that Jane Brown was worth
+even all the trouble he had taken, and more. Really, to see Jane
+Brown properly, she should have always been seen in the sun. She was
+that sort.
+</p>
+<p>
+The lame girl sat down in the centre of the ward, and the buzz died
+away. She was not pretty, and she was very nervous. Twenty-two
+frowned a trifle.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Poor devils," he said to himself. But Jane Brown put away her
+hunting-case watch, and the lame girl swept the ward with soft eyes
+that had in them a pity that was almost a benediction.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she sang. Her voice was like her eyes, very sweet and rather
+frightened, but tender. And suddenly something a little hard and
+selfish in Twenty-two began to be horribly ashamed of itself. And,
+for no earthly reason in the world, he began to feel like a cumberer
+of the earth. Before she had finished the first song, he was
+thinking that perhaps when he was getting about again, he might run
+over to France for a few months in the ambulance service. A fellow
+really ought to do his bit.
+</p>
+<p>
+At just about that point Jane Brown turned and saw him. And although
+he had run all these risks to get to her, and even then had an
+extremely cold tin sign lying on his knee under the blanket, at
+first she did not know him. The shock of this was almost too much
+for him. In all sorts of places people were glad to see him,
+especially women. He was astonished, but it was good for him.
+</p>
+<p>
+She recognised him almost immediately, however, and flushed a
+little, because she knew he had no business there. She was awfully
+bound up with rules.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I came back on purpose to see you," said Twenty-two, when at last
+the lame girl had limped away. "Because, that day I came in and you
+looked after me, you know, I&mdash;must have talked a lot of nonsense."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Morphia makes some people talk," she said. It was said in an exact
+copy of the ward nurse's voice, a frightfully professional and
+impersonal tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But," said Twenty-two, stirring uneasily, "I said a lot that wasn't
+true. You may have forgotten, but I haven't. Now that about a girl
+named Mabel, for instance&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+He stirred again, because, after all, what did it matter what he had
+said? She was gazing over the ward. She was not interested in him.
+She had almost forgotten him. And as he stirred Mr. Simond's cane
+fell out. It was immediately followed by the tin sign, which only
+gradually subsided, face up, on the bare floor, in a slowly
+diminishing series of crashes.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown stooped and picked them both up and placed them on his
+lap. Then, very stern, she marched out of the ward into the
+corridor, and there subsided into quiet hysterics of mirth.
+Twenty-two, who hated to be laughed at, followed her in the chair,
+looking extremely annoyed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What else was I to do?" he demanded, after a time. "Of course, if
+you report it, I'm gone."
+</p>
+<p>
+"What do you intend to do with it now?" she asked. All her
+professional manner had gone, and she looked alarmingly young.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If I put it back, I'll only have to steal it again. Because I am
+absolutely bored to death in that room of mine. I have played a
+thousand games of solitaire."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer looked around. There was no one in sight.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I should think," she suggested, "that if you slipped it behind that
+radiator, no one would ever know about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+Fortunately, the ambulance gong set up a clamour below the window
+just then, and no one heard one of the hospital's most cherished
+rules going, as one may say, into the discard.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer leaned her nose against the window and looked down.
+A coloured man was being carried in on a stretcher. Although she did
+not know it&mdash;indeed, never did know it&mdash;the coloured gentleman in
+question was one Augustus Baird.
+</p>
+<p>
+Soon afterward Twenty-two squeaked&mdash;his chair needed
+oiling&mdash;squeaked back to his lonely room and took stock. He found
+that he was rid of Mabel, but was still a reporter, hurt in doing
+his duty. He had let this go because he saw that duty was a sort of
+fetish with the Probationer. And since just now she liked him for
+what she thought he was, why not wait to tell her until she liked
+him for himself?
+</p>
+<p>
+He hoped she was going to like him, because she was going to see him
+a lot. Also, he liked her even better than he had remembered that he
+did. She had a sort of thoroughbred look that he liked. And he liked
+the way her hair was soft and straight and shiny. And he liked the
+way she was all business and no nonsense. And the way she counted
+pulses, with her lips moving and a little frown between her
+eyebrows. And he liked her for being herself&mdash;which is, after all,
+the reason why most men like the women they like, and extremely
+reasonable.
+</p>
+<p>
+The First Assistant loaned him Browning that afternoon, and he read
+"Pippa Passes." He thought Pippa must have looked like the
+Probationer.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Head was a bit querulous that evening. The Heads of Training
+Schools get that way now and then, although they generally reveal it
+only to the First Assistant. They have to do so many irreconcilable
+things, such as keeping down expenses while keeping up requisitions,
+and remembering the different sorts of sutures the Staff likes, and
+receiving the Ladies' Committee, and conducting prayers and
+lectures, and knowing by a swift survey of a ward that the stands
+have been carbolised and all the toe-nails cut. Because it is
+amazing the way toe-nails grow in bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Head would probably never have come out flatly, but she had a
+wretched cold, and the First Assistant was giving her a mustard
+footbath, which was very hot. The Head sat up with a blanket over
+her shoulders, and read lists while her feet took on the blush of
+ripe apples. And at last she said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"How is that Probationer with the ridiculous name getting along?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The First Assistant poured in more hot water.
+</p>
+<p>
+"N. Jane?" she asked. "Well, she's a nice little thing, and she
+seems willing. But, of course&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Head groaned.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Nineteen!" she said. "And no character at all. I detest fluttery
+people. She flutters the moment I go into the ward."
+</p>
+<p>
+The First Assistant sat back and felt of her cap, which was of
+starched tulle and was softening a bit from the steam. She felt a
+thrill of pity for the Probationer. She, too, had once felt fluttery
+when the Head came in.
+</p>
+<p>
+"She is very anxious to stay," she observed. "She works hard, too.
+I&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"She has no personality, no decision," said the Head, and sneezed
+twice. She was really very wretched, and so she was unfair. "She is
+pretty and sweet. But I cannot run my training school on prettiness
+and sweetness. Has Doctor Harvard come in yet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I&mdash;I think not," said the First Assistant. She looked up quickly,
+but the Head was squeezing a lemon in a cup of hot water beside her.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, while the Head was having a footbath, and Twenty-two was having
+a stock-taking, and Augustus Baird was having his symptoms recorded,
+Jane Brown was having a shock.
+</p>
+<p>
+She heard an unmistakable shuffling of feet in the corridor.
+</p>
+<p>
+Sounds take on much significance in a hospital, and probationers
+study them, especially footsteps. It gives them a moment sometimes
+to think what to do next.
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>Internes</i>, for instance, frequently wear rubber soles on their
+white shoes and have a way of slipping up on one. And the engineer
+goes on a half run, generally accompanied by the clanking of a tool
+or two. And the elevator man runs, too, because generally the bell
+is ringing. And ward patients shuffle about in carpet slippers, and
+the pharmacy clerk has a brisk young step, inclined to be jaunty.
+</p>
+<p>
+But it is the Staff which is always unmistakable. It comes along the
+corridor deliberately, inexorably. It plants its feet firmly and
+with authority. It moves with the inevitability of fate, with the
+pride of royalty, with the ease of the best made-to-order boots. The
+ring of a Staff member's heel on a hospital corridor is the most
+authoritative sound on earth. He may be the gentlest soul in the
+world, but he will tread like royalty.
+</p>
+<p>
+But this was not Staff. Jane Brown knew this sound, and it filled
+her with terror. It was the scuffling of four pairs of feet,
+carefully instructed not to keep step. It meant, in other words, a
+stretcher. But perhaps it was not coming to her. Ah, but it was!
+</p>
+<p>
+Panic seized Jane Brown. She knew there were certain things to do,
+but they went out of her mind like a cat out of a cellar window.
+However, the ward was watching. It had itself, generally speaking,
+come in feet first. It knew the procedure. So, instructed by low
+voices from the beds around, Jane Brown feverishly tore the spread
+off the emergency bed and drew it somewhat apart from its fellows.
+Then she stood back and waited.
+</p>
+<p>
+Came in four officers from the police patrol. Came in the Senior
+Surgical Interne. Came two convalescents from the next ward to stare
+in at the door. Came the stretcher, containing a quiet figure under
+a grey blanket.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two, at that exact moment, was putting a queen on a ten spot
+and pretending there is nothing wrong about cheating oneself.
+</p>
+<p>
+In a very short time the quiet figure was on the bed, and the Senior
+Surgical Interne was writing in the order book: "Prepare for
+operation."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown read it over his shoulder, which is not etiquette.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But&mdash;I can't," she quavered. "I don't know how. I won't touch him.
+He's&mdash;he's bloody!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she took another look at the bed and she saw&mdash;Johnny Fraser.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now Johnny had, in his small way, played a part in the Probationer's
+life, such as occasionally scrubbing porches or borrowing a half
+dollar or being suspected of stealing the eggs from the henhouse.
+But <i>that</i> Johnny Fraser had been a wicked, smiling imp, much given
+to sitting in the sun.
+</p>
+<p>
+Here lay another Johnny Fraser, a quiet one, who might never again
+feel the warm earth through his worthless clothes on his worthless
+young body. A Johnny of closed eyes and slow, noisy breathing.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why, Johnny!" said the Probationer, in a strangled voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne was interested.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Know him?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He is a boy from home." She was still staring at this quiet,
+un-impudent figure.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne eyed her with an eye that was only
+partially professional. Then he went to the medicine closet and
+poured a bit of aromatic ammonia into a glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Sit down and drink this," he said, in a very masculine voice. He
+liked to feel that he could do something for her. Indeed, there was
+something almost proprietary in the way he took her pulse.
+</p>
+<p>
+Some time after the early hospital supper that evening Twenty-two,
+having oiled his chair with some olive oil from his tray, made a
+clandestine trip through the twilight of the corridor back of the
+elevator shaft. To avoid scandal he pretended interest in other
+wards, but he gravitated, as a needle to the pole, to H. And there
+he found the Probationer, looking rather strained, and mothering a
+quiet figure on a bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was a trifle puzzled at her distress, for she made no secret of
+Johnny's status in the community. What he did not grasp was that
+Johnny Fraser was a link between this new and rather terrible world
+of the hospital and home. It was not Johnny alone, it was Johnny
+scrubbing a home porch and doing it badly, it was Johnny in her
+father's old clothes, it was Johnny fishing for catfish in the
+creek, or lending his pole to one of the little brothers whose
+pictures were on her table in the dormitory.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two felt a certain depression. He reflected rather grimly
+that he had been ten days missing and that no one had apparently
+given a hang whether he turned up or not.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Is he going to live?" he inquired. He could see that the ward nurse
+had an eye on him, and was preparing for retreat.
+</p>
+<p>
+"O yes," said Jane Brown. "I think so now. The <i>interne</i> says they
+have had a message from Doctor Willie. He is coming." There was a
+beautiful confidence in her tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+Things moved very fast with the Probationer for the next twenty-four
+hours. Doctor Willie came, looking weary but smiling benevolently.
+Jane Brown met him in a corridor and kissed him, as, indeed, she had
+been in the habit of doing since her babyhood.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Where is the young rascal?" said Doctor Willie. "Up to his old
+tricks, Nellie, and struck by a train." He put a hand under her
+chin, which is never done to the members of the training school in a
+hospital, and searched her face with his kind old eyes. "Well, how
+does it go, Nellie?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown swallowed hard.
+</p>
+<p>
+"All right," she managed. "They want to operate, Doctor Willie."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Tut!" he said. "Always in a hurry, these hospitals. We'll wait a
+while, I think."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Is everybody well at home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+It had come to her, you see, what comes to every nurse once in her
+training&mdash;the thinness of the veil, the terror of calamity, the fear
+of death.
+</p>
+<p>
+"All well. And&mdash;&mdash;" he glanced around. Only the Senior Surgical
+Interne was in sight, and he was out of hearing. "Look here,
+Nellie," he said, "I've got a dozen fresh eggs for you in my
+satchel. Your mother sent them."
+</p>
+<p>
+She nearly lost her professional manner again then. But she only
+asked him to warn the boys about automobiles and riding on the backs
+of wagons.
+</p>
+<p>
+Had any one said Twenty-two to her, she would not have known what
+was meant. Not just then, anyhow.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the doctors' room that night the Senior Surgical Interne lighted
+a cigarette and telephoned to the operating room.
+</p>
+<p>
+"That trephining's off," he said, briefly.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then he fell to conversation with the Senior Medical, who was rather
+worried about a case listed on the books as Augustus Baird,
+coloured.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two did not sleep very well that night. He needed exercise,
+he felt. But there was something else. Miss Brown had been just a
+shade too ready to accept his explanation about Mabel, he felt, so
+ready that he feared she had been more polite than sincere. Probably
+she still believed there was a Mabel. Not that it mattered, except
+that he hated to make a fool of himself. He roused once in the night
+and was quite sure he heard her voice down the corridor. He knew
+this must be wrong, because they would not make her work all day and
+all night, too.
+</p>
+<p>
+But, as it happened, it <i>was</i> Jane Brown. The hospital provided
+plenty of sleeping time, but now and then there was a slip-up and
+somebody paid. There had been a night operation, following on a busy
+day, and the operating-room nurses needed help. Out of a sound sleep
+the night Assistant had summoned Jane Brown to clean instruments.
+</p>
+<p>
+At five o'clock that morning she was still sitting on a stool beside
+a glass table, polishing instruments which made her shiver. All
+around were things that were spattered with blood. But she looked
+anything but fluttery. She was a very grim and determined young
+person just then, and professional beyond belief. The other things,
+like washing window-sills and cutting toe-nails, had had no
+significance. But here she was at last on the edge of mercy. Some
+one who might have died had lived that night because of this room,
+and these instruments, and willing hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+She hoped she would always have willing hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+She looked very pale at breakfast the next morning, and rather
+older. Also she had a new note of authority in her voice when she
+telephoned the kitchen and demanded H ward's soft-boiled eggs. She
+washed window-sills that morning again, but no longer was there
+rebellion in her soul. She was seeing suddenly how the hospital
+required all these menial services, which were not menial at all but
+only preparation; that there were little tasks and big ones, and one
+graduated from the one to the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+She took some flowers from the ward bouquet and put them beside
+Johnny's bed&mdash;Johnny, who was still lying quiet, with closed eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne did a dressing in the ward that morning.
+He had been in to see Augustus Baird, and he felt uneasy. He vented
+it on Tony, the Italian, with a stiletto thrust in his neck, by
+jerking at the adhesive. Tony wailed, and Jane Brown, who was the
+"dirty" nurse&mdash;which does not mean what it appears to mean, but is
+the person who receives the soiled dressings&mdash;Jane Brown gritted her
+teeth.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Keep quiet," said the S.S.I., who was a good fellow, but had never
+been stabbed in the neck for running away with somebody else's wife.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Eet hurt," said Tony. "Ow."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown turned very pink.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why don't you let me cut it off properly?" she said, in a strangled
+tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+The total result of this was that Jane Brown was reprimanded by the
+First Assistant, and learned some things about ethics.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But," she protested, "it was both stupid and cruel. And if I know I
+am right&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"How are you to know you are right?" demanded the First Assistant,
+crossly. Her feet were stinging. "'A little knowledge is a dangerous
+thing.'" This was a favorite quotation of hers, although not
+Browning. "Nurses in hospitals are there to carry out the doctor's
+orders. Not to think or to say what they think unless they are
+asked. To be intelligent, but&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"But not too intelligent!" said the Probationer. "I see."
+</p>
+<p>
+This was duly reported to the Head, who observed that it was merely
+what she had expected and extremely pert. Her cold was hardly any
+better.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was taking the Probationer quite a time to realise her own total
+lack of significance in all this. She had been accustomed to men who
+rose when a woman entered a room and remained standing as long as
+she stood. And now she was in a new world, where she had to rise and
+remain standing while a cocky youth in ducks, just out of medical
+college, sauntered in with his hands in his pockets and took a
+<i>boutonnière</i> from the ward bouquet.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was probably extremely good for her.
+</p>
+<p>
+She was frightfully tired that day, and toward evening the little
+glow of service began to fade. There seemed to be nothing to do for
+Johnny but to wait. Doctor Willie had seemed to think that nature
+would clear matters up there, and had requested no operation. She
+smoothed beds and carried cups of water and broke another
+thermometer. And she put the eggs from home in the ward pantry and
+made egg-nogs of them for Stanislas Krzykolski, who was
+unaccountably upset as to stomach.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had entirely forgotten Twenty-two. He had stayed away all that
+day, in a sort of faint hope that she would miss him. But she had
+not. She was feeling rather worried, to tell the truth. For a Staff
+surgeon going through the ward, had stopped by Johnny's bed and
+examined the pupils of his eyes, and had then exchanged a glance
+with the Senior Surgical Interne that had perplexed her.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the chapel at prayers that evening all around her the nurses sat
+and rested, their tired hands folded in their laps. They talked a
+little among themselves, but it was only a buzzing that reached the
+Probationer faintly. Some one near was talking about something that
+was missing.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Gone?" she said. "Of course it is gone. The bath-room man reported
+it to me and I went and looked."
+</p>
+<p>
+"But who in the world would take it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"My dear," said the first speaker, "who <i>does</i> take things in a
+hospital, anyhow? Only&mdash;a tin sign!"
+</p>
+<p>
+It was then that the Head came in. She swept in; her grey gown, her
+grey hair gave her a majesty that filled the Probationer with awe.
+Behind her came the First Assistant with the prayer-book and hymnal.
+The Head believed in form.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown offered up a little prayer that night for Johnny Fraser,
+and another little one without words, that Doctor Willie was right.
+She sat and rested her weary young body, and remembered how Doctor
+Willie was loved and respected, and the years he had cared for the
+whole countryside. And the peace of the quiet room, with the Easter
+lilies on the tiny altar, brought rest to her.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was when prayers were over that the Head made her announcement.
+She rose and looked over the shadowy room, where among the rows of
+white caps only the Probationer's head was uncovered, and she said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"I have an announcement to make to the training school. One which I
+regret, and which will mean a certain amount of hardship and
+deprivation.
+</p>
+<p>
+"A case of contagion has been discovered in one of the wards, and it
+has been considered necessary to quarantine the hospital. The doors
+were closed at seven-thirty this evening."
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+II
+</p>
+<p>
+Considering that he could not get out anyhow, Twenty-two took the
+news of the quarantine calmly. He reflected that, if he was shut in,
+Jane Brown was shut in also. He had a wicked hope, at the beginning,
+that the Senior Surgical Interne had been shut out, but at nine
+o'clock that evening that young gentleman showed up at the door of
+his room, said "Cheer-o," came in, helped himself to a cigarette,
+gave a professional glance at Twenty-two's toes, which were all that
+was un-plastered of the leg, and departing threw back over his
+shoulder his sole conversational effort:
+</p>
+<p>
+"Hell of a mess, isn't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two took up again gloomily the book he was reading, which was
+on Diseases of the Horse, from the hospital library. He was in the
+midst of Glanders.
+</p>
+<p>
+He had, during most of that day, been making up his mind to let his
+family know where he was. He did not think they cared, particularly.
+He had no illusions about that. But there was something about Jane
+Brown which made him feel like doing the decent thing. It annoyed
+him frightfully, but there it was. She was so eminently the sort of
+person who believed in doing the decent thing.
+</p>
+<p>
+So, about seven o'clock, he had sent the orderly out for stamps and
+paper. He imagined that Jane Brown would not think writing home on
+hospital stationery a good way to break bad news. But the orderly
+had stopped for a chat at the engine house, and had ended by playing
+a game of dominoes. When, at ten o'clock, he had returned to the
+hospital entrance, the richer by a quarter and a glass of beer, he
+had found a strange policeman on the hospital steps, and the doors
+locked.
+</p>
+<p>
+The quarantine was on.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now there are different sorts of quarantines. There is the sort
+where a trained nurse and the patient are shut up in a room and
+bath, and the family only opens the door and peers in. And there is
+the sort where the front door has a placard on it, and the family
+goes in and out the back way, and takes a street-car to the office,
+the same as usual. And there is the hospital quarantine, which is
+the real thing, because hospitals are expected to do things
+thoroughly.
+</p>
+<p>
+So our hospital was closed up as tight as a jar of preserves. There
+were policemen at all the doors, quite suddenly. They locked the
+doors and put the keys in their pockets, and from that time on they
+opened them only to pass things in, such as newspapers or milk or
+groceries or the braver members of the Staff. But not to let
+anything out&mdash;except the Staff. Supposedly Staffs do not carry
+germs.
+</p>
+<p>
+And, indeed, even the Staff was not keen about entering. It thought
+of a lot of things it ought to do about visiting time, and
+prescribed considerably over the telephone.
+</p>
+<p>
+At first there was a great deal of confusion, because quite a number
+of people had been out on various errands when it happened. And they
+came back, and protested to the office that they had only their
+uniforms on under their coats, and three dollars; or their slippers
+and no hats. Or that they would sue the city. One or two of them got
+quite desperate and tried to crawl up the fire-escape, but failed.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is of interest chiefly because it profoundly affected Jane
+Brown. Miss McAdoo, her ward nurse, had debated whether to wash her
+hair that evening, or to take a walk. She had decided on the walk,
+and was therefore shut out, along with the Junior Medical, the
+kitchen cat, the Superintendent's mother-in-law and six other
+nurses.
+</p>
+<p>
+The next morning the First Assistant gave Jane Brown charge of H
+ward.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's very irregular," she said. "I don't exactly know&mdash;you have
+only one bad case, haven't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Only Johnny."
+</p>
+<p>
+The First Assistant absent-mindedly ran a finger over the top of a
+table, and examined it for dust.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Of course," she said, "it's a great chance for you. Show that you
+can handle this ward, and you are practically safe."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown drew a long breath and stood up very straight. Then she
+ran her eye over the ward. There was something vaguely reminiscent
+of Miss McAdoo in her glance.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two made three brief excursions back along the corridor
+that first day of the quarantine. But Jane Brown was extremely
+professional and very busy. There was an air of discipline over the
+ward. Let a man but so much as turn over in bed and show an inch of
+blanket, and she pounced on the bed and reduced it to the most
+horrible neatness. All the beds looked as if they had been made up
+with a carpenter's square.
+</p>
+<p>
+On the third trip, however, Jane Brown was writing at the table.
+Twenty-two wheeled himself into the doorway and eyed her with
+disapproval.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What do you mean by sitting down?" he demanded sarcastically.
+"Don't you know that now you are in charge you ought to keep
+moving?"
+</p>
+<p>
+To which she replied, absently:
+</p>
+<p>
+"Three buttered toasts, two dry toasts, six soft boiled eggs, and
+twelve soups." She was working on the diet slips.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she smiled at him. They were quite old friends already. It is
+curious about love and friendship and all those kindred emotions.
+They do not grow nearly so fast when people are together as when
+they are apart. It is an actual fact that the growth of many an
+intimacy is checked by meetings. Because when people are apart it is
+what they <i>are</i> that counts, and when they are together it is what
+they do and say and look like. Many a beautiful affair has been
+ruined because, just as it was going along well, the principals met
+again.
+</p>
+<p>
+However, all this merely means that Twenty-two and Jane Brown were
+infinitely closer friends than four or five meetings really
+indicates.
+</p>
+<p>
+The ward was very quiet on this late afternoon call of his save for
+Johnny's heavy breathing. There is a quiet hour in a hospital,
+between afternoon temperatures and the ringing of the bell which
+means that the suppers for the wards are on their way&mdash;a quiet hour
+when over the long rows of beds broods the peace of the ending day.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is a melancholy hour, too, because from the streets comes faintly
+the echo of feet hurrying home, the eager trot of a horse bound
+stableward. To those in the eddy that is the ward comes at this time
+a certain heaviness of spirit. Poor thing though home may have been,
+they long for it.
+</p>
+<p>
+In H ward that late afternoon there was a wave of homesickness in
+the air, and on the part of those men who were up and about, who
+shuffled up and down the ward in flapping carpet slippers, an
+inclination to mutiny.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How did they take it?" Twenty-two inquired. She puckered her
+eyebrows.
+</p>
+<p>
+"They don't like it," she confessed. "Some of them were about ready
+to go home and it&mdash;<i>Tony!</i>" she called sharply.
+</p>
+<p>
+For Tony, who had been cunningly standing by the window leading to a
+fire-escape, had flung the window up and was giving unmistakable
+signs of climbing out and returning to the other man's wife.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Tony!" she called, and ran. Tony scrambled up on the sill. A sort
+of titter ran over the ward and Tony, now on the platform outside,
+waved a derisive hand through the window.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good-bye, mees!" he said, and&mdash;disappeared.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was not a very dramatic thing, after all. It is chiefly
+significant for its effect on Twenty-two, who was obliged to sit
+frozen with horror and cursing his broken leg, while Jane Brown
+raced a brown little Italian down the fire-escape and caught him at
+the foot of it. Tony took a look around. The courtyard gates were
+closed and a policeman sat outside on a camp-stool reading the
+newspaper. Tony smiled sheepishly and surrendered.
+</p>
+<p>
+Some seconds later Tony and Jane Brown appeared on the platform
+outside. Jane Brown had Tony by the ear, and she stopped long enough
+outside to exchange the ear for his shoulder, by which she shook
+him, vigorously.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two turned his chair around and wheeled himself back to his
+room. He was filled with a cold rage&mdash;because she might have fallen
+on the fire-escape and been killed; because he had not been able to
+help her; because she was there, looking after the derelicts of
+life, when the world was beautiful outside, and she was young;
+because to her he was just Twenty-two and nothing more.
+</p>
+<p>
+He had seen her exactly six times.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown gave the ward a little talk that night before the night
+nurse reported. She stood in the centre of the long room, beside the
+tulips, and said that she was going to be alone there, and that she
+would have to put the situation up to their sense of honour. If they
+tried to escape, they would hurt her. Also they would surely be
+caught and brought back. And, because she believed in a combination
+of faith and deeds, she took three nails and the linen-room
+flatiron, and nailed shut the window onto the fire-escape.
+</p>
+<p>
+After that, she brushed crumbs out of the beds with a whiskbroom and
+rubbed a few backs with alcohol, and smoothed the counterpanes, and
+hung over Johnny's unconscious figure for a little while, giving
+motherly pats to his flat pillow and worrying considerably because
+there was so little about him to remind her of the Johnny she knew
+at home.
+</p>
+<p>
+After that she sat down and made up her records for the night nurse.
+The ward understood, and was perfectly good, trying hard not to muss
+its pillows or wrinkle the covers. And struggling, too, with a new
+idea. They were prisoners. No more release cards would brighten the
+days. For an indefinite period the old Frenchman would moan at
+night, and Bader the German would snore, and the Chinaman would
+cough. Indefinitely they would eat soft-boiled eggs and rice and
+beef-tea and cornstarch.
+</p>
+<p>
+The ward felt extremely low in its mind.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+That night the Senior Surgical Interne went in to play cribbage with
+Twenty-two, and received a lecture on leaving a young girl alone in
+H with a lot of desperate men. They both grew rather heated over the
+discussion and forgot to play cribbage at all. Twenty-two lay awake
+half the night, because he had seen clearly that the Senior Surgical
+Interne was interested in Jane Brown also, and would probably loaf
+around H most of the time since there would be no new cases now. It
+was a crowning humiliation to have the night nurse apply to the
+Senior Surgical Interne for a sleeping powder for him!
+</p>
+<p>
+Toward morning he remembered that he had promised to write out from
+memory one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese for the First
+Assistant, and he turned on the light and jotted down two lines of
+it. He wrote:
+</p>
+<p class="verse">
+          "<i>For we two look two ways, and cannot shine <br />
+            With the same sunlight on our brow and hair.</i>"&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+And then sat up in bed for half an hour looking at it because he was
+so awfully afraid it was true of Jane Brown and himself. Not, of
+course, that he wanted to shine at all. It was the looking two ways
+that hurt.
+</p>
+<p>
+The next evening the nurses took their airing on the roof, which was
+a sooty place with a parapet, and in the courtyard, which was an
+equally sooty place with a wispy fountain. And because the whole
+situation was new, they formed in little groups on the wooden
+benches and sang, hands folded on white aprons, heads lifted, eyes
+upturned to where, above the dimly lighted windows, the stars peered
+palely through the smoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+The S.S.I. sauntered out. He had thought he saw the Probationer from
+his window, and in the new relaxation of discipline he saw a chance
+to join her. But the figure he had thought he recognised proved to
+be some one else, and he fell to wandering alone up and down the
+courtyard.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was trying to work out this problem: would the advantage of
+marrying early and thus being considered eligible for certain
+cases, offset the disadvantage of the extra expense?
+</p>
+<p>
+He decided to marry early and hang the expense.
+</p>
+<p>
+The days went by, three, then four, and a little line of tension
+deepened around Jane Brown's mouth. Perhaps it has not been
+mentioned that she had a fighting nose, short and straight, and a
+wistful mouth. For Johnny Fraser was still lying in a stupor.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown felt that something was wrong. Doctor Willie came in once
+or twice, making the long trip without complaint and without hope of
+payment. All his busy life he had worked for the sake of work, and
+not for reward. He called her "Nellie," to the delight of the ward,
+which began to love him, and he spent a long hour each time by
+Johnny's bed. But the Probationer was quick to realise that the
+Senior Surgical Interne disapproved of him.
+</p>
+<p>
+That young man had developed a tendency to wander into H at odd
+hours, and sit on the edge of a table, leaving Jane Brown divided
+between proper respect for an <i>interne</i> and fury over the wrinkling
+of her table covers. It was during one of these visits that she
+spoke of Doctor Willie.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Because he is a country practitioner," she said, "you&mdash;you
+patronise him."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not at all," said the Senior Surgical Interne. "Personally I like
+him immensely."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Personally!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne waved a hand toward Johnny's bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Look there," he said. "You don't think that chap's getting any
+better, do you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"If," said Jane Brown, with suspicious quiet, "if you think you know
+more than a man who has practised for forty years, and saved more
+people than you ever saw, why don't you tell him so?"
+</p>
+<p>
+There is really no defence for this conversation. Discourse between
+a probationer and an <i>interne</i> is supposed to be limited to yea,
+yea, and nay, nay. But the circumstances were unusual.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Tell him!" exclaimed the Senior Surgical Interne, "and be called
+before the Executive Committee and fired! Dear girl, I am
+inexpressibly flattered, but the voice of an <i>interne</i> in a hospital
+is the voice of one crying in the wilderness."
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two, who was out on crutches that day for the first time, and
+was looking very big and extremely awkward, Twenty-two looked back
+from the elevator shaft and scowled. He seemed always to see a flash
+of white duck near the door of H ward.
+</p>
+<p>
+To add to his chagrin, the Senior Surgical Interne clapped him on
+the back in congratulation a moment later, and nearly upset him. He
+had intended to go back to the ward and discuss a plan he had, but
+he was very morose those days and really not a companionable person.
+He stumped back to his room and resolutely went to bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+There he lay for a long time looking at the ceiling, and saying, out
+of his misery, things not necessary to repeat.
+</p>
+<p>
+So Twenty-two went to bed and sulked, refusing supper, and having
+the word "Vicious" marked on his record by the nurse, who hoped he
+would see it some time. And Jane Brown went and sat beside a
+strangely silent Johnny, and worried. And the Senior Surgical
+Interne went down to the pharmacy and thereby altered a number of
+things.
+</p>
+<p>
+The pharmacy clerk had been shaving&mdash;his own bedroom was dark&mdash;and
+he saw the Senior Surgical Interne in the little mirror hung on the
+window frame.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Hello," he said, over the soap. "Shut the door."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne shut the door, and then sniffed. "Smells
+like a bar-room," he commented.
+</p>
+<p>
+The pharmacy clerk shaved the left angle of his jaw, and then turned
+around.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Little experiment of mine," he explained. "Simple syrup, grain
+alcohol, a dash of cochineal for colouring, and some flavouring
+extract. It's an imitation cordial. Try it."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne was not a drinker, but he was willing
+to try anything once. So he secured a two-ounce medicine glass, and
+filled it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Looks nice," he commented, and tasted it. "It's not bad."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not bad!" said the pharmacy clerk. "You'd pay four dollars a bottle
+for that stuff in a hotel. Actual cost here, about forty cents."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne sat down and stretched out his legs. He
+had the glass in his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's rather sweet," he said. "But it looks pretty." He took another
+sip.
+</p>
+<p>
+After he had finished it, he got to thinking things over. He felt
+about seven feet tall and very important, and not at all like a
+voice crying in the wilderness. He had a strong inclination to go
+into the Superintendent's office and tell him where he went wrong in
+running the institution&mdash;which he restrained. And another to go up
+to H and tell Jane Brown the truth about Johnny Fraser&mdash;which he
+yielded to.
+</p>
+<p>
+On the way up he gave the elevator man a cigar.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was very explicit with Jane Brown.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Your man's wrong, that's all there is about it," he said. "I can't
+say anything and you can't. But he's wrong. That's an operative
+case. The Staff knows it."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then, why doesn't the Staff do it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne was still feeling very tall. He looked
+down at her from a great distance.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Because, dear child," he said, "it's your man's case. You ought to
+know enough about professional ethics for that."
+</p>
+<p>
+He went away, then, and had a violent headache, which he blamed on
+confinement and lack of exercise. But he had sowed something in the
+Probationer's mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+For she knew, suddenly, that he had been right. The Staff had meant
+that, then, when they looked at Johnny and shook their heads. The
+Staff knew, the hospital knew. Every one knew but Doctor Willie. But
+Doctor Willie had the case. Back in her little town Johnny's mother
+was looking to Doctor Willie, believing in him, hoping through him.
+</p>
+<p>
+That night Twenty-two slept, and Jane Brown lay awake. And down in H
+ward Johnny Fraser had a bad spell at that hour toward dawn when the
+vitality is low, and men die. He did not die, however. But the night
+nurse recorded, "Pulse very thin and iregular," at four o'clock.
+</p>
+<p>
+She, too, was not a famous speller.
+</p>
+<p>
+During the next morning, while the ward rolled bandages, having
+carefully scrubbed its hands first, Jane Brown wrote records&mdash;she
+did it rather well now&mdash;and then arranged the pins in the ward
+pincushion. She made concentric circles of safety-pins outside and
+common pins inside, with a large H in the centre. But her mind was
+not on this artistic bit of creation. It was on Johnny Fraser.
+</p>
+<p>
+She made up her mind to speak to Doctor Willie.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two had got over his sulking or his jealousy, or whatever it
+was, and during the early hours, those hours when Johnny was hardly
+breathing, he had planned something. He thought that he did it to
+interest the patients and make them contented, but somewhere in the
+back of his mind he knew it was to see more of Jane Brown. He
+planned a concert in the chapel.
+</p>
+<p>
+So that morning he took Elizabeth, the plaster cast, back to H ward,
+where Jane Brown was fixing the pincushion, and had a good minute of
+feasting his eyes on her while she was sucking a jabbed finger. She
+knew she should have dipped the finger in a solution, but habit is
+strong in most of us.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two had a wild desire to offer to kiss the finger and make it
+well. This, however, was not habit. It was insanity. He recognised
+this himself, and felt more than a trifle worried about it, because
+he had been in love quite a number of times before, but he had never
+had this sort of feeling.
+</p>
+<p>
+He put the concert up to her with a certain amount of anxiety. If
+she could sing, or play, or recite&mdash;although he hoped she would not
+recite&mdash;all would be well. But if she refused to take any part, he
+did not intend to have a concert. That was flat.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I can play," she said, making a neat period after the H on the
+pincushion.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was awfully relieved.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good," he said. "You know, I like the way you say that. It's
+so&mdash;well, it's so competent." He got out a notebook and wrote "Miss
+Brown, piano selections."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was while he was writing that Jane Brown had a sort of mental
+picture&mdash;the shabby piano at home, kicked below by many childish
+feet, but mellow and sweet, like an old violin, and herself sitting
+practising, over and over, that part of Paderewski's Minuet where,
+as every one knows, the fingering is rather difficult, and outside
+the open window, leaning on his broom, worthless Johnny Fraser,
+staring in with friendly eyes and an extremely dirty face. To
+Twenty-two's unbounded amazement she flung down the cushion and made
+for the little ward linen room.
+</p>
+<p>
+He found her there a moment later, her arms outstretched on the
+table and her face buried in them. Some one had been boiling a
+rubber tube and had let the pan go dry. Ever afterward Twenty-two
+was to associate the smell of burning rubber with Jane Brown, and
+with his first real knowledge that he was in love with her.
+</p>
+<p>
+He stumped in after her and closed the door, and might have ruined
+everything then and there by taking her in his arms, crutch and
+all. But the smell of burning rubber is a singularly permeating one,
+and he was kept from one indiscretion by being discovered in
+another.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was somewhat later that Jane Brown was reprimanded for being
+found in the linen room with a private patient. She made no excuse,
+but something a little defiant began to grow in her eyes. It was not
+that she loved her work less. She was learning, day by day, the
+endless sacrifices of this profession she had chosen, its
+unselfishness, its grinding hard work, the payment that may lie in a
+smile of gratitude, the agony of pain that cannot be relieved. She
+went through her days with hands held out for service, and at night,
+in the chapel, she whispered soundless little prayers to be
+accepted, and to be always gentle and kind. She did not want to
+become a machine. She knew, although she had no words for it, the
+difference between duty and service.
+</p>
+<p>
+But&mdash;a little spirit of rebellion was growing in her breast. She did
+not understand about Johnny Fraser, for one thing. And the matter of
+the linen room hurt. There seemed to be too many rules.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then, too, she began to learn that hospitals had limitations. Jane
+Brown's hospital had no social worker. Much as she loved the work,
+the part that the hospital could not do began to hurt her. Before
+the quarantine women with new babies had gone out, without an idea
+of where to spend the night. Ailing children had gone home to such
+places as she could see from the dormitory windows, where the work
+the hospital had begun could not be finished.
+</p>
+<p>
+From the roof of the building at night she looked out over a city
+that terrified her. The call of a playing child in the street began
+to sound to her like the shriek of accident. The very grinding of
+the trolley cars, the smoke of the mills, began to mean the
+operating room. She thought a great deal, those days, about the
+little town she had come from, with its peace and quiet streets. The
+city seemed cruel. But now and then she learned that if cities are
+cruel, men are kind.
+</p>
+<p>
+Thus, on the very day of the concert, the quarantine was broken for
+a few minutes. It was broken forcibly, and by an officer of the law.
+A little newsie, standing by a fire at the next corner, for the
+spring day was cold, had caught fire. The big corner man had seen it
+all. He stripped off his overcoat, rolled the boy in it, and ran to
+the hospital. Here he was confronted by a brother officer, who was
+forbidden to admit him. The corner man did the thing that seemed
+quickest. He laid the newsie on the ground, knocked out the
+quarantine officer in two blows, broke the glass of the door with a
+third, slipped a bolt, and then, his burden in his arms, stalked in.
+</p>
+<p>
+It did not lessen the majesty of that entrance that he was crying
+all the time.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer pondered that story when she heard it. After all,
+laws were right and good, but there were higher things than laws.
+She went and stood by Johnny's bed for a long time, thinking.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the meantime, unexpected talent for the concert had developed.
+The piano in the chapel proving out of order, the elevator man
+proved to have been a piano tuner. He tuned it with a bone forceps.
+Strange places, hospitals, into which drift men from every walk of
+life, to find a haven and peace within their quiet walls. Old Tony
+had sung, in his youth, in the opera at Milan. A pretty young nurse
+went around the corridors muttering bits of "Orphant Annie" to
+herself. The Senior Surgical Interne was to sing the "Rosary," and
+went about practising to himself. He came into H ward and sang it
+through for Jane Brown, with his heart in his clear young eyes. He
+sang about the hours he had spent with her being strings of pearls,
+and all that, but he was really asking her if she would be willing
+to begin life with him in a little house, where she would have to
+answer the door-bell and watch telephone calls while he was out.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown felt something of this, too. For she said: "You sing it
+beautifully," although he had flatted at least three times.
+</p>
+<p>
+He wrote his name on a medicine label and glued it to her hand. It
+looked alarmingly possessive.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two presided at the concert that night. He was extravagantly
+funny, and the sort of creaking solemnity with which things began
+turned to uproarious laughter very soon.
+</p>
+<p>
+Everything went off wonderfully. Tony started his selection too
+high, and was obliged to stop and begin over again. And the two
+Silversteins, from the children's ward, who were to dance a Highland
+fling together, had a violent quarrel at the last moment and had to
+be scratched. But everything else went well. The ambulance driver
+gave a bass solo, and kept a bar or two ahead of the accompaniment,
+dodging chords as he did wagons on the street, and fetching up with
+a sort of garrison finish much as he brought in the ambulance.
+</p>
+<p>
+But the real musical event of the evening was Jane Brown's playing.
+She played Schubert without any notes, because she had been taught
+to play Schubert that way.
+</p>
+<p>
+And when they called her back, she played little folk songs of the
+far places of Europe. Standing around the walls, in wheeled chairs,
+on crutches, pale with the hospital pallor, these aliens in their
+eddy listened and thrilled. Some of them wept, but they smiled also.
+</p>
+<p>
+At the end she played the Minuet, with a sort of flaming look in
+her eyes that puzzled Twenty-two. He could not know that she was
+playing it to Johnny Fraser, lying with closed eyes in the ward
+upstairs. He did not realise that there was a passion of sacrifice
+throbbing behind the dignity of the music.
+</p>
+<p>
+Doctor Willie had stayed over for the concert. He sat, beaming
+benevolently, in the front row, and toward the end he got up and
+told some stories. After all, it was Doctor Willie who was the real
+hit of the evening. The convalescents rocked with joy in their
+roller chairs. Crutches came down in loud applause. When he sat down
+he slipped a big hand over Jane Brown's and gave hers a hearty
+squeeze.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How d'you like me as a parlour entertainer, Nellie?" he whispered.
+</p>
+<p>
+She put her other hand over his. Somehow she could not speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+The First Assistant called to the Probationer that night as she went
+past her door. Lights were out, so the First Assistant had a candle,
+and she was rubbing her feet with witch hazel.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Come in," she called. "I have been looking for you. I have some
+news for you."
+</p>
+<p>
+The exaltation of the concert had died away. Jane Brown, in the
+candle light, looked small and tired and very, very young.
+</p>
+<p>
+"We have watched you carefully," said the First Assistant, who had
+her night garments on but had forgotten to take off her cap.
+"Although you are young, you have shown ability, and&mdash;you are to be
+accepted."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Thank you, very much," replied Jane Brown, in a strangled tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+"At first," said the First Assistant, "we were not sure. You were
+very young, and you had such odd ideas. You know that yourself now."
+</p>
+<p>
+She leaned down and pressed a sore little toe with her forefinger.
+Then she sighed. The mention of Jane Brown's youth had hurt her,
+because she was no longer very young. And there were times when she
+was tired, when it seemed to her that only youth counted. She felt
+that way to-night.
+</p>
+<p>
+When Jane Brown had gone on, she blew out her candle and went to
+bed, still in her cap.
+</p>
+<p>
+Hospitals do not really sleep at night. The elevator man dozes in
+his cage, and the night watchman may nap in the engineer's room in
+the basement. But the night nurses are always making their sleepless
+rounds, and in the wards, dark and quiet, restless figures turn and
+sigh.
+</p>
+<p>
+Before she went to bed that night, Jane Brown, by devious ways,
+slipped back to her ward. It looked strange to her, this cavernous
+place, filled with the unlovely noises of sleeping men. By the one
+low light near the doorway she went back to Johnny's bed, and sat
+down beside him. She felt that this was the place to think things
+out. In her room other things pressed in on her; the necessity of
+making good for the sake of those at home, her love of the work, and
+cowardice. But here she saw things right.
+</p>
+<p>
+The night nurse found her there some time later, asleep, her
+hunting-case watch open on Johnny's bed and her fingers still on his
+quiet wrist. She made no report of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two had another sleepless night written in on his record that
+night. He sat up and worried. He worried about the way the Senior
+Surgical Interne had sung to Jane Brown that night. And he worried
+about things he had done and shouldn't have, and things he should
+have done and hadn't. Mostly the first. At five in the morning he
+wrote a letter to his family telling them where he was, and that he
+had been vaccinated and that the letter would be fumigated. He also
+wrote a check for an artificial leg for the boy in the children's
+ward, and then went to bed and put himself to sleep by reciting the
+"Rosary" over and over. His last conscious thought was that the
+hours he had spent with a certain person would not make much of a
+string of pearls.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer went to Doctor Willie the next day. Some of the
+exuberance of the concert still bubbled in him, although he shook
+his head over Johnny's record.
+</p>
+<p>
+"A little slow, Nellie," he said. "A little slow."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown took a long breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Doctor Willie," she said, "won't you have him operated on?"
+</p>
+<p>
+He looked up at her over his spectacles.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Operated on? What for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, he's not getting any better," she managed desperately.
+"I'm&mdash;sometimes I think he'll die while we're waiting for him to get
+better."
+</p>
+<p>
+He was surprised, but he was not angry.
+</p>
+<p>
+"There's no fracture, child," he said gently. "If there is a clot
+there, nature is probably better at removing it than we are. The
+trouble with you," he said indulgently, "is that you have come here,
+where they operate first and regret afterward. Nature is the best
+surgeon, child."
+</p>
+<p>
+She cast about her despairingly for some way to tell him the truth.
+But even when she spoke she knew she was foredoomed to failure.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But&mdash;suppose the Staff thinks that he should be?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Doctor Willie's kindly mouth set itself into grim lines.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The Staff!" he said, and looked at her searchingly. Then his jaws
+set at an obstinate angle.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, Nellie," he said, "I guess one opinion's as good as another
+in these cases. And I don't suppose they'll do any cutting and
+hacking without my consent." He looked at Johnny's unconscious
+figure. "He never amounted to much," he added, "but it's surprising
+the way money's been coming in to pay his board here. Your mother
+sent five dollars. A good lot of people are interested in him. I
+can't see myself going home and telling them he died on the
+operating table."
+</p>
+<p>
+He patted her on the arm as he went out.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't get an old head on those young shoulders yet, Nellie," he
+said as he was going. "Leave the worrying to me. I'm used to it."
+</p>
+<p>
+She saw then that to him she was still a little girl. She probably
+would always be just a little girl to him. He did not take her
+seriously, and no one else would speak to him. She was quite
+despairing.
+</p>
+<p>
+The ward loved Doctor Willie since the night before. It watched him
+out with affectionate eyes. Jane Brown watched him, too, his fine
+old head, the sturdy step that had brought healing and peace to a
+whole county. She had hurt him, she knew that. She ached at the
+thought of it. And she had done no good.
+</p>
+<p>
+That afternoon Jane Brown broke another rule. She went to Twenty-two
+on her off duty, and caused a mild furore there. He had been drawing
+a sketch of her from memory, an extremely poor sketch, with one eye
+larger than the other. He hid it immediately, although she could not
+possibly have recognised it, and talked very fast to cover his
+excitement.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, well!" he said. "I knew I was going to have some luck to-day.
+My right hand has been itching&mdash;or is that a sign of money?" Then he
+saw her face, and reduced his speech to normality, if not his heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Come and sit down," he said. "And tell me about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+But she would not sit down. She went to the window and looked out
+for a moment. It was from there she said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"I have been accepted."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good." But he did not, apparently, think it such good news. He drew
+a long breath. "Well, I suppose your friends should be glad for
+you."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I didn't come to talk about being accepted," she announced.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't suppose, by any chance, you came to see how I am getting
+along?" he inquired humbly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I can see that."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You can't see how lonely I am." When she offered nothing to this
+speech, he enlarged on it. "When it gets unbearable," he said, "I
+sit in front of the mirror and keep myself company. If that doesn't
+make your heart ache, nothing will."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm afraid I have a heart-ache, but it is not that." For a
+terrible moment he thought of that theory of his which referred to a
+disappointment in love. Was she going to have the unbelievable
+cruelty to tell him about it?
+</p>
+<p>
+"I have to talk to somebody," she said simply. "And I came to you,
+because you've worked on a newspaper, and you have had a lot of
+experience. It's&mdash;a matter of ethics. But really it's a matter of
+life and death."
+</p>
+<p>
+He felt most horribly humble before her, and he hated the lie,
+except that it had brought her to him. There was something so direct
+and childlike about her. The very way she drew a chair in front of
+him, and proceeded, talking rather fast, to lay the matter before
+him, touched him profoundly. He felt, somehow, incredibly old and
+experienced.
+</p>
+<p>
+And then, after all that, to fail her!
+</p>
+<p>
+"You see how it is," she finished. "I can't go to the Staff, and
+they wouldn't do anything if I did&mdash;except possibly put me out.
+Because a nurse really only follows orders. And&mdash;I've got to stay,
+if I can. And Doctor Willie doesn't believe in an operation and
+won't see that he's dying. And everybody at home thinks he is right,
+because&mdash;well," she added hastily, "he's been right a good many
+times."
+</p>
+<p>
+He listened attentively. His record, you remember, was his own way
+some ninety-seven per cent of the time, and at first he would not
+believe that this was going to be the three per cent, or a part of
+it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well," he said at last, "we'll just make the Staff turn in and do
+it. That's easy."
+</p>
+<p>
+"But they won't. They can't."
+</p>
+<p>
+"We can't let Johnny die, either, can we?"
+</p>
+<p>
+But when at last she was gone, and the room was incredibly empty
+without her,&mdash;when, to confess a fact that he was exceedingly
+shame-faced about, he had wheeled over to the chair she had sat in
+and put his cheek against the arm where her hand had rested, when he
+was somewhat his own man again and had got over the feeling that his
+arms were empty of something they had never held&mdash;then it was that
+Twenty-two found himself up against the three per cent.
+</p>
+<p>
+The hospital's attitude was firm. It could not interfere. It was an
+outside patient and an outside doctor. Its responsibility ended with
+providing for the care of the patient, under his physician's orders.
+It was regretful&mdash;but, of course, unless the case was turned over to
+the Staff&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+He went back to the ward to tell her, after it had all been
+explained to him. But she was not surprised. He saw that, after all,
+she had really known he was going to fail her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's hopeless," was all she said. "Everybody is right, and
+everybody is wrong."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the next day that, going to the courtyard for a breath of
+air, she saw a woman outside the iron gate waving to her. It was
+Johnny's mother, a forlorn old soul in what Jane Brown recognised as
+an old suit of her mother's.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Doctor Willie bought my ticket, Miss Nellie," she said nervously.
+"It seems like I had to come, even if I couldn't get in. I've been
+waiting around most all afternoon. How is he?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"He is resting quietly," said Jane Brown, holding herself very
+tense, because she wanted to scream. "He isn't suffering at all."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Could you tell me which window he's near, Miss Nellie?"
+</p>
+<p>
+She pointed out the window, and Johnny Fraser's mother stood,
+holding to the bars, peering up at it. Her lips moved, and Jane
+Brown knew that she was praying. At last she turned her eyes away.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Folks have said a lot about him," she said, "but he was always a
+good son to me. If only he'd had a chance&mdash;I'd be right worried,
+Miss Nellie, if he didn't have Doctor Willie looking after him."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown went into the building. There was just one thing clear in
+her mind. Johnny Fraser must have his chance, somehow.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the meantime things were not doing any too well in the hospital.
+A second case, although mild, had extended the quarantine.
+Discontent grew, and threatened to develop into mutiny. Six men
+from one of the wards marched <i>en masse</i> to the lower hall, and were
+preparing to rush the guards when they were discovered. The Senior
+Surgical Interne took two prisoners himself, and became an emergency
+case for two stitches and arnica compresses.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown helped to fix him up, and he took advantage of her
+holding a dressing basin near his cut lip to kiss her hand, very
+respectfully. She would have resented it under other circumstances,
+but the Senior Surgical Interne was, even if temporarily, a patient,
+and must be humoured. She forgot about the kiss immediately, anyhow,
+although he did not.
+</p>
+<p>
+Her three months of probation were drawing to a close now, and her
+cap was already made and put away in a box, ready for the day she
+should don it. But she did not look at it very often.
+</p>
+<p>
+And all the time, fighting his battle with youth and vigour, but
+with closed eyes, and losing it day by day, was Johnny Fraser.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then, one night on the roof, Jane Brown had to refuse the Senior
+Surgical Interne. He took it very hard.
+</p>
+<p>
+"We'd have been such pals," he said, rather wistfully, after he saw
+it was no use.
+</p>
+<p>
+"We can be, anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I suppose," he said with some bitterness, "that I'd have stood a
+better chance if I'd done as you wanted me to about that fellow in
+your ward, gone to the staff and raised hell."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wouldn't have married you," said Jane Brown, "but I'd have
+thought you were pretty much of a man."
+</p>
+<p>
+The more he thought about that the less he liked it. It almost kept
+him awake that night.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the next day that Twenty-two had his idea. He ran true to
+form, and carried it back to Jane Brown for her approval. But she
+was not enthusiastic.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It would help to amuse them, of course, but how can you publish a
+newspaper without any news?" she asked, rather listlessly, for her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"News! This building is full of news. I have some bits already.
+Listen!" He took a notebook out of his pocket. "The stork breaks
+quarantine. New baby in O ward. The chief engineer has developed a
+boil on his neck. Elevator Man arrested for breaking speed limit.
+Wanted, four square inches of cuticle for skin grafting in W. How's
+that? And I'm only beginning."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown listened. Somehow, behind Twenty-two's lightness of tone,
+she felt something more earnest. She did not put it into words, even
+to herself, but she divined something new, a desire to do his bit,
+there in the hospital. It was, if she had only known it, a
+milestone in a hitherto unmarked career. Twenty-two, who had always
+been a man, was by way of becoming a person.
+</p>
+<p>
+He explained about publishing it. He used to run a typewriter in
+college, and the convalescents could mimeograph it and sell it.
+There was a mimeographing machine in the office.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne came in just then. Refusing to marry him
+had had much the effect of smacking a puppy. He came back, a trifle
+timid, but friendly. So he came in just then, and elected himself to
+the advertising and circulation department, and gave the Probationer
+the society end, although it was not his paper or his idea, and sat
+down at once at the table and started a limerick, commencing:
+</p>
+<p class="center">
+          "<i>We're here in the city, marooned</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+However, he never got any further with it, because there are,
+apparently, no rhymes for "marooned." He refused "tuned" which
+several people offered him, with extreme scorn.
+</p>
+<p>
+Up to this point Jane Brown had been rather too worried to think
+about Twenty-two. She had grown accustomed to seeing him coming
+slowly back toward her ward, his eyes travelling much faster than he
+did. Not, of course, that she knew that. And to his being, in a way,
+underfoot a part of every day, after the Head had made rounds and
+was safely out of the road for a good two hours.
+</p>
+<p>
+But two things happened that day to turn her mind in onto her heart.
+One was when she heard about the artificial leg. The other was when
+she passed the door of his room, where a large card now announced
+"Office of the <i>Quarantine Sentinel</i>." She passed the door, and she
+distinctly heard most un-hospital-like chatter within. Judging from
+the shadows on the glass door, too, the room was full. It sounded
+joyous and carefree.
+</p>
+<p>
+Something in Jane Brown&mdash;her mind, probably&mdash;turned right around and
+looked into her heart, and made an odd discovery. This was that Jane
+Brown's heart had sunk about two inches, and was feeling very queer.
+</p>
+<p>
+She went straight on, however, and put on a fresh collar in her
+little bedroom, and listed her washing and changed her shoes,
+because her feet still ached a lot of the time. But she was a brave
+person and liked to look things in the face. So before she went back
+to the ward, she stood in front of her mirror and said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"You're a nice nurse, Nell Brown. To&mdash;to talk about duty and brag
+about service, and then to act like a fool."
+</p>
+<p>
+She went back to the ward and sat beside Johnny. But that night she
+went up on the roof again, and sat on the parapet. She could see,
+across the courtyard, the dim rectangles of her ward, and around a
+corner in plain view, "room Twenty-two." Its occupant was sitting at
+the typewriter, and working hard. Or he seemed to be. It was too far
+away to be sure. Jane Brown slid down onto the roof, which was not
+very clean, and putting her elbows on the parapet, watched him for a
+long time. When he got up, at last, and came to the open window, she
+hardly breathed. However, he only stood there, looking toward her
+but not seeing her.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown put her head on the parapet that night and cried. She
+thought she was crying about Johnny Fraser. She might have felt
+somewhat comforted had she known that Twenty-two, being tired with
+his day's work, had at last given way to most horrible jealousy of
+the Senior Surgical Interne, and that his misery was to hers as five
+is to one.
+</p>
+<p>
+The first number of the <i>Quarantine Sentinel</i> was a great success.
+It served in the wards much the same purpose as the magazines
+published in the trenches. It relieved the monotony, brought the
+different wards together, furnished laughter and gossip. Twenty-two
+wrote the editorials, published the paper, with the aid of a couple
+of convalescents, and in his leisure drew cartoons. He drew very
+well, but all his girls looked like Jane Brown. It caused a ripple
+of talk.
+</p>
+<p>
+The children from the children's ward distributed them, and went
+back from the private rooms bearing tribute of flowers and fruit.
+Twenty-two himself developed a most reprehensible habit of
+concealing candy in the <i>Sentinel</i> office and smuggling it to his
+carriers. Altogether a new and neighbourly feeling seemed to
+follow in the wake of the little paper. People who had sulked
+in side-by-side rooms began, in the relaxed discipline of
+convalescence, to pay little calls about. Crotchety dowagers knitted
+socks for new babies. A wave of friendliness swept over every one,
+and engulfed particularly Twenty-two.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the glow of it he changed perceptibly. This was the first
+popularity he had ever earned, and the first he had ever cared a
+fi-penny bit about. And, because he valued it, he felt more and more
+unworthy of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+But it kept him from seeing Jane Brown. He was too busy for many
+excursions to the ward, and when he went he was immediately the
+centre of an animated group. He hardly ever saw her alone, and when
+he did he began to suspect that she pretended duties that might have
+waited.
+</p>
+<p>
+One day he happened to go back while Doctor Willie was there, and
+after that he understood her problem better.
+</p>
+<p>
+Through it all Johnny lived. His thin, young body was now hardly an
+outline under the smooth, white covering of his bed. He swallowed,
+faintly, such bits of liquid as were placed between his lips, but
+there were times when Jane Brown's fingers, more expert now, could
+find no pulse at all. And still she had found no way to give him his
+chance.
+</p>
+<p>
+She made a last appeal to Doctor Willie that day, but he only shook
+his head gravely.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Even if there was an operation now, Nellie," said Doctor Willie
+that day, "he could not stand it."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the first time that Twenty-two had known her name was Nellie.
+</p>
+<p>
+That was the last day of Jane Brown's probation. On the next day she
+was to don her cap. The <i>Sentinel</i> came out with a congratulatory
+editorial, and at nine o'clock that night the First Assistant
+brought an announcement, in the Head's own writing, for the paper.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The Head of the Training School announces with much pleasure the
+acceptance of Miss N. Jane Brown as a pupil nurse."
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two sat and stared at it for quite a long time.
+</p>
+<p>
+That night Jane Brown fought her battle and won. She went to her
+room immediately after chapel, and took the family pictures off her
+little stand and got out ink and paper. She put the photographs out
+of sight, because she knew that they were counting on her, and she
+could not bear her mother's eyes. And then she counted her money,
+because she had broken another thermometer, and the ticket home was
+rather expensive. She had enough, but very little more.
+</p>
+<p>
+After that she went to work.
+</p>
+<p>
+It took her rather a long time, because she had a great deal to
+explain. She had to put her case, in fact. And she was not strong on
+either ethics or logic. She said so, indeed, at the beginning. She
+said also that she had talked to a lot of people, but that no one
+understood how she felt&mdash;that there ought to be no professional
+ethics, or etiquette, or anything else, where it was life or death.
+That she felt hospitals were to save lives and not to save feelings.
+It seemed necessary, after that, to defend Doctor Willie&mdash;without
+naming him, of course. How much good he had done, and how he came to
+rely on himself and his own opinion because in the country there was
+no one to consult with.
+</p>
+<p>
+However, she was not so gentle with the Staff. She said that it was
+standing by and letting a patient die, because it was too polite to
+interfere, although they had all agreed among themselves that an
+operation was necessary. And that if they felt that way, would they
+refuse to pull a child from in front of a locomotive because it was
+its mother's business, and she didn't know how to do it?
+</p>
+<p>
+<i>Then she signed it.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+She turned it in at the <i>Sentinel</i> office the next morning while
+the editor was shaving. She had to pass it through a crack in the
+door. Even that, however, was enough for the editor in question to
+see that she wore no cap.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But&mdash;see here," he said, in a rather lathery voice, "you're
+accepted, you know. Where's the&mdash;the visible sign?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown was not quite sure she could speak. However, she managed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"After you read that," she said, "you'll understand."
+</p>
+<p>
+He read it immediately, of course, growing more and more grave, and
+the soap drying on his chin. Its sheer courage made him gasp.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good girl," he said to himself. "Brave little girl. But it finishes
+her here, and she knows it."
+</p>
+<p>
+He was pretty well cut up about it, too, because while he was
+getting it ready he felt as if he was sharpening a knife to stab her
+with. Her own knife, too. But he had to be as brave as she was.
+</p>
+<p>
+The paper came out at two o'clock. At three the First Assistant,
+looking extremely white, relieved Jane Brown of the care of H ward
+and sent her to her room.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown eyed her wistfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm not to come back, I suppose?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The First Assistant avoided her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm afraid not," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane Brown went up the ward and looked down at Johnny Fraser. Then
+she gathered up her bandage scissors and her little dressing forceps
+and went out.
+</p>
+<p>
+The First Assistant took a step after her, but stopped. There were
+tears in her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+Things moved very rapidly in the hospital that day, while the guards
+sat outside on their camp-stools and ate apples or read the
+newspapers, and while Jane Brown sat alone in her room.
+</p>
+<p>
+First of all the Staff met and summoned Twenty-two. He went down in
+the elevator&mdash;he had lost Elizabeth a few days before, and was using
+a cane&mdash;ready for trouble. He had always met a fight more than
+halfway. It was the same instinct that had taken him to the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+But no one wanted to fight. The Staff was waiting, grave and
+perplexed, but rather anxious to put its case than otherwise. It
+felt misunderstood, aggrieved, and horribly afraid it was going to
+get in the newspapers. But it was not angry. On the contrary, it was
+trying its extremely intelligent best to see things from a new
+angle.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Surgical Interne was waiting outside. He had smoked
+eighteen cigarettes since he received his copy of the <i>Sentinel</i>,
+and was as unhappy as an <i>interne</i> can be.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What the devil made you publish it?" he demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Because," he said, "I have always had a sneaking desire to publish
+an honest paper, one where public questions can be discussed. If
+this isn't a public question, I don't know one when I see it."
+</p>
+<p>
+But he was not smiling when he went in.
+</p>
+<p>
+An hour later Doctor Willie came in. He had brought some flowers for
+the children's ward, and his arms were bulging. To his surprise,
+accustomed as he was to the somewhat cavalier treatment of the
+country practitioner in a big city hospital, he was invited to the
+Staff room.
+</p>
+<p>
+To the eternal credit of the Staff Jane Brown's part in that painful
+half hour was never known. The Staff was careful, too, of Doctor
+Willie. They knew they were being irregular, and were most
+wretchedly uncomfortable. Also, there being six of them against one,
+it looked rather like force, particularly since, after the first two
+minutes, every one of them liked Doctor Willie.
+</p>
+<p>
+He took it so awfully well. He sat there, with his elbows on a table
+beside a withering mass of spring flowers, and faced the
+white-coated Staff, and said that he hoped he was man enough to
+acknowledge a mistake, and six opinions against one left him nothing
+else to do. The Senior Surgical Interne, who had been hating him
+for weeks, offered him a cigar.
+</p>
+<p>
+He had only one request to make. There was a little girl in the
+training school who believed in him, and he would like to go to the
+ward and write the order for the operation himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+Which he did. But Jane Brown was not there.
+</p>
+<p>
+Late that evening the First Assistant, passing along the corridor in
+the dormitory, was accosted by a quiet figure in a blue uniform,
+without a cap.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How is he?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The First Assistant was feeling more cheerful than usual. The
+operating surgeon had congratulated her on the way things had moved
+that day, and she was feeling, as she often did, that, after all,
+work was a solace for many troubles.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Of course, it is very soon, but he stood it well." She looked up at
+Jane Brown, who was taller than she was, but who always, somehow,
+looked rather little. There are girls like that. "Look here," she
+said, "you must not sit in that room and worry. Run up to the
+operating-room and help to clear away."
+</p>
+<p>
+She was very wise, the First Assistant. For Jane Brown went, and
+washed away some of the ache with the stains of Johnny's operation.
+Here, all about her, were the tangible evidences of her triumph,
+which was also a defeat. A little glow of service revived in her.
+If Johnny lived, it was a small price to pay for a life. If he died,
+she had given him his chance. The operating-room nurses were very
+kind. They liked her courage, but they were frightened, too. She,
+like the others, had been right, but also she was wrong.
+</p>
+<p>
+They paid her tribute of little kindnesses, but they knew she must
+go.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the night nurse who told Twenty-two that Jane Brown was in
+the operating-room. He was still up and dressed at midnight, but the
+sheets of to-morrow's editorial lay blank on his table.
+</p>
+<p>
+The night nurse glanced at her watch to see if it was time for the
+twelve o'clock medicines.
+</p>
+<p>
+"There's a rumour going about," she said, "that the quarantine's to
+be lifted to-morrow. I'll be rather sorry. It has been a change."
+</p>
+<p>
+"To-morrow," said Twenty-two, in a startled voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I suppose you'll be going out at once?"
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a wistful note in her voice. She liked him. He had been an
+oasis of cheer in the dreary rounds of the night. A very little
+more, and she might have forgotten her rule, which was never to be
+sentimentally interested in a patient.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wonder," said Twenty-two, in a curious tone, "if you will give me
+my cane?"
+</p>
+<p>
+He was clad, at that time, in a hideous bathrobe, purchased by the
+orderly, over his night clothing, and he had the expression of a
+person who intends to take no chances.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Thanks," said Twenty-two. "And&mdash;will you send the night watchman
+here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The night nurse went out. She had a distinct feeling that something
+was about to happen. At least she claimed it later. But she found
+the night watchman making coffee in a back pantry, and gave him her
+message.
+</p>
+<p>
+Some time later Jane Brown stood in the doorway of the
+operating-room and gave it a farewell look. Its white floor and
+walls were spotless. Shining rows of instruments on clean towels
+were ready to put away in the cabinets. The sterilisers glowed in
+warm rectangles of gleaming copper. Over all brooded the peace of
+order, the quiet of the night.
+</p>
+<p>
+Outside the operating-room door she drew a long breath, and faced
+the night watchman. She had left something in Twenty-two. Would she
+go and get it?
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's very late," said Jane Brown. "And it isn't allowed, I'm sure."
+</p>
+<p>
+However, what was one more rule to her who had defied them all? A
+spirit of recklessness seized her. After all, why not? She would
+never see him again. Like the operating-room, she would stand in the
+doorway and say a mute little farewell.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twenty-two's door was wide open, and he was standing in the centre
+of the room, looking out. He had heard her long before she came in
+sight, for he, too, had learned the hospital habit of classifying
+footsteps.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was horribly excited. He had never been so nervous before. He had
+made up a small speech, a sort of beginning, but he forgot it the
+moment he heard her, and she surprised him in the midst of trying,
+agonisingly, to remember it.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a sort of dreadful calm, however, about Jane Brown.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The watchman says I have left something here."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was clear to him at once that he meant nothing to her. It was in
+her voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You did," he said. And tried to smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then&mdash;if I may have it&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wish to heaven you could have it," he said, very rapidly. "I
+don't want it. It's darned miserable."
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's&mdash;what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's an ache," he went on, still rather incoherent. "A pain. A
+misery." Then, seeing her beginning to put on a professional look:
+"No, not that. It's a feeling. Look here," he said, rather more
+slowly, "do you mind coming in and closing the door? There's a man
+across who's always listening."
+</p>
+<p>
+She went in, but she did not close the door. She went slowly,
+looking rather pale.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What I sent for you for is this," said Twenty-two, "are you going
+away? Because I've got to know."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm being sent away as soon as the quarantine is over. It's&mdash;it's
+perfectly right. I expected it. Things would soon go to pieces if
+the nurses took to&mdash;took to doing what I did."
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly Twenty-two limped across the room and slammed the door
+shut, a proceeding immediately followed by an irritated ringing of
+bells at the night nurse's desk. Then he turned, his back against
+the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Because I'm going when you do," he said, in a terrible voice. "I'm
+going when you go, and wherever you go. I've stood all the waiting
+around for a glimpse of you that I'm going to stand." He glared at
+her. "For weeks," he said, "I've sat here in this room and listened
+for you, and hated to go to sleep for fear you would pass and I
+wouldn't be looking through that damned door. And now I've reached
+the limit."
+</p>
+<p>
+A sort of band which had seemed to be fastened around Jane Brown's
+head for days suddenly removed itself to her heart, which became
+extremely irregular.
+</p>
+<p>
+"And I want to say this," went on Twenty-two, still in a savage
+tone. He was horribly frightened, so he blustered. "I don't care
+whether you want me or not, you've got to have me. I'm so much in
+love with you that it hurts."
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly Jane Brown's heart settled down into a soft rhythmic
+beating that was like a song. After all, life was made up of love
+and work, and love came first.
+</p>
+<p>
+She faced Twenty-two with brave eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I love you, too&mdash;so much that it hurts."
+</p>
+<p>
+The gentleman across the hall, sitting up in bed, with an angry
+thumb on the bell, was electrified to see, on the glass door across,
+the silhouette of a young lady without a cap go into the arms of a
+very large, masculine silhouette in a dressing-gown. He heard, too,
+the thump of a falling cane.
+</p>
+<p>
+Late that night Jane Brown, by devious ways, made her way back to H
+ward. Johnny was there, a strange Johnny with a bandaged head, but
+with open eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+At dawn, the dawn of the day when Jane Brown was to leave the little
+world of the hospital for a little world of two, consisting of a man
+and a woman, the night nurse found her there, asleep, her fingers
+still on Johnny's thin wrist.
+</p>
+<p>
+She did not report it.
+</p>
+<a name="2H_4_0003"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+
+<h2>
+    JANE
+</h2>
+<p class="sec">
+I
+</p>
+<p>
+Having retired to a hospital to sulk, Jane remained there. The
+family came and sat by her bed uncomfortably and smoked, and finally
+retreated with defeat written large all over it, leaving Jane to the
+continued possession of Room 33, a pink kimono with slippers to
+match, a hand-embroidered face pillow with a rose-coloured bow on
+the corner, and a young nurse with a gift of giving Jane daily the
+appearance of a strawberry and vanilla ice rising from a meringue of
+bed linen.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane's complaint was temper. The family knew this, and so did
+Jane, although she had an annoying way of looking hurt, a gentle
+heart-brokenness of speech that made the family, under the
+pretence of getting a match, go out into the hall and swear softly
+under its breath. But it was temper, and the family was not
+deceived. Also, knowing Jane, the family was quite ready to
+believe that while it was swearing in the hall, Jane was biting
+holes in the hand-embroidered face pillow in Room 33.
+</p>
+<p>
+It had finally come to be a test of endurance. Jane vowed to stay
+at the hospital until the family on bended knee begged her to emerge
+and to brighten the world again with her presence. The family, being
+her father, said it would be damned if it would, and that if Jane
+cared to live on anæmic chicken broth, oatmeal wafers and massage
+twice a day for the rest of her life, why, let her.
+</p>
+<p>
+The dispute, having begun about whether Jane should or should not
+marry a certain person, Jane representing the affirmative and her
+father the negative, had taken on new aspects, had grown and
+altered, and had, to be brief, become a contest between the
+masculine Johnson and the feminine Johnson as to which would take
+the count. Not that this appeared on the surface. The masculine
+Johnson, having closed the summer home on Jane's defection and gone
+back to the city, sent daily telegrams, novels and hothouse grapes,
+all three of which Jane devoured indiscriminately. Once, indeed,
+Father Johnson had motored the forty miles from town, to be told
+that Jane was too ill and unhappy to see him, and to have a glimpse,
+as he drove furiously away, of Jane sitting pensive at her window in
+the pink kimono, gazing over his head at the distant hills and
+clearly entirely indifferent to him and his wrath.
+</p>
+<p>
+So we find Jane, on a frosty morning in late October, in triumphant
+possession of the field&mdash;aunts and cousins routed, her father
+sulking in town, and the victor herself&mdash;or is victor feminine?&mdash;and
+if it isn't, shouldn't it be?&mdash;sitting up in bed staring blankly at
+her watch.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane had just wakened&mdash;an hour later than usual; she had rung the
+bell three times and no one had responded. Jane's famous temper
+began to stretch and yawn. At this hour Jane was accustomed
+to be washed with tepid water, scented daintily with violet,
+alcohol-rubbed, talcum-powdered, and finally fresh-linened, coifed
+and manicured, to be supported with a heap of fresh pillows and fed
+creamed sweet-bread and golden-brown coffee and toast.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane rang again, with a line between her eyebrows. The bell was not
+broken. She could hear it distinctly. This was an outrage! She would
+report it to the superintendent. She had been ringing for ten
+minutes. That little minx of a nurse was flirting somewhere with one
+of the internes.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane angrily flung the covers back and got out on her small bare
+feet. Then she stretched her slim young arms above her head, her
+spoiled red mouth forming a scarlet O as she yawned. In her
+sleeveless and neckless nightgown, with her hair over her shoulders,
+minus the more elaborate coiffure which later in the day helped
+her to poise and firmness, she looked a pretty young girl,
+almost&mdash;although Jane herself never suspected this&mdash;almost an
+amiable young person.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane saw herself in the glass and assumed immediately the two lines
+between her eyebrows which were the outward and visible token of
+what she had suffered. Then she found her slippers, a pair of
+stockings to match and two round bits of pink silk elastic of
+private and feminine use, and sat down on the floor to put them on.
+</p>
+<p>
+The floor was cold. To Jane's wrath was added indignation. She
+hitched herself along the boards to the radiator and put her hand on
+it. It was even colder than Jane.
+</p>
+<p>
+The family temper was fully awake by this time and ready for
+business. Jane, sitting on the icy floor, jerked on her stockings,
+snapped the pink bands into place, thrust her feet into her slippers
+and rose, shivering. She went to the bed, and by dint of careful
+man&oelig;uvring so placed the bell between the head of the bed and the
+wall that during the remainder of her toilet it rang steadily.
+</p>
+<p>
+The remainder of Jane's toilet was rather casual. She flung on the
+silk kimono, twisted her hair on top of her head and stuck a pin or
+two in it, thus achieving a sort of effect a thousand times more
+bewildering than she had ever managed with a curling iron and
+twenty seven hair pins, and flinging her door wide stalked into the
+hall. At least she meant to stalk, but one does not really stamp
+about much in number-two, heelless, pink-satin mules.
+</p>
+<p>
+At the first stalk&mdash;or stamp&mdash;she stopped. Standing uncertainly just
+outside her door was a strange man, strangely attired. Jane clutched
+her kimono about her and stared.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Did&mdash;did you&mdash;are you ringing?" asked the apparition. It wore a
+pair of white-duck trousers, much soiled, a coat that bore the words
+"furnace room" down the front in red letters on a white tape, and a
+clean and spotless white apron. There was coal dust on its face and
+streaks of it in its hair, which appeared normally to be red.
+</p>
+<p>
+"There's something the matter with your bell," said the young man.
+"It keeps on ringing."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I intend it to," said Jane coldly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You can't make a racket like that round here, you know," he
+asserted, looking past her into the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I intend to make all the racket I can until I get some attention."
+</p>
+<p>
+"What have you done&mdash;put a book on it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Look here"&mdash;Jane added another line to the two between her
+eyebrows. In the family this was generally a signal for a retreat,
+but of course the young man could not know this, and, besides, he
+was red-headed. "Look here," said Jane, "I don't know who you are
+and I don't care either, but that bell is going to ring until I get
+my bath and some breakfast. And it's going to ring then unless I
+stop it."
+</p>
+<p>
+The young man in the coal dust and the white apron looked at Jane
+and smiled. Then he walked past her into the room, jerked the bed
+from the wall and released the bell.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Now!" he said as the din outside ceased. "I'm too busy to talk just
+at present, but if you do that again I'll take the bell out of the
+room altogether. There are other people in the hospital besides
+yourself."
+</p>
+<p>
+At that he started out and along the hall, leaving Jane speechless.
+After he'd gone about a dozen feet he stopped and turned, looking at
+Jane reflectively.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Do you know anything about cooking?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I know more about cooking than you do about politeness," she
+retorted, white with fury, and went into her room and slammed the
+door. She went directly to the bell and put it behind the bed and
+set it to ringing again. Then she sat down in a chair and picked up
+a book. Had the red-haired person opened the door she was perfectly
+prepared to fling the book at him. She would have thrown a hatchet
+had she had one.
+</p>
+<p>
+As a matter of fact, however, he did not come back. The bell rang
+with a soul-satisfying jangle for about two minutes and then died
+away, and no amount of poking with a hairpin did any good. It was
+clear that the bell had been cut off outside!
+</p>
+<p>
+For fifty-five minutes Jane sat in that chair breakfastless, very
+casually washed and with the aforesaid Billie Burkeness of hair.
+Then, hunger gaining over temper, she opened the door and peered
+out. From somewhere near at hand there came a pungent odor of
+burning toast. Jane sniffed; then, driven by hunger, she made a
+short sally down the hall to the parlour where the nurses on duty
+made their headquarters. It was empty. The dismantled bell register
+was on the wall, with the bell unscrewed and lying on the mantel
+beside it, and the odour of burning toast was stronger than ever.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane padded softly to the odour, following her small nose. It led
+her to the pantry, where under ordinary circumstances the patients'
+trays were prepared by a pantrymaid, the food being shipped there
+from the kitchen on a lift. Clearly the circumstances were not
+ordinary. The pantrymaid was not in sight.
+</p>
+<p>
+Instead, the red-haired person was standing by the window scraping
+busily at a blackened piece of toast. There was a rank odour of
+boiling tea in the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Damnation!" said the red-haired person, and flung the toast into a
+corner where there already lay a small heap of charred breakfast
+hopes. Then he saw Jane.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I fixed the bell, didn't I?" he remarked. "I say, since you claim
+to know so much about cooking, I wish you'd make some toast."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I didn't say I knew much," snapped Jane, holding her kimono round
+her. "I said I knew more than you knew about politeness."
+</p>
+<p>
+The red-haired person smiled again, and then, making a deep bow,
+with a knife in one hand and a toaster in the other, he said:
+"Madam, I prithee forgive me for my untoward conduct of an hour
+since. Say but the word and I replace the bell."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I won't make any toast," said Jane, looking at the bread with
+famished eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, very well," said the red-haired person with a sigh. "On your
+head be it!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"But I'll tell you how to do it," conceded Jane, "if you'll explain
+who you are and what you are doing in that costume and where the
+nurses are."
+</p>
+<p>
+The red-haired person sat down on the edge of the table and looked
+at her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll make a bargain with you," he said. "There's a convalescent
+typhoid in a room near yours who swears he'll go down to the village
+for something to eat in his&mdash;er&mdash;hospital attire unless he's fed
+soon. He's dangerous, empty. He's reached the cannibalistic stage.
+If he should see you in that ravishing pink thing, I&mdash;I wouldn't
+answer for the consequences. I'll tell you everything if you'll make
+him six large slices of toast and boil him four or five eggs, enough
+to hold him for a while. The tea's probably ready; it's been boiling
+for an hour."
+</p>
+<p>
+Hunger was making Jane human. She gathered up the tail of her
+kimono, and stepping daintily into the pantry proceeded to spread
+herself a slice of bread and butter.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Where is everybody?" she asked, licking some butter off her thumb
+with a small pink tongue.
+</p>
+<p class="verse2">
+          <i>Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold,</i> <br />
+          &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>And the mate of the Nancy brig,</i> <br />
+          <i>And the bosun tight and the midshipmite,</i> <br />
+          &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>And the crew of the captain's gig.</i>
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+recited the red-haired person.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You!" said Jane with the bread halfway to her mouth.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Even I," said the red-haired person. "I'm the superintendent, the
+staff, the training school, the cooks, the furnace man and the
+ambulance driver."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane was pouring herself a cup of tea, and she put in milk and sugar
+and took a sip or two before she would give him the satisfaction of
+asking him what he meant. Anyhow, probably she had already guessed.
+Jane was no fool.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I hope you're getting the salary list," she said, sitting on the
+pantry girl's chair and, what with the tea inside and somebody to
+quarrel with, feeling more like herself. "My father's one of the
+directors, and somebody gets it."
+</p>
+<p>
+The red-haired person sat on the radiator and eyed Jane. He looked
+slightly stunned, as if the presence of beauty in a Billie Burke
+chignon and little else except a kimono was almost too much for him.
+From somewhere near by came a terrific thumping, as of some one
+pounding a hairbrush on a table. The red-haired person shifted along
+the radiator a little nearer Jane, and continued to gloat.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't let that noise bother you," he said; "that's only the
+convalescent typhoid banging for his breakfast. He's been shouting
+for food ever since I came at six last night."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Is it safe to feed him so much?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't know. He hasn't had anything yet. Perhaps if you're ready
+you'd better fix him something."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane had finished her bread and tea by this time and remembered her
+kimono.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll go back and dress," she said primly. But he wouldn't hear of
+it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He's starving," he objected as a fresh volley of thumps came along
+the hall. "I've been trying at intervals since daylight to make him
+a piece of toast. The minute I put it on the fire I think of
+something I've forgotten, and when I come back it's in flames."
+</p>
+<p>
+So Jane cut some bread and put on eggs to boil, and the red-haired
+person told his story.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You see," he explained, "although I appear to be a furnace man from
+the waist up and an interne from the waist down, I am really the new
+superintendent."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I hope you'll do better than the last one," she said severely. "He
+was always flirting with the nurses."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I shall never flirt with the nurses," he promised, looking at her.
+"Anyhow I shan't have any immediate chance. The other fellow left
+last night and took with him everything portable except the
+ambulance&mdash;nurses, staff, cooks. I wish to Heaven he'd taken the
+patients! And he did more than that. He cut the telephone wires!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well!" said Jane. "Are you going to stand for it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The red-haired man threw up his hands. "The village is with him," he
+declared. "It's a factional fight&mdash;the village against the
+fashionable summer colony on the hill. I cannot telephone from the
+village&mdash;the telegraph operator is deaf when I speak to him; the
+village milkman and grocer sent boys up this morning&mdash;look here."
+He fished a scrap of paper from his pocket and read:
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+      I will not supply the Valley Hospital with any fresh
+      meats, canned oysters and sausages, or do any plumbing
+      for the hospital until the reinstatement of Dr. Sheets.
+</p>
+<p class="ar"><span class="sc">T. Cashdollar</span>, Butcher.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane took the paper and read it again. "Humph!" she commented.
+"Old Sheets wrote it himself. Mr. Cashdollar couldn't think
+'reinstatement,' let alone spell it."
+</p>
+<p>
+"The question is not who wrote it, but what we are to do," said the
+red-haired person. "Shall I let old Sheets come back?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"If you do," said Jane fiercely, "I shall hate you the rest of my
+life."
+</p>
+<p>
+And as it was clear by this time that the red-haired person could
+imagine nothing more horrible, it was settled then and there that he
+should stay.
+</p>
+<p>
+"There are only two wards," he said. "In the men's a man named
+Higgins is able to be up and is keeping things straight. And in the
+woman's ward Mary O'Shaughnessy is looking after them. The furnaces
+are the worst. I'd have forgiven almost anything else. I've sat up
+all night nursing the fires, but they breathed their last at six
+this morning and I guess there's nothing left but to call the
+coroner."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane had achieved a tolerable plate of toast by that time and four
+eggs. Also she had a fine flush, a combination of heat from the gas
+stove and temper.
+</p>
+<p>
+"They ought to be ashamed," she cried angrily, "leaving a lot of
+sick people!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, as to that," said the red-headed person, "there aren't any
+very sick ones. Two or three neurasthenics like yourself and a
+convalescent typhoid and a D.T. in a private room. If it wasn't
+that Mary O'Shaughnessy&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+But at the word "neurasthenics" Jane had put down the toaster, and
+by the time the unconscious young man had reached the O'Shaughnessy
+she was going out the door with her chin up. He called after her,
+and finding she did not turn he followed her, shouting apologies at
+her back until she went into her room. And as hospital doors don't
+lock from the inside she pushed the washstand against the knob and
+went to bed to keep warm.
+</p>
+<p>
+He stood outside and apologised again, and later he brought a tray
+of bread and butter and a pot of the tea, which had been boiling for
+two hours by that time, and put it outside the door on the floor.
+But Jane refused to get it, and finished her breakfast from a jar of
+candied ginger that some one had sent her, and read "Lorna Doone."
+</p>
+<p>
+Now and then a sound of terrific hammering would follow the
+steampipes and Jane would smile wickedly. By noon she had finished
+the ginger and was wondering what the person about whom she and the
+family had disagreed would think when he heard the way she was being
+treated. And by one o'clock she had cried her eyes entirely shut and
+had pushed the washstand back from the door.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+II
+</p>
+<p>
+Now a hospital full of nurses and doctors with a bell to summon food
+and attention is one thing. A hospital without nurses and doctors,
+and with only one person to do everything, and that person mostly in
+the cellar, is quite another. Jane was very sad and lonely, and to
+add to her troubles the delirium-tremens case down the hall began to
+sing "Oh Promise Me" in a falsetto voice and kept it up for hours.
+</p>
+<p>
+At three Jane got up and bathed her eyes. She also did her hair,
+and thus fortified she started out to find the red-haired person.
+She intended to say that she was paying sixty-five dollars a week
+and belonged to a leading family, and that she didn't mean to
+endure for a moment the treatment she was getting, and being
+called a neurasthenic and made to cook for the other patients.
+</p>
+<p>
+She went slowly along the hall. The convalescent typhoid heard her
+and called.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Hey, doc!" he cried. "Hey, doc! Great Scott, man, when do I get
+some dinner?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane quickened her steps and made for the pantry. From somewhere
+beyond, the delirium-tremens case was singing happily:
+</p>
+<p class="verse2">
+          <i>I&mdash;love you o&mdash;own&mdash;ly,</i> <br />
+          <i>I love&mdash;but&mdash;you.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane shivered a little. The person in whom she had been interested
+and who had caused her precipitate retirement, if not to a nunnery,
+to what answered the same purpose, had been very fond of that song.
+He used to sing it, leaning over the piano and looking into her
+eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane's nose led her again to the pantry. There was a sort of soupy
+odour in the air, and sure enough the red-haired person was there,
+very immaculate in fresh ducks, pouring boiling water into three
+tea-cups out of a kettle and then dropping a beef capsule into each
+cup.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now Jane had intended, as I have said, to say that she was being
+outrageously treated, and belonged to one of the best families, and
+so on. What she really said was piteously:
+</p>
+<p>
+"How good it smells!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Doesn't it!" said the red-haired person, sniffing. "Beef capsules.
+I've made thirty cups of it so far since one o'clock&mdash;the more they
+have the more they want. I say, be a good girl and run up to the
+kitchen for some more crackers while I carry food to the
+convalescent typhoid. He's murderous!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Where are the crackers?" asked Jane stiffly, but not exactly caring
+to raise an issue until she was sure of getting something to eat.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Store closet in the kitchen, third drawer on the left," said the
+red-haired man, shaking some cayenne pepper into one of the cups.
+"You might stop that howling lunatic on your way if you will."
+</p>
+<p>
+"How?" asked Jane, pausing.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Ram a towel down his throat, or&mdash;but don't bother. I'll dose him
+with this beef tea and red pepper, and he'll be too busy putting out
+the fire to want to sing."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You wouldn't be so cruel!" said Jane, rather drawing back. The
+red-haired person smiled and to Jane it showed that he was actually
+ferocious. She ran all the way up for the crackers and down again,
+carrying the tin box. There is no doubt that Jane's family would
+have promptly swooned had it seen her.
+</p>
+<p>
+When she came down there was a sort of after-dinner peace reigning.
+The convalescent typhoid, having filled up on milk and beef soup,
+had floated off to sleep. "The Chocolate Soldier" had given way to
+deep-muttered imprecations from the singer's room. Jane made herself
+a cup of bouillon and drank it scalding. She was making the second
+when the red-haired person came back with an empty cup.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I forgot to explain," he said, "that beef tea and red pepper's the
+treatment for our young friend in there. After a man has been
+burning his stomach daily with a quart or so of raw booze&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I beg your pardon," said Jane coolly. Booze was not considered good
+form on the hill&mdash;the word, of course. There was plenty of the
+substance.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Raw booze," repeated the red-haired person. "Nothing short of red
+pepper or dynamite is going to act as a substitute. Why, I'll bet
+the inside of that chap's stomach is of the general sensitiveness
+and consistency of my shoe."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Indeed!" said Jane, coldly polite. In Jane's circle people did not
+discuss the interiors of other people's stomachs. The red-haired
+person sat on the table with a cup of bouillon in one hand and a
+cracker in the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You know," he said genially, "it's awfully bully of you to come out
+and keep me company like this. I never put in such a day. I've given
+up fussing with the furnace and got out extra blankets instead. And
+I think by night our troubles will be over." He held up the cup and
+glanced at Jane, who was looking entrancingly pretty. "To our
+troubles being over!" he said, draining the cup, and then found
+that he had used the red pepper again by mistake. It took five
+minutes and four cups of cold water to enable him to explain what he
+meant.
+</p>
+<p>
+"By our troubles being over," he said finally when he could speak,
+"I mean this: There's a train from town at eight to-night, and if
+all goes well it will deposit in the village half a dozen nurses, a
+cook or two, a furnace man&mdash;good Heavens, I wonder if I forgot a
+furnace man!"
+</p>
+<p>
+It seemed, as Jane discovered, that the telephone wires being cut,
+he had sent Higgins from the men's ward to the village to send some
+telegrams for him.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I couldn't leave, you see," he explained, "and having some small
+reason to believe that I am <i>persona non grata</i> in this vicinity I
+sent Higgins."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane had always hated the name Higgins. She said afterward that she
+felt uneasy from that moment. The red-haired person, who was not
+bad-looking, being tall and straight and having a very decent nose,
+looked at Jane, and Jane, having been shut away for weeks&mdash;Jane
+preened a little and was glad she had done her hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You looked better the other way," said the red-haired person,
+reading her mind in a most uncanny manner. "Why should a girl with
+as pretty hair as yours cover it up with a net, anyhow?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"You are very disagreeable and&mdash;and impertinent," said Jane,
+sliding off the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It isn't disagreeable to tell a girl she has pretty hair," the
+red-haired person protested&mdash;"or impertinent either."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane was gathering up the remnants of her temper, scattered by the
+events of the day.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You said I was a neurasthenic," she accused him. "It&mdash;it isn't
+being a neurasthenic to be nervous and upset and hating the very
+sight of people, is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Bless my soul!" said the red-haired man. "Then what is it?" Jane
+flushed, but he went on tactlessly: "I give you my word, I think you
+are the most perfectly"&mdash;he gave every appearance of being about to
+say "beautiful," but he evidently changed his mind&mdash;"the most
+perfectly healthy person I have ever looked at," he finished.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is difficult to say just what Jane would have done under other
+circumstances, but just as she was getting her temper really in hand
+and preparing to launch something, shuffling footsteps were heard in
+the hall and Higgins stood in the doorway.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was in a sad state. One of his eyes was entirely closed, and the
+corresponding ear stood out large and bulbous from his head. Also he
+was coated with mud, and he was carefully nursing one hand with the
+other.
+</p>
+<p>
+He said he had been met at the near end of the railroad bridge by
+the ex-furnace man and one of the ex-orderlies and sent back firmly,
+having in fact been kicked back part of the way. He'd been told to
+report at the hospital that the tradespeople had instituted a
+boycott, and that either the former superintendent went back or the
+entire place could starve to death.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was then that Jane discovered that her much-vaunted temper was
+not one-two-three to that of the red-haired person. He turned a sort
+of blue-white, shoved Jane out of his way as if she had been a
+chair, and she heard him clatter down the stairs and slam out of the
+front door.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane went back to her room and looked down the drive. He was running
+toward the bridge, and the sunlight on his red hair and his flying
+legs made him look like a revengeful meteor. Jane was weak in the
+knees. She knelt on the cold radiator and watched him out of sight,
+and then got trembly all over and fell to snivelling. This was of
+course because, if anything happened to him, she would be left
+entirely alone. And anyhow the D.T. case was singing again and had
+rather got on her nerves.
+</p>
+<p>
+In ten minutes the red-haired person appeared. He had a
+wretched-looking creature by the back of the neck and he alternately
+pushed and kicked him up the drive. He&mdash;the red-haired person&mdash;was
+whistling and clearly immensely pleased with himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane put a little powder on her nose and waited for him to come and
+tell her all about it. But he did not come near. This was quite the
+cleverest thing he could have done, had he known it. Jane was not
+accustomed to waiting in vain. He must have gone directly to the
+cellar, half pushing and half kicking the luckless furnace man, for
+about four o'clock the radiator began to get warm.
+</p>
+<p>
+At five he came and knocked at Jane's door, and on being invited in
+he sat down on the bed and looked at her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, we've got the furnace going," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then that was the&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Furnace man? Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Aren't you afraid to leave him?" queried Jane. "Won't he run off?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Got him locked in a padded cell," he said. "I can take him out to
+coal up. The rest of the time he can sit and think of his sins. The
+question is&mdash;what are we to do next?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I should think," ventured Jane, "that we'd better be thinking about
+supper."
+</p>
+<p>
+"The beef capsules are gone."
+</p>
+<p>
+"But surely there must be something else about&mdash;potatoes or things
+like that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+He brightened perceptibly. "Oh, yes, carloads of potatoes, and
+there's canned stuff. Higgins can pare potatoes, and there's Mary
+O'Shaughnessy. We could have potatoes and canned tomatoes and eggs."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Fine!" said Jane with her eyes gleaming, although the day before
+she would have said they were her three abominations.
+</p>
+<p>
+And with that he called Higgins and Mary O'Shaughnessy and the four
+of them went to the kitchen.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane positively shone. She had never realised before how much she
+knew about cooking. They built a fire and got kettles boiling and
+everybody pared potatoes, and although in excess of zeal the eggs
+were ready long before everything else and the tomatoes scorched
+slightly, still they made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in
+ability, and when Higgins had carried the trays to the lift and
+started them on their way, Jane and the red-haired person shook
+hands on it and then ate a boiled potato from the same plate,
+sitting side by side on a table.
+</p>
+<p>
+They were ravenous. They boiled one egg each and ate it, and then
+boiled another and another, and when they finished they found that
+Jane had eaten four potatoes, four eggs and unlimited bread and
+butter, while the red-haired person had eaten six saucers of stewed
+tomatoes and was starting on the seventh.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You know," he said over the seventh, "we've got to figure this
+thing out. The entire town is solid against us&mdash;no use trying to get
+to a telephone. And anyhow they've got us surrounded. We're in a
+state of siege."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane was beating up an egg in milk for the D.T. patient, the
+capsules being exhausted, and the red-haired person was watching her
+closely. She had the two vertical lines between her eyes, but they
+looked really like lines of endeavour and not temper.
+</p>
+<p>
+She stopped beating and looked up.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Couldn't I go to the village?" she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"They would stop you."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then&mdash;I think I know what we can do," she said, giving the eggnog a
+final whisk. "My people have a summer place on the hill. If you
+could get there you could telephone to the city."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Could I get in?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I have a key."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane did not explain that the said key had been left by her father,
+with the terse hope that if she came to her senses she could get
+into the house and get her clothes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good girl," said the red-headed person and patted her on the
+shoulder. "We'll euchre the old skate yet." Curiously, Jane did not
+resent either the speech or the pat.
+</p>
+<p>
+He took the glass and tied on a white apron. "If our friend doesn't
+drink this, I will," he continued. "If he'd seen it in the making,
+as I have, he'd be crazy about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+He opened the door and stood listening. From below floated up the
+refrain:
+</p>
+<p class="verse2">
+          <i>I&mdash;love you o&mdash;own&mdash;ly,</i> <br />
+          <i>I love&mdash;but&mdash;you.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+"Listen to that!" he said. "Stomach's gone, but still has a heart!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Higgins came up the stairs heavily and stopped close by the
+red-haired person, whispering something to him. There was a second's
+pause. Then the red-haired person gave the eggnog to Higgins and
+both disappeared.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane was puzzled. She rather thought the furnace man had got out and
+listened for a scuffle, but none came. She did, however, hear the
+singing cease below, and then commence with renewed vigour, and she
+heard Higgins slowly remounting the stairs. He came in, with the
+empty glass and a sheepish expression. Part of the eggnog was
+distributed over his person.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He wants his nurse, ma'am," said Higgins. "Wouldn't let me near
+him. Flung a pillow at me."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Where is the doctor?" demanded Jane.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Busy," replied Higgins. "One of the women is sick."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane was provoked. She had put some labour into the eggnog. But it
+shows the curious evolution going on in her that she got out the
+eggs and milk and made another one without protest. Then with her
+head up she carried it to the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You might clear things away, Higgins," she said, and went down the
+stairs. Her heart was going rather fast. Most of the men Jane knew
+drank more or less, but this was different. She would have turned
+back halfway there had it not been for Higgins and for owning
+herself conquered. That was Jane's real weakness&mdash;she never owned
+herself beaten.
+</p>
+<p>
+The singing had subsided to a low muttering. Jane stopped outside
+the door and took a fresh grip on her courage. Then she pushed the
+door open and went in.
+</p>
+<p>
+The light was shaded, and at first the tossing figure on the bed was
+only a misty outline of greys and whites. She walked over, expecting
+a pillow at any moment and shielding the glass from attack with her
+hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I have brought you another eggnog," she began severely, "and if you
+spill it&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she looked down and saw the face on the pillow.
+</p>
+<p>
+To her everlasting credit, Jane did not faint. But in that moment,
+while she stood staring down at the flushed young face with its
+tumbled dark hair and deep-cut lines of dissipation, the man who had
+sung to her over the piano, looking love into her eyes, died to her,
+and Jane, cold and steady, sat down on the side of the bed and fed
+the eggnog, spoonful by spoonful, to his corpse!
+</p>
+<p>
+When the blank-eyed young man on the bed had swallowed it all
+passively, looking at her with dull, incurious eyes, she went back
+to her room and closing the door put the washstand against it. She
+did nothing theatrical. She went over to the window and stood
+looking out where the trees along the drive were fading in the dusk
+from green to grey, from grey to black. And over the transom came
+again and again monotonously the refrain:
+</p>
+<p class="verse2">
+          <i>I&mdash;love you o&mdash;own&mdash;ly,</i> <br />
+          <i>I love&mdash;but&mdash;you.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane fell on her knees beside the bed and buried her wilful head in
+the hand-embroidered pillow, and said a little prayer because she
+had found out in time.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+III
+</p>
+<p>
+The full realisation of their predicament came with the dusk. The
+electric lights were shut off! Jane, crawling into bed tearfully at
+half after eight, turned the reading light switch over her head, but
+no flood of rosy radiance poured down on the hand-embroidered pillow
+with the pink bow.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane sat up and stared round her. Already the outline of her dresser
+was faint and shadowy. In half an hour black night would settle down
+and she had not even a candle or a box of matches. She crawled out,
+panicky, and began in the darkness to don her kimono and slippers.
+As she opened the door and stepped into the hall the convalescent
+typhoid heard her and set up his usual cry.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Hey," he called, "whoever that is come in and fix the lights.
+They're broken. And I want some bread and milk. I can't sleep on an
+empty stomach!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane padded on past the room where love lay cold and dead, down the
+corridor with its alarming echoes. The house seemed very quiet. At a
+corner unexpectedly she collided with some one going hastily. The
+result was a crash and a deluge of hot water. Jane got a drop on her
+bare ankle, and as soon as she could breathe she screamed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why don't you look where you're going?" demanded the red-haired
+person angrily. "I've been an hour boiling that water, and now it
+has to be done over again!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"It would do a lot of good to look!" retorted Jane. "But if you
+wish I'll carry a bell!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"The thing for you to do," said the red-haired person severely, "is
+to go back to bed like a good girl and stay there until morning. The
+light is cut off."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Really!" said Jane. "I thought it had just gone out for a walk. I
+daresay I may have a box of matches at least?"
+</p>
+<p>
+He fumbled in his pockets without success.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not a match, of course!" he said disgustedly. "Was any one ever in
+such an infernal mess? Can't you get back to your room without
+matches?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I shan't go back at all unless I have some sort of light,"
+maintained Jane. "I'm&mdash;horribly frightened!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The break in her voice caught his attention and he put his hand out
+gently and took her arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Now listen," he said. "You've been brave and fine all day, and
+don't stop it now. I&mdash;I've got all I can manage. Mary O'Shaughnessy
+is&mdash;&mdash;" He stopped. "I'm going to be very busy," he said with half a
+groan. "I surely do wish you were forty for the next few hours. But
+you'll go back and stay in your room, won't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+He patted her arm, which Jane particularly hated generally. But Jane
+had altered considerably since morning.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then you cannot go to the telephone?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not to-night."
+</p>
+<p>
+"And Higgins?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Higgins has gone," he said. "He slipped off an hour ago. We'll have
+to manage to-night somehow. Now will you be a good child?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll go back," she promised meekly. "I'm sorry I'm not forty."
+</p>
+<p>
+He turned her round and started her in the right direction with a
+little push. But she had gone only a step or two when she heard him
+coming after her quickly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Where are you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Here," quavered Jane, not quite sure of him or of herself perhaps.
+</p>
+<p>
+But when he stopped beside her he didn't try to touch her arm again.
+He only said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wouldn't have you forty for anything in the world. I want you to
+be just as you are, very beautiful and young."
+</p>
+<p>
+Then, as if he was afraid he would say too much, he turned on his
+heel, and a moment after he kicked against the fallen pitcher in the
+darkness and awoke a thousand echoes. As for Jane, she put her
+fingers to her ears and ran to her room, where she slammed the door
+and crawled into bed with burning cheeks.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane was never sure whether it was five minutes later or five
+seconds when somebody in the room spoke&mdash;from a chair by the window.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Do you think," said a mild voice&mdash;"do you think you could find me
+some bread and butter? Or a glass of milk?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane sat up in bed suddenly. She knew at once that she had made a
+mistake, but she was quite dignified about it. She looked over at
+the chair, and the convalescent typhoid was sitting in it, wrapped
+in a blanket and looking wan and ghostly in the dusk.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm afraid I'm in the wrong room," Jane said very stiffly, trying
+to get out of the bed with dignity, which is difficult. "The hall is
+dark and all the doors look so alike&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+She made for the door at that and got out into the hall with her
+heart going a thousand a minute again.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You've forgotten your slippers," called the convalescent typhoid
+after her. But nothing would have taken Jane back.
+</p>
+<p>
+The convalescent typhoid took the slippers home later and locked
+them away in an inner drawer, where he kept one or two things like
+faded roses, and old gloves, and a silk necktie that a girl had made
+him at college&mdash;things that are all the secrets a man keeps from his
+wife and that belong in that small corner of his heart which also
+he keeps from his wife. But that has nothing to do with Jane.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane went back to her own bed thoroughly demoralised. And sleep
+being pretty well banished by that time, she sat up in bed and
+thought things over. Before this she had not thought much, only
+raged and sulked alternately. But now she thought. She thought about
+the man in the room down the hall with the lines of dissipation on
+his face. And she thought a great deal about what a silly she had
+been, and that it was not too late yet, she being not forty and
+"beautiful." It must be confessed that she thought a great deal
+about that. Also she reflected that what she deserved was to marry
+some person with even a worse temper than hers, who would bully her
+at times and generally keep her straight. And from that, of course,
+it was only a step to the fact that red-haired people are
+proverbially bad-tempered!
+</p>
+<p>
+She thought, too, about Mary O'Shaughnessy without another woman
+near, and not even a light, except perhaps a candle. Things were
+always so much worse in the darkness. And perhaps she might be going
+to be very ill and ought to have another doctor!
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane seemed to have been reflecting for a long time, when the church
+clock far down in the village struck nine. And with the chiming of
+the clock was born, full grown, an idea which before it was sixty
+seconds of age was a determination.
+</p>
+<p>
+In pursuance of the idea Jane once more crawled out of bed and began
+to dress; she put on heavy shoes and a short skirt, a coat, and a
+motor veil over her hair. The indignation at the defection of the
+hospital staff, held in subjection during the day by the necessity
+for doing something, now rose and lent speed and fury to her
+movements. In an incredibly short time Jane was feeling her way
+along the hall and down the staircase, now a well of unfathomable
+blackness and incredible rustlings and creakings.
+</p>
+<p>
+The front doors were unlocked. Outside there was faint starlight,
+the chirp of a sleepy bird, and far off across the valley the
+gasping and wheezing of a freight climbing the heavy grade to the
+village.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane paused at the drive and took a breath. Then at her best
+gymnasium pace, arms close to sides, head up, feet well planted, she
+started to run. At the sundial she left the drive and took to the
+lawn gleaming with the frost of late October. She stopped running
+then and began to pick her way more cautiously. Even at that she
+collided heavily with a wire fence marking the boundary, and sat on
+the ground for some time after, whimpering over the outrage and
+feeling her nose. It was distinctly scratched and swollen. No one
+would think her beautiful with a nose like that!
+</p>
+<p>
+She had not expected the wire fence. It was impossible to climb and
+more difficult to get under. However, she found one place where the
+ground dipped, and wormed her way under the fence in most
+undignified fashion. It is perfectly certain that had Jane's family
+seen her then and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing
+for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary
+O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it
+had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But
+it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night
+for the first time in her spoiled young life.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane never told the details of that excursion. Those that came out
+in the paper were only guess-work, of course, but it is quite true
+that a reporter found scraps of her motor veil on three wire fences,
+and there seems to be no reason to doubt, also, that two false curls
+were discovered a week later in a cow pasture on her own estate. But
+as Jane never wore curls afterward anyhow&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+Well, Jane got to her own house about eleven and crept in like a
+thief to the telephone. There were more rustlings and creakings and
+rumblings in the empty house than she had ever imagined, and she
+went backward through the hall for fear of something coming after
+her. But, which is to the point, she got to the telephone and called
+up her father in the city.
+</p>
+<p>
+The first message that astonished gentleman got was that a
+red-haired person at the hospital was very ill, having run into a
+wire fence and bruised a nose, and that he was to bring out at once
+from town two doctors, six nurses, a cook and a furnace man!
+</p>
+<p>
+After a time, however, as Jane grew calmer, he got it straightened
+out, and said a number of things over the telephone anent the
+deserting staff that are quite forbidden by the rules both of the
+club and of the telephone company. He gave Jane full instructions
+about sending to the village and having somebody come up and stay
+with her, and about taking a hot footbath and going to bed between
+blankets, and when Jane replied meekly to everything "Yes, father,"
+and "All right, father," he was so stunned by her mildness that he
+was certain she must be really ill.
+</p>
+<p>
+Not that Jane had any idea of doing all these things. She hung up
+the telephone and gathered all the candles from all the candlesticks
+on the lower floor, and started back for the hospital. The moon had
+come up and she had no more trouble with fencing, but she was
+desperately tired. She climbed the drive slowly, coming to frequent
+pauses. The hospital, long and low and sleeping, lay before her,
+and in one upper window there was a small yellow light.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane climbed the steps and sat down on the top one. She felt very
+tired and sad and dejected, and she sat down on the upper step to
+think of how useless she was, and how much a man must know to be a
+doctor, and that perhaps she would take up nursing in earnest and
+amount to something, and&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+It was about three o'clock in the morning when the red-haired
+person, coming down belatedly to close the front doors, saw a
+shapeless heap on the porch surrounded by a radius of white-wax
+candles, and going up shoved at it with his foot. Whereat the heap
+moved slightly and muttered "Lemme shleep."
+</p>
+<p>
+The red-haired person said "Good Heavens!" and bending down held a
+lighted match to the sleeper's face and stared, petrified. Jane
+opened her eyes, sat up and put her hand over her mutilated nose
+with one gesture.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You!" said the red-haired person. And then mercifully the match
+went out.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't light another," said Jane. "I'm an alarming sight.
+Would&mdash;would you mind feeling if my nose is broken?"
+</p>
+<p>
+He didn't move to examine it. He just kept on kneeling and staring.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Where have you been?" he demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Over to telephone," said Jane, and yawned. "They're bringing
+everybody in automobiles&mdash;doctors, nurses, furnace man&mdash;oh, dear me,
+I hope I mentioned a cook!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Do you mean to say," said the red-haired person wonderingly, "that
+you went by yourself across the fields and telephoned to get me out
+of this mess?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not at all," Jane corrected him coolly. "I'm in the mess myself."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You'll be ill again."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I never was ill," said Jane. "I was here for a mean disposition."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane sat in the moonlight with her hands in her lap and looked at
+him calmly. The red-haired person reached over and took both her
+hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You're a heroine," he said, and bending down he kissed first one
+and then the other. "Isn't it bad enough that you are beautiful
+without your also being brave?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Jane eyed him, but he was in deadly earnest. In the moonlight his
+hair was really not red at all, and he looked pale and very, very
+tired. Something inside of Jane gave a curious thrill that was half
+pain. Perhaps it was the dying of her temper, perhaps&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+"Am I still beautiful with this nose?" she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You are everything that a woman should be," he said, and dropping
+her hands he got up. He stood there in the moonlight, straight and
+young and crowned with despair, and Jane looked up from under her
+long lashes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then why don't you stay where you were?" she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+At that he reached down and took her hands again and pulled her to
+her feet. He was very strong.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Because if I do I'll never leave you again," he said. "And I must
+go."
+</p>
+<p>
+He dropped her hands, or tried to, but Jane wasn't ready to be
+dropped.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You know," she said, "I've told you I'm a sulky, bad-tempered&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+But at that he laughed suddenly, triumphantly, and put both his arms
+round her and held her close.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I love you," he said, "and if you are bad-tempered, so am I, only I
+think I'm worse. It's a shame to spoil two houses with us, isn't
+it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+To her eternal shame be it told, Jane never struggled. She simply
+held up her mouth to be kissed.
+</p>
+<p>
+That is really all the story. Jane's father came with three
+automobiles that morning at dawn, bringing with him all that goes to
+make up a hospital, from a pharmacy clerk to absorbent cotton, and
+having left the new supplies in the office he stamped upstairs to
+Jane's room and flung open the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+He expected to find Jane in hysterics and the pink silk kimono.
+</p>
+<p>
+What he really saw was this: A coal fire was lighted in Jane's
+grate, and in a low chair before it, with her nose swollen level
+with her forehead, sat Jane, holding on her lap Mary O'Shaughnessy's
+baby, very new and magenta-coloured and yelling like a trooper.
+Kneeling beside the chair was a tall, red-headed person holding a
+bottle of olive oil.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Now, sweetest," the red-haired person was saying, "turn him on his
+tummy and we'll rub his back. Gee, isn't that a fat back!"
+</p>
+<p>
+And as Jane's father stared and Jane anxiously turned the baby, the
+red-haired person leaned over and kissed the back of Jane's neck.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Jane!" he whispered.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Jane!!" said her father.
+</p>
+<a name="2H_4_0004"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+
+<h2>
+    IN THE PAVILION
+</h2>
+<p class="sec">
+I
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, had Billy Grant really died there would be no story. The story
+is to relate how he nearly died; and how, approaching that bourne to
+which no traveller may take with him anything but his sins&mdash;and this
+with Billy Grant meant considerable luggage&mdash;he cast about for some
+way to prevent the Lindley Grants from getting possession of his
+worldly goods.
+</p>
+<p>
+Probably it would never have happened at all had not young Grant,
+having hit on a scheme, clung to it with a tenacity that might
+better have been devoted to saving his soul, and had he not said to
+the Nurse, who was at that moment shaking a thermometer: "Come
+on&mdash;be a sport! It's only a matter of hours." Not that he said it
+aloud&mdash;he whispered it, and fought for the breath to do even that.
+The Nurse, having shaken down the thermometer, walked to the table
+and recorded a temperature of one hundred and six degrees through a
+most unprofessional mist of tears. Then in the symptom column she
+wrote: "Delirious."
+</p>
+<p>
+But Billy Grant was not delirious. A fever of a hundred and four or
+thereabout may fuse one's mind in a sort of fiery crucible, but when
+it gets to a hundred and six all the foreign thoughts, like seeing
+green monkeys on the footboard and wondering why the doctor is
+walking on his hands&mdash;all these things melt away, and one sees one's
+past, as when drowning, and remembers to hate one's relations, and
+is curious about what is coming when one goes over.
+</p>
+<p>
+So Billy Grant lay on his bed in the contagious pavilion of the
+hospital, and remembered to hate the Lindley Grants and to try to
+devise a way to keep them out of his property. And, having studied
+law, he knew no will that he might make now would hold against the
+Lindley Grants for a minute, unless he survived its making some
+thirty days. The Staff Doctor had given him about thirty hours or
+less.
+</p>
+<p>
+Perhaps he would have given up in despair and been forced to rest
+content with a threat to haunt the Lindley Grants and otherwise mar
+the enjoyment of their good fortune, had not the Nurse at that
+moment put the thermometer under his arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, as every one knows, an axillary temperature takes five minutes,
+during which it is customary for a nurse to kneel beside the bed, or
+even to sit very lightly on the edge, holding the patient's arm
+close to his side and counting his respirations while pretending to
+be thinking of something else. It was during these five minutes that
+the idea came into Billy Grant's mind and, having come, remained.
+The Nurse got up, rustling starchily, and Billy caught her eye.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Every engine," he said with difficulty, "labours&mdash;in a low&mdash;gear.
+No wonder I'm&mdash;heated up!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse, who was young, put her hand on his forehead.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Try to sleep," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Time for&mdash;that&mdash;later," said Billy Grant. "I'll&mdash;I'll be a&mdash;long
+time&mdash;dead. I&mdash;I wonder whether you'd&mdash;do me a&mdash;favour."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll do anything in the world you want."
+</p>
+<p>
+She tried to smile down at him, but only succeeded in making her
+chin quiver, which would never do&mdash;being unprofessional and likely
+to get to the head nurse; so, being obliged to do something, she
+took his pulse by the throbbing in his neck.
+</p>
+<p>
+"One, two, three, four, five, six&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then&mdash;marry me," gasped Billy Grant. "Only for an&mdash;hour or&mdash;two,
+you know. You&mdash;promised. Come on&mdash;be a sport!"
+</p>
+<p>
+It was then that the Nurse walked to the table and recorded
+"Delirious" in the symptom column. And, though she was a Smith
+College girl and had taken a something or other in mathematics, she
+spelled it just then with two r's.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billy Grant was not in love with the Nurse. She was a part of his
+illness, like the narrow brass bed and the yellow painted walls,
+and the thermometer under his arm, and the medicines. There were
+even times&mdash;when his fever subsided for a degree or two, after a
+cold sponge, and the muddled condition of mind returned&mdash;when she
+seemed to have more heads than even a nurse requires. So sentiment
+did not enter into the matter at all; it was revenge.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You&mdash;promised," he said again; but the Nurse only smiled
+indulgently and rearranged the bottles on the stand in neat rows.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jenks, the orderly, carried her supper to the isolation pavilion at
+six o'clock&mdash;cold ham, potato salad, egg custard and tea. Also, he
+brought her an evening paper. But the Nurse was not hungry. She went
+into the bathroom, washed her eyes with cold water, put on a clean
+collar, against the impending visit of the Staff Doctor, and then
+stood at the window, looking across at the hospital and feeling very
+lonely and responsible. It was not a great hospital, but it loomed
+large and terrible that night. The ambulance came out into the
+courtyard, and an interne, in white ducks, came out to it, carrying
+a surgical bag. He looked over at her and waved his hand. "Big
+railroad wreck!" he called cheerfully. "Got 'em coming in bunches."
+He crawled into the ambulance, where the driver, trained to many
+internes, gave him time to light a cigarette; then out into the
+dusk, with the gong beating madly. Billy Grant, who had lapsed into
+a doze, opened his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What&mdash;about it?" he asked. "You're not&mdash;married already&mdash;are you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please try to rest. Perhaps if I get your beef juice&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, damn&mdash;the beef juice!" whispered Billy Grant, and shut his eyes
+again&mdash;but not to sleep. He was planning how to get his way, and
+finally, out of a curious and fantastic medley of thoughts, he
+evolved something. The doctor, of course! These women had to do what
+the doctor ordered. He would see the doctor!&mdash;upon which, with a
+precision quite amazing, all the green monkeys on the footboard of
+the bed put their thumbs to their noses at him.
+</p>
+<p>
+The situation was unusual; for here was young Grant, far enough from
+any one who knew he was one of the Van Kleek Grants&mdash;and, as such,
+entitled to all the nurses and doctors that money could
+procure&mdash;shut away in the isolation pavilion of a hospital, and not
+even putting up a good fight! Even the Nurse felt this, and when the
+Staff Man came across the courtyard that night she met him on the
+doorstep and told him.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He doesn't care whether he gets well or not," she said
+dispiritedly. "All he seems to think about is to die and to leave
+everything he owns so his relatives won't get it. It's horrible!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Staff Man, who had finished up a hard day with a hospital supper
+of steak and fried potatoes, sat down on the doorstep and fished out
+a digestive tablet from his surgical bag.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's pretty sad, little girl," he said, over the pill. He had known
+the Nurse for some time, having, in fact, brought her&mdash;according to
+report at the time&mdash;in a predecessor of the very bag at his feet,
+and he had the fatherly manner that belongs by right to the man who
+has first thumped one between the shoulder-blades to make one
+breathe, and who had remarked on this occasion to some one beyond
+the door: "A girl, and fat as butter!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse tiptoed in and found Billy Grant apparently asleep.
+Actually he had only closed his eyes, hoping to lure one of the
+monkeys within clutching distance. So the Nurse came out again, with
+the symptom record.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Delirious, with two r's," said the Staff Doctor, glancing over his
+spectacles. "He must have been pretty bad."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not wild; he&mdash;he wanted me to marry him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+She smiled, showing a most alluring dimple in one cheek.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I see! Well, that's not necessarily delirium. H'm&mdash;pulse,
+respiration&mdash;look at that temperature! Yes, it's pretty sad&mdash;away
+from home, too, poor lad!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"You&mdash;&mdash; Isn't there any hope, doctor?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"None at all&mdash;at least, I've never had 'em get well."
+</p>
+<p>
+Now the Nurse should, by all the ethics of hospital practice, have
+walked behind the Staff Doctor, listening reverentially to what he
+said, not speaking until she was spoken to, and carrying in one hand
+an order blank on which said august personage would presently
+inscribe certain cabalistic characters, to be deciphered later by
+the pharmacy clerk with a strong light and much blasphemy, and in
+the other hand a clean towel. The clean towel does not enter into
+the story, but for the curious be it said that were said personage
+to desire to listen to the patient's heart, the towel would be
+unfolded and spread, without creases, over the patient's
+chest&mdash;which reminds me of the Irishman and the weary practitioner;
+but every one knows that story.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now that is what the Nurse should have done; instead of which, in
+the darkened passageway, being very tired and exhausted and under a
+hideous strain, she suddenly slipped her arm through the Staff
+Doctor's and, putting her head on his shoulder, began to cry softly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What's this?" demanded the Staff Doctor sternly and, putting his
+arm round her: "Don't you know that Junior Nurses are not supposed
+to weep over the Staff?" And, getting no answer but a choke: "We
+can't have you used up like this; I'll make them relieve you. When
+did you sleep?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't want to be relieved," said the Nurse, very muffled.
+"No-nobody else would know wh-what he wanted. I just&mdash;I just can't
+bear to see him&mdash;to see him&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Staff Doctor picked up the clean towel, which belonged on the
+Nurse's left arm, and dried her eyes for her; then he sighed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"None of us likes to see it, girl," he said. "I'm an old man, and
+I've never got used to it. What do they send you to eat?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"The food's all right," she said rather drearily. "I'm not
+hungry&mdash;that's all. How long do you think&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Staff Doctor, who was putting an antiseptic gauze cap over his
+white hair, ran a safety pin into his scalp at that moment and did
+not reply at once. Then, "Perhaps&mdash;until morning," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+He held out his arms for the long, white, sterilised coat, and a
+moment later, with his face clean-washed of emotion, and looking
+like a benevolent Turk, he entered the sick room. The Nurse was just
+behind him, with an order book in one hand and a clean towel over
+her arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billy Grant, from his bed, gave the turban a high sign of greeting.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Allah&mdash;is&mdash;great!" he gasped cheerfully. "Well, doctor&mdash;I guess
+it's all&mdash;over but&mdash;the shouting."
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+II
+</p>
+<p>
+Some time after midnight Billy Grant roused out of a stupor. He was
+quite rational; in fact, he thought he would get out of bed. But his
+feet would not move. This was absurd! One's feet must move if one
+wills them to! However, he could not stir either of them. Otherwise
+he was beautifully comfortable.
+</p>
+<p>
+Faint as was the stir he made the Nurse heard him. She was sitting
+in the dark by the window.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Water?" she asked softly, coming to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please." His voice was stronger than it had been.
+</p>
+<p>
+Some of the water went down his neck, but it did not matter. Nothing
+mattered except the Lindley Grants. The Nurse took his temperature
+and went out into the hall to read the thermometer, so he might not
+watch her face. Then, having recorded it under the nightlight, she
+came back into the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why don't you put on something comfortable?" demanded Billy Grant
+querulously. He was so comfortable himself and she was so stiffly
+starched, so relentless of collar and cap.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I am comfortable."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Where's that wrapper thing you've been wearing at night?" The Nurse
+rather flushed at this. "Why don't you lie down on the cot and take
+a nap? I don't need anything."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not&mdash;not to-night."
+</p>
+<p>
+He understood, of course, but he refused to be depressed. He was too
+comfortable. He was breathing easily, and his voice, though weak,
+was clear.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Would you mind sitting beside me? Or are you tired? But of course
+you are. Perhaps in a night or so you'll be over there again,
+sleeping in a nice white gown in a nice fresh bed, with no querulous
+devil&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"You'll have to be sterilised or formaldehyded?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes." This very low.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Will you put your hand over mine? Thanks. It's&mdash;company, you know."
+He was apologetic; under her hand his own burned fire. "I&mdash;I spoke
+to the Staff about that while you were out of the room."
+</p>
+<p>
+"About what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"About your marrying me."
+</p>
+<p>
+"What did he say?" She humoured him.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He said he was willing if you were. You're not going to move&mdash;are
+you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"No. But you must not talk."
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's like this. I've got a little property&mdash;not much; a little." He
+was nervously eager about this. If she knew it amounted to anything
+she would refuse, and the Lindley Grants&mdash;&mdash; "And when I&mdash;you
+know&mdash;&mdash; I want to leave it where it will do some good. That little
+brother of yours&mdash;it would send him through college, or help to."
+</p>
+<p>
+Once, weeks ago, before he became so ill, she had told him of the
+brother. This in itself was wrong and against the ethics of the
+profession. One does not speak of oneself or one's family.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If you won't try to sleep, shall I read to you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Read what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I thought&mdash;the Bible, if you wouldn't mind."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Certainly," he agreed. "I suppose that's the conventional thing;
+and if it makes you feel any better&mdash;&mdash; Will you think over what
+I've been saying?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll think about it," she said, soothing him like a fretful child,
+and brought her Bible.
+</p>
+<p>
+The clock on the near-by town hall struck two as she drew up her
+chair beside him and commenced to read by the shaded light. Across
+the courtyard the windows were dim yellowish rectangles, with here
+and there one brighter than the others that told its own story of
+sleepless hours. A taxicab rolled along the street outside, carrying
+a boisterous night party.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse had taken off her cap and put it on a stand. The autumn
+night was warm, and the light touch of the tulle had pressed her
+hair in damp, fine curves over her forehead. There were purple
+hollows of anxiety and sleeplessness under her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The perfect nurse," the head of the training school was fond of
+saying, "is more or less of a machine. Too much sympathy is a
+handicap to her work and an embarrassment to her patient. A perfect,
+silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Poor Junior Nurse!
+</p>
+<p>
+Now Billy Grant, lying there listening to something out of Isaiah,
+should have been repenting his hard-living, hard-drinking young
+life; should have been forgiving the Lindley Grants&mdash;which story
+does not belong here; should have been asking for the consolation of
+the church, and trying to summon from the depths of his
+consciousness faint memories of early teachings as to the life
+beyond, and what he might or might not expect there.
+</p>
+<p>
+What he actually did while the Nurse read was to try to move his
+legs, and, failing this, to plan a way to achieve the final revenge
+of a not particularly forgiving life.
+</p>
+<p>
+At a little before three o'clock the Nurse telephoned across for an
+interne, who came over in a bathrobe over his pajamas and shot a
+hypodermic into Billy Grant's left arm. Billy Grant hardly noticed.
+He was seeing Mrs. Lindley Grant when his surprise was sprung on
+her. The interne summoned the Nurse into the hall with a jerk of his
+head.
+</p>
+<p>
+"About all in!" he said. "Heart's gone&mdash;too much booze probably. I'd
+stay, but there's nothing to do."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Would oxygen&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, you can try it if you like. It's like blowing up a leaking
+tire; but if you'll feel better, do it." He yawned and tied the cord
+of his bathrobe round him more securely. "I guess you'll be glad to
+get back," he observed, looking round the dingy hall. "This place
+always gives me a chill. Well, let me know if you want me. Good
+night."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse stood in the hallway until the echo of his slippers on the
+asphalt had died away. Then she turned to Billy Grant.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well?" demanded Billy Grant. "How long have I? Until morning?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"If you would only not talk and excite yourself&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Hell!" said Billy Grant, we regret to record. "I've got to do all
+the talking I'm going to do right now. I beg your pardon&mdash;I didn't
+intend to swear."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, that's all right!" said the Nurse vaguely. This was like no
+deathbed she had ever seen, and it was disconcerting.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Shall I read again?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"No, thank you."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse looked at her watch, which had been graduation present
+from her mother and which said, inside the case: "To my little
+girl!" There is no question but that, when the Nurse's mother gave
+that inscription to the jeweller, she was thinking of the day when
+the Staff Doctor had brought the Nurse in his leather bag, and had
+slapped her between the shoulders to make her breathe. "To my little
+girl!" said the watch; and across from that&mdash;"Three o'clock."
+</p>
+<p>
+At half-past three Billy Grant, having matured his plans, remarked
+that if it would ease the Nurse any he'd see a preacher. His voice
+was weaker again and broken.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not"&mdash;he said, struggling&mdash;"not that I think&mdash;he'll pass me.
+But&mdash;if you say so&mdash;I'll&mdash;take a chance."
+</p>
+<p>
+All of which was diabolical cunning; for when, as the result of a
+telephone conversation, the minister came, an unworldly man who
+counted the world, an automobile, a vested choir and a silver
+communion service well lost for the sake of a dozen derelicts in a
+slum mission house, Billy Grant sent the Nurse out to prepare a
+broth he could no longer swallow, and proceeded to cajole the man of
+God. This he did by urging the need of the Nurse's small brother for
+an education and by forgetting to mention either the Lindley Grants
+or the extent of his property.
+</p>
+<p>
+From four o'clock until five Billy Grant coaxed the Nurse with what
+voice he had. The idea had become an obsession; and minute by
+minute, panting breath by panting breath, her resolution wore away.
+He was not delirious; he was as sane as she was and terribly set.
+And this thing he wanted was so easy to grant; meant so little to
+her and, for some strange reason, so much to him. Perhaps, if she
+did it, he would think a little of what the preacher was saying.
+</p>
+<p>
+At five o'clock, utterly worn out with the struggle and finding his
+pulse a negligible quantity, in response to his pleading eyes the
+Nurse, kneeling and holding a thermometer under her patient's arm
+with one hand, reached the other one over the bed and was married in
+a dozen words and a soiled white apron.
+</p>
+<p>
+Dawn was creeping in at the windows&mdash;a grey city dawn, filled with
+soot and the rumbling of early wagons. A smell of damp asphalt from
+the courtyard floated in and a dirty sparrow chirped on the sill
+where the Nurse had been in the habit of leaving crumbs. Billy
+Grant, very sleepy and contented now that he had got his way,
+dictated a line or two on a blank symptom record, and signed his
+will in a sprawling hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If only," he muttered, "I could see Lin's face when that's&mdash;sprung
+on him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The minister picked up the Bible from the tumbled bed and opened it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Perhaps," he suggested very softly, "if I read from the Word of
+God&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+Satisfied now that he had fooled the Lindley Grants out of their
+very shoebuttons, Billy Grant was asleep&mdash;asleep with the
+thermometer under his arm and with his chest rising and falling
+peacefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+The minister looked across at the Nurse, who was still holding the
+thermometer in place. She had buried her face in the white
+counterpane.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You are a good woman, sister," he said softly. "The boy is happier,
+and you are none the worse. Shall I keep the paper for you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+But the Nurse, worn out with the long night, slept where she knelt.
+The minister, who had come across the street in a ragged
+smoking-coat and no collar, creaked round the bed and threw the edge
+of the blanket over her shoulders.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then, turning his coat collar up over his unshaved neck, he departed
+for the mission across the street, where one of his derelicts, in
+his shirtsleeves, was sweeping the pavement. There, mindful of the
+fact that he had come from the contagious pavilion, the minister
+brushed his shabby smoking-coat with a whiskbroom to remove the
+germs!
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+III
+</p>
+<p>
+Billy Grant, of course, did not die. This was perhaps because only
+the good die young. And Billy Grant's creed had been the honour of a
+gentleman rather than the Mosaic Law. There was, therefore, no
+particular violence done to his code when his last thoughts&mdash;or what
+appeared to be his last thoughts&mdash;were revenge instead of salvation.
+</p>
+<p>
+The fact was, Billy Grant had a real reason for hating the Lindley
+Grants. When a fellow like that has all the Van Kleek money and a
+hereditary thirst, he is bound to drink. The Lindley Grants did not
+understand this and made themselves obnoxious by calling him "Poor
+Billy!" and not having wine when he came to dinner. That, however,
+was not his reason for hating them.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billy Grant fell in love. To give the devil his due, he promptly set
+about reforming himself. He took about half as many whisky-and-sodas
+as he had been in the habit of doing, and cut out champagne
+altogether. He took up golf to fill in the time, too, but gave it up
+when he found it made him thirstier than ever. And then, with
+things so shaping up that he could rise in the morning without
+having a drink to get up on, the Lindley Grants thought it best to
+warn the girl's family before it was too late.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He is a nice boy in some ways," Mrs. Lindley Grant had said on the
+occasion of the warning; "but, like all drinking men, he is a broken
+reed, eccentric and irresponsible. No daughter of mine could marry
+him. I'd rather bury her. And if you want facts Lindley will give
+them to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+So the girl had sent back her ring and a cold little letter, and
+Billy Grant had got roaring full at a club that night and presented
+the ring to a cabman&mdash;all of which is exceedingly sordid, but rather
+human after all.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse, having had no sleep for forty-eight hours, slept for
+quite thirty minutes. She wakened at the end of that time and
+started up with a horrible fear that the thing she was waiting for
+had come. But Billy Grant was still alive, sleeping naturally, and
+the thermometer, having been in place forty minutes, registered a
+hundred and three.
+</p>
+<p>
+At eight o'clock the interne, hurrying over in fresh ducks, with a
+laudable desire to make the rounds before the Staff began to drop
+in, found Billy Grant very still and with his eyes closed, and the
+Nurse standing beside the bed, pale and tremulous.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why didn't you let me know?" he demanded, aggrieved. "I ought to
+have been called. I told you&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"He isn't dead," said the Nurse breathlessly. "He&mdash;I think he is
+better."
+</p>
+<p>
+Whereon she stumbled out of the room into her own little room across
+the hall, locking the door behind her, and leaving the interne to
+hunt the symptom record for himself&mdash;a thing not to be lightly
+overlooked; though of course internes are not the Staff.
+</p>
+<p>
+The interne looked over the record and whistled.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Wouldn't that paralyse you!" he said under his breath. "'Pulse very
+weak.' 'Pulse almost obliterated.' 'Very talkative.' 'Breathing hard
+at four A.M. Cannot swallow.' And then: 'Sleeping calmly from five
+o'clock.' 'Pulse stronger.' Temperature one hundred and three.' By
+gad, that last prescription of mine was a hit!"
+</p>
+<p>
+So now began a curious drama of convalescence in the little
+isolation pavilion across the courtyard. Not for a minute did the
+two people most concerned forget their strange relationship; not for
+worlds would either have allowed the other to know that he or she
+remembered. Now and then the Nurse caught Billy Grant's eyes fixed
+on her as she moved about the room, with a curious wistful
+expression in them. And sometimes, waking from a doze, he would find
+her in her chair by the window, with her book dropped into her lap
+and a frightened look in her eyes, staring at him.
+</p>
+<p>
+He gained strength rapidly and the day came when, with the orderly's
+assistance, he was lifted to a chair. There was one brief moment in
+which he stood tottering on his feet. In that instant he had
+realised what a little thing she was, after all, and what a cruel
+advantage he had used for his own purpose.
+</p>
+<p>
+When he was settled in the chair and the orderly had gone she
+brought an extra pillow to put behind him, and he dared the first
+personality of their new relationship.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What a little girl you are, after all!" he said. "Lying there in
+the bed shaking at your frown, you were so formidable."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I am not small," she said, straightening herself. She had always
+hoped that her cap gave her height. "It is you who are so tall.
+You&mdash;you are a giant!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"A wicked giant, seeking whom I may devour and carrying off lovely
+girls for dinner under pretence of marriage&mdash;&mdash;" He stopped his
+nonsense abruptly, having got so far, and both of them coloured.
+Thrashing about desperately for something to break the wretched
+silence, he seized on the one thing that in those days of his
+convalescence was always pertinent&mdash;food. "Speaking of dinner," he
+said hastily, "isn't it time for some buttermilk?"
+</p>
+<p>
+She was quite calm when she came back&mdash;cool, even smiling; but
+Billy Grant had not had the safety valve of action. As she placed
+the glass on the table at his elbow he reached out and took her
+hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Can you ever forgive me?" he asked. Not an original speech; the
+usual question of the marauding male, a query after the fact and too
+late for anything but forgiveness.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Forgive you? For not dying?"
+</p>
+<p>
+She was pale; but no more subterfuge now, no more turning aside from
+dangerous subjects. The matter was up before the house.
+</p>
+<p>
+"For marrying you!" said Billy Grant, and upset the buttermilk. It
+took a little time to wipe up the floor and to put a clean cover on
+the stand, and after that to bring a fresh glass and place it on the
+table. But these were merely parliamentary preliminaries while each
+side got its forces in line.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Do you hate me very much?" opened Billy Grant. This was, to change
+the figure, a blow below the belt.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why should I hate you?" countered the other side.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I should think you would. I forced the thing on you."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I need not have done it."
+</p>
+<p>
+"But being you, and always thinking about making some one else happy
+and comfortable&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, if only they don't find it out over there!" she burst out. "If
+they do and I have to leave, with Jim&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+Here, realising that she was going to cry and not caring to screw up
+her face before any one, she put her arms on the stand and buried
+her face in them. Her stiff tulle cap almost touched Billy Grant's
+arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billy Grant had a shocked second.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Jim?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"My little brother," from the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billy Grant drew a long breath of relief. For a moment he had
+thought&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wonder&mdash;whether I dare to say something to you." Silence from the
+table and presumably consent. "Isn't he&mdash;don't you think that&mdash;I
+might be allowed to&mdash;to help Jim? It would help me to like myself
+again. Just now I'm not standing very high with myself."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Won't you tell me why you did it?" she said, suddenly sitting up,
+her arms still out before her on the table. "Why did you coax so?
+You said it was because of a little property you had, but&mdash;that
+wasn't it&mdash;was it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"No."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Or because you cared a snap for me." This was affirmation, not
+question.
+</p>
+<p>
+"No, not that, though I&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+She gave a hopeless little gesture of despair.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then&mdash;why? Why?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"For one of the meanest reasons I know&mdash;to be even with some people
+who had treated me badly."
+</p>
+<p>
+The thing was easier now. His flat denial of any sentimental reason
+had helped to make it so.
+</p>
+<p>
+"A girl that you cared about?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Partly that. The girl was a poor thing. She didn't care enough to
+be hurt by anything I did. But the people who made the trouble&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+Now a curious thing happened. Billy Grant found at this moment that
+he no longer hated the Lindley Grants. The discovery left him
+speechless&mdash;that he who had taken his hate into the very valley of
+death with him should now find himself thinking of both Lindley and
+his wife with nothing more bitter than contempt shocked him. A state
+of affairs existed for which his hatred of the Lindley Grants was
+alone responsible; now the hate was gone and the state of affairs
+persisted.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I should like," said Billy Grant presently, "to tell you a
+little&mdash;if it will not bore you&mdash;about myself and the things I have
+done that I shouldn't, and about the girl. And of course, you know,
+I'm&mdash;I'm not going to hold you to&mdash;to the thing I forced you into.
+There are ways to fix that."
+</p>
+<p>
+Before she would listen, however, she must take his temperature and
+give him his medicine, and see that he drank his buttermilk&mdash;the
+buttermilk last, so as not to chill his mouth for the thermometer.
+The tired lines had gone from under her eyes and she was very lovely
+that day. She had always been lovely, even when the Staff Doctor
+had slapped her between the shoulders long ago&mdash;you know about
+that&mdash;only Billy Grant had never noticed it; but to-day, sitting
+there with the thermometer in his mouth while she counted his
+respirations, pretending to be looking out the window while she did
+it, Billy Grant saw how sweet and lovely and in every way adorable
+she was, in spite of the sad droop of her lips&mdash;and found it hard to
+say the thing he felt he must.
+</p>
+<p>
+"After all," he remarked round the thermometer, "the thing is not
+irrevocable. I can fix it up so that&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Keep your lips closed about the thermometer!" she said sternly, and
+snapped her watch shut.
+</p>
+<p>
+The pulse and so on having been recorded, and "Very hungry" put down
+under Symptoms, she came back to her chair by the window, facing
+him. She sat down primly and smoothed her white apron in her lap.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Now!" she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I am to go on?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes, please."
+</p>
+<p>
+"If you are going to change the pillows or the screen, or give me
+any other diabolical truck to swallow," he said somewhat peevishly,
+"will you get it over now, so we can have five unprofessional
+minutes?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Certainly," she said; and bringing an extra blanket she spread it,
+to his disgust, over his knees.
+</p>
+<p>
+This time, when she sat down, one of her hands lay on the table near
+him and he reached over and covered it with his.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please!" he begged. "For company! And it will help me to tell you
+some of the things I have to tell."
+</p>
+<p>
+She left it there, after an uneasy stirring. So, sitting there,
+looking out into the dusty courtyard with its bandaged figures in
+wheeled chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench&mdash;their crutches
+beside them&mdash;its waterless fountain and its dingy birds, he told her
+about the girl and the Lindley Grants, and even about the cabman and
+the ring. And feeling, perhaps in some current from the small hand
+under his, that she was knowing and understanding and not turning
+away, he told her a great deal he had not meant to tell&mdash;ugly
+things, many of them&mdash;for that was his creed.
+</p>
+<p>
+And, because in a hospital one lives many lives vicariously with
+many people, what the girl back home would never have understood
+this girl did and faced unabashed. Life, as she knew it, was not all
+good and not all bad; passion and tenderness, violence and peace,
+joy and wretchedness, birth and death&mdash;these she had looked on, all
+of them, with clear eyes and hands ready to help.
+</p>
+<p>
+So Billy Grant laid the good and the bad of his life before her,
+knowing that he was burying it with her. When he finished, her hand
+on the table had turned and was clasping his. He bent over and
+kissed her fingers softly.
+</p>
+<p>
+After that she read to him, and their talk, if any, was impersonal.
+When the orderly had put him back to bed he lay watching her moving
+about, rejoicing in her quiet strength, her repose. How well she was
+taking it all! If only&mdash;but there was no hope of that. She could go
+to Reno, and in a few months she would be free again and the thing
+would be as if it had never been.
+</p>
+<p>
+At nine o'clock that night the isolation pavilion was ready for the
+night. The lights in the sickroom were out. In the hall a nightlight
+burned low, Billy Grant was not asleep. He tried counting the
+lighted windows of the hospital and grew only more wakeful.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse was sleeping now in her own room across, with the doors
+open between. The slightest movement and she was up, tiptoeing in,
+with her hair in a long braid down her back and her wrapper sleeves
+falling away loosely from her white, young arms. So, aching with
+inaction, Billy Grant lay still until the silence across indicated
+that she was sleeping.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then he got up. This is a matter of difficulty when one is still
+very weak, and is achieved by rising first into a sitting posture by
+pulling oneself up by the bars of the bed, and then by slipping
+first one leg, then the other, over the side. Properly done, even
+the weakest thus find themselves in a position that by the aid of a
+chairback may become, however shaky, a standing one.
+</p>
+<p>
+He got to his feet better than he expected, but not well enough to
+relinquish the chair. He had made no sound. That was good. He would
+tell her in the morning and rally her on her powers as a sleeper. He
+took a step&mdash;if only his knees&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+He had advanced into line with the doorway and stood looking through
+the open door of the room across.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse was on her knees beside the bed, in her nightgown, crying.
+Her whole young body was shaken with silent sobs; her arms, in their
+short white sleeves, stretched across the bed, her fingers clutching
+the counterpane.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billy Grant stumbled back to his bed and fell in with a sort of
+groan. Almost instantly she was at the door, her flannel wrapper
+held about her, peering into the darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I thought I heard&mdash;are you worse?" she asked anxiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm all right," he said, hating himself; "just not sleepy. How
+about you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not asleep yet, but&mdash;resting," she replied.
+</p>
+<p>
+She stood in the doorway, dimly outlined, with her long braid over
+her shoulder and her voice still a little strained from crying. In
+the darkness Billy Grant half stretched out his arms, then dropped
+them, ashamed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Would you like another blanket?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"If there is one near."
+</p>
+<p>
+She came in a moment later with the blanket and spread it over the
+bed. He lay very still while she patted and smoothed it into place.
+He was mustering up his courage to ask for something&mdash;a curious
+state of mind for Billy Grant, who had always taken what he wanted
+without asking.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wish you would kiss me&mdash;just once!" he said wistfully. And then,
+seeing her draw back, he took an unfair advantage: "I think that's
+the reason I'm not sleeping."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't be absurd!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Is it so absurd&mdash;under the circumstances?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"You can sleep quite well if you only try."
+</p>
+<p>
+She went out into the hall again, her chin well up. Then she
+hesitated, turned and came swiftly back into the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If I do," she said rather breathlessly, "will you go to sleep? And
+will you promise to hold your arms up over your head?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"But my arms&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Over your head!"
+</p>
+<p>
+He obeyed at that, and the next moment she had bent over him in the
+darkness; and quickly, lightly, deliciously, she kissed&mdash;the tip of
+his nose!
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+IV
+</p>
+<p>
+She was quite cheerful the next day and entirely composed. Neither
+of them referred to the episode of the night before, but Billy Grant
+thought of little else. Early in the morning he asked her to bring
+him a hand mirror and, surveying his face, tortured and disfigured
+by the orderly's shaving, suffered an acute wound in his vanity. He
+was glad it had been dark or she probably would not have&mdash;&mdash; He
+borrowed a razor from the interne and proceeded to enjoy himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+Propped up in his chair, he rioted in lather, sliced a piece out of
+his right ear, and shaved the back of his neck by touch, in lieu of
+better treatment. This done, and the ragged and unkempt hair over
+his ears having been trimmed in scallops, due to the work being done
+with curved surgical scissors, he was his own man again.
+</p>
+<p>
+That afternoon, however, he was nervous and restless. The Nurse was
+troubled. He avoided the subject that had so obsessed him the day
+before, was absent and irritable, could not eat, and sat in his
+chair by the window, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse was puzzled, but the Staff Doctor, making rounds that day,
+enlightened her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He has pulled through&mdash;God and you alone know how," he said. "But
+as soon as he begins to get his strength he's going to yell for
+liquor again. When a man has been soaking up alcohol for years&mdash;&mdash;
+Drat this hospital cooking anyhow! Have you got any essence of
+pepsin?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse brought the pepsin and a medicine glass and the Staff
+Doctor swallowed and grimaced.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You were saying," said the Nurse timidly&mdash;for, the stress being
+over, he was Staff again and she was a Junior and not even entitled
+to a Senior's privileges, such as returning occasional badinage.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Every atom of him is going to crave it. He's wanting it now. He has
+been used to it for years." The Nurse was white to the lips, but
+steady. "He is not to have it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not a drop while he is here. When he gets out it is his own affair
+again, but while he's here&mdash;by-the-way, you'll have to watch the
+orderly. He'll bribe him."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't think so, doctor. He is a gentleman."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Pooh! Of course he is. I dare say he's a gentleman when he's drunk
+too; but he's a drinker&mdash;a habitual drinker."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse went back into the room and found Billy Grant sitting in a
+chair, with the book he had been reading on the floor and his face
+buried in his hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm awfuly sorry!" he said, not looking up. "I heard what he said.
+He's right, you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm sorry. And I'm afraid this is a place where I cannot help."
+</p>
+<p>
+She put her hand on his head, and he brought it down and held it
+between his.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Two or three times," he said, "when things were very bad with me,
+you let me hold your hand, and we got past somehow&mdash;didn't we?"
+</p>
+<p>
+She closed her eyes, remembering the dawn when, to soothe a dying
+man, in the presence of the mission preacher, she had put her hand
+in his. Billy Grant thought of it too.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Now you know what you've married," he said bitterly. The bitterness
+was at himself of course. "If&mdash;if you'll sit tight I have a fighting
+chance to make a man of myself; and after it's over we'll fix this
+thing for you so you will forget it ever happened. And I&mdash;&mdash; Don't
+take your hand away. Please!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I was feeling for my handkerchief," she explained.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Have I made you cry again?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Again?'
+</p>
+<p>
+"I saw you last night in your room. I didn't intend to; but I was
+trying to stand, and&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+She was very dignified at this, with her eyes still wet, and tried
+unsuccessfully to take her hand away.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If you are going to get up when it is forbidden I shall ask to be
+relieved."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You wouldn't do that!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Let go of my hand."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You wouldn't do that!!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please! The head nurse is coming."
+</p>
+<p>
+He freed her hand then and she wiped her eyes, remembering the
+"perfect, silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine."
+</p>
+<p>
+The head of the training school came to the door of the pavilion,
+but did not enter. The reason for this was twofold: first, she had
+confidence in the Nurse; second, she was afraid of contagion&mdash;this
+latter, of course, quite <i>sub rosa</i>, in view of the above quotation.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Head Nurse was a tall woman in white, and was so starchy that
+she rattled like a newspaper when she walked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good morning," she said briskly. "Have you sent over the soiled
+clothes?" Head nurses are always bothering about soiled clothes;
+and what becomes of all the nailbrushes, and how can they use so
+many bandages.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes, Miss Smith."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Meals come over promptly?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes, Miss Smith."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Getting any sleep?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, yes, plenty&mdash;now."
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Smith peered into the hallway, which seemed tidy, looked at the
+Nurse with approval, and then from the doorstep into the patient's
+room, where Billy Grant sat. At the sight of him her eyebrows rose.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "I thought he was older than that!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Twenty-nine," said the Nurse; "twenty-nine last Fourth of July."
+</p>
+<p>
+"H'm!" commented the Head Nurse. "You evidently know! I had no idea
+you were taking care of a boy. It won't do. I'll send over Miss
+Hart."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse tried to visualise Billy Grant in his times of stress
+clutching at Miss Hart's hand, and failed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Jenks is here, of course," she said, Jenks being the orderly.
+</p>
+<p>
+The idea of Jenks as a chaperon, however, did not appeal to the head
+nurse. She took another glance through the window at Billy Grant,
+looking uncommonly handsome and quite ten years younger since the
+shave, and she set her lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I am astonished beyond measure," she said. "Miss Hart will relieve
+you at two o'clock. Take your antiseptic bath and you may have the
+afternoon to yourself. Report in L Ward in the morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Smith rattled back across the courtyard and the Nurse stood
+watching her; then turned slowly and went into the house to tell
+Billy Grant.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now the stories about what followed differ. They agree on one point:
+that Billy Grant had a heart-to-heart talk with the substitute at
+two o'clock that afternoon and told her politely but firmly that he
+would none of her. Here the divergence begins. Some say he got the
+superintendent over the house telephone and said he had intended to
+make a large gift to the hospital, but if his comfort was so little
+considered as to change nurses just when he had got used to one, he
+would have to alter his plans. Another and more likely story,
+because it sounds more like Billy Grant, is that at five o'clock a
+florist's boy delivered to Miss Smith a box of orchids such as never
+had been seen before in the house, and a card inside which said:
+"Please, dear Miss Smith, take back the Hart that thou gavest."
+</p>
+<p>
+Whatever really happened&mdash;and only Billy Grant and the lady in
+question ever really knew&mdash;that night at eight o'clock, with Billy
+Grant sitting glumly in his room and Miss Hart studying typhoid
+fever in the hall, the Nurse came back again to the pavilion with
+her soft hair flying from its afternoon washing and her eyes
+shining. And things went on as before&mdash;not quite as before; for with
+the nurse question settled the craving got in its work again, and
+the next week was a bad one. There were good days, when he taught
+her double-dummy auction bridge, followed by terrible nights, when
+he walked the floor for hours and she sat by, unable to help. Then
+at dawn he would send her to bed remorsefully and take up the fight
+alone. And there were quiet nights when both slept and when he would
+waken to the craving again and fight all day.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm afraid I'm about killing her," he said to the Staff Doctor one
+day; "but it's my chance to make a man of myself&mdash;now or never."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Staff Doctor was no fool and he had heard about the orchids.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Fight it out, boy!" he said. "Pretty soon you'll quit peeling and
+cease being a menace to the public health, and you'd better get it
+over before you are free again."
+</p>
+<p>
+So, after a time, it grew a little easier. Grant was pretty much
+himself again&mdash;had put on a little flesh and could feel his biceps
+rise under his fingers. He took to cold plunges when he felt the
+craving coming on, and there were days when the little pavilion was
+full of the sound of running water. He shaved himself daily, too,
+and sent out for some collars.
+</p>
+<p>
+Between the two of them, since her return, there had been much of
+good fellowship, nothing of sentiment. He wanted her near, but he
+did not put a hand on her. In the strain of those few days the
+strange, grey dawn seemed to have faded into its own mists. Only
+once, when she had brought his breakfast tray and was arranging the
+dishes for him&mdash;against his protest, for he disliked being waited
+on&mdash;he reached over and touched a plain band ring she wore. She
+coloured.
+</p>
+<p>
+"My mother's," she said; "her wedding ring."
+</p>
+<p>
+Their eyes met across the tray, but he only said, after a moment:
+"Eggs like a rock, of course! Couldn't we get 'em raw and boil them
+over here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+It was that morning, also, that he suggested a thing which had been
+in his mind for some time.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Wouldn't it be possible," he asked, "to bring your tray in here and
+to eat together? It would be more sociable."
+</p>
+<p>
+She smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It isn't permitted."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Do you think&mdash;would another box of orchids&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+She shook her head as she poured out his coffee. "I should probably
+be expelled."
+</p>
+<p>
+He was greatly aggrieved.
+</p>
+<p>
+"That's all foolishness," he said. "How is that any worse&mdash;any more
+unconventional&mdash;than your bringing me your extra blanket on a cold
+night? Oh, I heard you last night!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then why didn't you leave it on?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"And let you freeze?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I was quite warm. As it was, it lay in the hallway all night and
+did no one any good."
+</p>
+<p>
+Having got thus far from wedding rings, he did not try to get back.
+He ate alone, and after breakfast, while she took her half-hour of
+exercise outside the window, he sat inside reading&mdash;only apparently
+reading, however.
+</p>
+<p>
+Once she went quite as far as the gate and stood looking out.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Jenks!" called Billy Grant.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jenks has not entered into the story much. He was a little man,
+rather fat, who occupied a tiny room in the pavilion, carried meals
+and soiled clothes, had sat on Billy Grant's chest once or twice
+during a delirium, and kept a bottle locked in the dish closet.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes, sir," said Jenks, coming behind a strong odour of <i>spiritus
+frumenti</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Jenks," said Billy Grant with an eye on the figure at the gate, "is
+that bottle of yours empty?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"What bottle?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"The one in the closet."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jenks eyed Billy Grant, and Billy eyed Jenks&mdash;a look of man to man,
+brother to brother.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not quite, sir&mdash;a nip or two."
+</p>
+<p>
+"At," suggested Billy Grant, "say&mdash;five dollars a nip?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Jenks smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+"About that," he said. "Filled?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Billy Grant debated. The Nurse was turning at the gate.
+</p>
+<p>
+"No," he said. "As it is, Jenks. Bring it here."
+</p>
+<p>
+Jenks brought the bottle and a glass, but the glass was motioned
+away. Billy Grant took the bottle in his hand and looked at it with
+a curious expression. Then he went over and put it in the upper
+bureau drawer, under a pile of handkerchiefs. Jenks watched him,
+bewildered.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Just a little experiment, Jenks," said Billy Grant.
+</p>
+<p>
+Jenks understood then and stopped smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wouldn't, Mr. Grant," he said; "it will only make you lose
+confidence in yourself when it doesn't work out."
+</p>
+<p>
+"But it's going to work out," said Billy Grant. "Would you mind
+turning on the cold water?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Now the next twenty-four hours puzzled the Nurse. When Billy Grant's
+eyes were not on her with an unfathomable expression in them, they
+were fixed on something in the neighbourhood of the dresser, and at
+these times they had a curious, fixed look not unmixed with triumph.
+She tried a new arrangement of combs and brushes and tilted the
+mirror at a different angle, without effect.
+</p>
+<p>
+That day Billy Grant took only one cold plunge. As the hours wore on
+he grew more cheerful; the look of triumph was unmistakable. He
+stared less at the dresser and more at the Nurse. At last it grew
+unendurable. She stopped in front of him and looked down at him
+severely. She could only be severe when he was sitting&mdash;when he was
+standing she had to look so far up at him, even when she stood on
+her tiptoes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What is wrong with me?" she demanded. "You look so queer! Is my cap
+crooked?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"It is a wonderful cap."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Is my face dirty?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"It is a won&mdash;&mdash; No, certainly not."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then would you mind not staring so? You&mdash;upset me."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I shall have to shut my eyes," he replied meekly, and worried her
+into a state of frenzy by sitting for fifty minutes with his head
+back and his eyes shut.
+</p>
+<p>
+So&mdash;the evening and the morning were another day, and the bottle lay
+undisturbed under the handkerchiefs, and the cold shower ceased
+running, and Billy Grant assumed the air of triumph permanently.
+That morning when the breakfast trays came he walked over into the
+Nurse's room and picked hers up, table and all, carrying it across
+the hall. In his own room he arranged the two trays side by side,
+and two chairs opposite each other. When the Nurse, who had been
+putting breadcrumbs on the window-sill, turned round Billy Grant was
+waiting to draw out one of the chairs, and there was something in
+his face she had not seen there before.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Shall we breakfast?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I told you yesterday&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Think a minute," he said softly. "Is there any reason why we should
+not breakfast together?" She pressed her hands close together, but
+she did not speak. "Unless&mdash;you do not wish to."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You remember you promised, as soon as you got away, to&mdash;fix
+that&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"So I will if you say the word."
+</p>
+<p>
+"And&mdash;to forget all about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+"That," said Billy Grant solemnly, "I shall never do so long as I
+live. Do you say the word?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"What else can I do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then there is somebody else?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, no!"
+</p>
+<p>
+He took a step toward her, but still he did not touch her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If there is no one else," he said, "and if I tell you that you have
+made me a man again&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Gracious! Your eggs will be cold." She made a motion toward the
+egg-cup, but Billy Grant caught her hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Damn the eggs!" he said. "Why don't you look at me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Something sweet and luminous and most unprofessional shone in the
+little Nurse's eyes, and the line of her pulse on a chart would have
+looked like a seismic disturbance.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I&mdash;I have to look up so far!" she said, but really she was looking
+down when she said it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, my dear&mdash;my dear!" exulted Billy Grant. "It is I who must look
+up at you!" And with that he dropped on his knees and kissed the
+starched hem of her apron.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse felt very absurd and a little frightened.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If only," she said, backing off&mdash;"if only you wouldn't be such a
+silly! Jenks is coming!"
+</p>
+<p>
+But Jenks was not coming. Billy Grant rose to his full height and
+looked down at her&mdash;a new Billy Grant, the one who had got drunk at
+a club and given a ring to a cabman having died that grey morning
+some weeks before.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I love you&mdash;love you&mdash;love you!" he said, and took her in his arms.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+Now the Head Nurse was interviewing an applicant; and, as the H.N.
+took a constitutional each morning in the courtyard and believed in
+losing no time, she was holding the interview as she walked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I think I would make a good nurse," said the applicant, a trifle
+breathless, the h.n. being a brisk walker. "I am so sympathetic."
+</p>
+<p>
+The H.N. stopped and raised a reproving forefinger.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Too much sympathy is a handicap," she orated. "The perfect nurse is
+a silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine&mdash;this little
+building here is the isolation pavilion."
+</p>
+<p>
+"An emotionless machine," repeated the applicant. "I see&mdash;an e&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+The words died on her lips. She was looking past a crowd of birds on
+the windowsill to where, just inside, Billy Grant and the Nurse in a
+very mussed cap were breakfasting together. And as she looked Billy
+Grant bent over across the tray.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I adore you!" he said distinctly and, lifting the Nurse's hands,
+kissed first one and then the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It is hard work," said Miss Smith&mdash;having made a note that the boys
+in the children's ward must be restrained from lowering a pasteboard
+box on a string from a window&mdash;"hard work without sentiment. It is
+not a romantic occupation."
+</p>
+<p>
+She waved an admonitory hand toward the window, and the box went up
+swiftly. The applicant looked again toward the pavilion, where
+Billy Grant, having kissed the Nurse's hands, had buried his face in
+her two palms.
+</p>
+<p>
+The mild October sun shone down on the courtyard, with its bandaged
+figures in wheel-chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench, their
+crutches beside them, its waterless fountain and dingy birds.
+</p>
+<p>
+The applicant thrilled to it all&mdash;joy and suffering, birth and
+death, misery and hope, life and love. Love!
+</p>
+<p>
+The H.N. turned to her grimly, but her eyes were soft.
+</p>
+<p>
+"All this," she said, waving her hand vaguely, "for eight dollars a
+month!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I think," said the applicant shyly, "I should like to come."
+</p>
+<a name="2H_4_0005"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+
+<h2>
+    GOD'S FOOL
+</h2>
+<p class="sec">
+I
+</p>
+<p>
+The great God endows His children variously. To some He gives
+intellect&mdash;and they move the earth. To some He allots heart&mdash;and the
+beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a
+soul, without intelligence&mdash;and these, who never grow up, but remain
+always His children, are God's fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as
+if from His palette the Artist of all had taken one colour instead
+of many.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy was God's fool. Having only a soul and no intelligence, he
+lived the life of the soul. Through his faded, childish old blue
+eyes he looked out on a world that hurried past him with, at
+best, a friendly touch on his shoulder. No man shook his hand in
+comradeship. No woman save the little old mother had ever caressed
+him. He lived alone in a world of his own fashioning, peopled by
+moving, noiseless figures and filled with dreams&mdash;noiseless because
+the Dummy had ears that heard not and lips that smiled at a
+kindness, but that did not speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+In this world of his there was no uncharitableness&mdash;no sin. There
+was a God&mdash;why should he not know his Father?&mdash;there were brasses to
+clean and three meals a day; and there was chapel on Sunday, where
+one held a book&mdash;the Dummy held his upside down&mdash;and felt the
+vibration of the organ, and proudly watched the afternoon sunlight
+smiling on the polished metal of the chandelier and choir rail.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+The Probationer sat turning the bandage machine and watching the
+Dummy, who was polishing the brass plates on the beds. The plates
+said: "Endowed in perpetuity"&mdash;by various leading citizens, to whom
+God had given His best gifts, both heart and brain.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How old do you suppose he is?" she asked, dropping her voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Nurse was writing fresh labels for the medicine closet,
+and for "tincture of myrrh" she wrote absently "tincture of mirth,"
+and had to tear it up.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He can't hear you," she said rather shortly. "How old? Oh, I don't
+know. About a hundred, I should think."
+</p>
+<p>
+This was, of course, because of his soul, which was all he had, and
+which, having existed from the beginning, was incredibly old. The
+little dead mother could have told them that he was less than
+thirty.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer sat winding bandages. Now and then they went
+crooked and had to be done again. She was very tired. The creaking
+of the bandage machine made her nervous&mdash;that and a sort of
+disillusionment; for was this her great mission, this sitting in a
+silent, sunny ward, where the double row of beds held only querulous
+convalescent women? How close was she to life who had come to soothe
+the suffering and close the eyes of the dying; who had imagined that
+her instruments of healing were a thermometer and a prayer-book; and
+who found herself fighting the good fight with a bandage machine
+and, even worse, a scrubbing brush and a finetooth comb?
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Nurse, having finished the M's, glanced up and surprised
+a tear on the Probationer's round young cheek. She was wise, having
+trained many probationers.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Go to first supper, please," she said. First supper is the Senior's
+prerogative; but it is given occasionally to juniors and
+probationers as a mark of approval, or when the Senior is not
+hungry, or when a probationer reaches the breaking point, which is
+just before she gets her uniform.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer smiled and brightened. After all, she must be doing
+fairly well; and if she were not in the battle she was of it.
+Glimpses she had of the battle&mdash;stretchers going up and down in the
+slow elevator; sheeted figures on their way to the operating room;
+the clang of the ambulance bell in the courtyard; the occasional cry
+of a new life ushered in; the impressive silence of an old life
+going out. She surveyed the bandages on the bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll put away the bandages first," she said. "That's what you said,
+I think&mdash;never to leave the emergency bed with anything on it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Right-oh!" said the Senior.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Though nothing ever happens back here&mdash;does it?'
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's about our turn; I'm looking for a burned case." The
+Probationer, putting the bandages into a basket, turned and stared.
+</p>
+<p>
+"We have had two in to-day in the house," the Senior went on,
+starting on the N's and making the capital carefully. "There will be
+a third, of course; and we may get it. Cases always seem to run in
+threes. While you're straightening the bed I suppose I might as well
+go to supper after all."
+</p>
+<p>
+So it was the Probationer and the Dummy who received the new case,
+while the Senior ate cold salmon and fried potatoes with other
+seniors, and inveighed against lectures on Saturday evening and
+other things that seniors object to, such as things lost in the
+wash, and milk in the coffee instead of cream, and women from the
+Avenue who drank carbolic acid and kept the ambulance busy.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer was from the country and she had never heard of
+the Avenue. And the Dummy, who walked there daily with the
+superintendent's dog, knew nothing of its wickedness. In his soul,
+where there was nothing but kindness, there was even a feeling of
+tenderness for the Avenue. Once the dog had been bitten by a terrier
+from one of the houses, and a girl had carried him in and washed the
+wounds and bound them up. Thereafter the Dummy had watched for her
+and bowed when he saw her. When he did not see her he bowed to the
+house.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy finished the brass plates and, gathering up his rags and
+polish, shuffled to the door. His walk was a patient shamble, but he
+covered incredible distances. When he reached the emergency bed he
+stopped and pointed to it. The Probationer looked startled.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He's tellin' you to get it ready," shrilled Irish Delia, sitting up
+in the next bed. "He did that before you was brought in," she called
+to Old Maggie across the ward. "Goodness knows how he finds out&mdash;but
+he knows. Get the spread off the bed, miss. There's something
+coming."
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+The Probationer had come from the country and naturally knew nothing
+of the Avenue. Sometimes on her off duty she took short walks there,
+wondering if the passers-by who stared at her knew that she was a
+part of the great building that loomed over the district, happily
+ignorant of the real significance of their glances. Once a girl,
+sitting behind bowed shutters, had leaned out and smiled at her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Hot to-day, isn't it?" she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer stopped politely.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's fearful! Is there any place near where I can get some soda
+water?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl in the window stared.
+</p>
+<p>
+"There's a drug store two squares down," she said. "And say, if I
+were you&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, nothing!" said the girl in the window, and quite unexpectedly
+slammed the shutters.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer had puzzled over it quite a lot. More than once she
+walked by the house, but she did not see the smiling girl&mdash;only,
+curiously enough, one day she saw the Dummy passing the house and
+watched him bow and take off his old cap, though there was no one in
+sight.
+</p>
+<p>
+Sooner or later the Avenue girls get to the hospital. Sometimes it
+is because they cannot sleep, and lie and think things over&mdash;and
+there is no way out; and God hates them&mdash;though, of course, there is
+that story about Jesus and the Avenue woman. And what is the use of
+going home and being asked questions that cannot be answered? So
+they try to put an end to things generally&mdash;and end up in the
+emergency bed, terribly frightened, because it has occurred to them
+that if they do not dare to meet the home folks how are they going
+to meet the Almighty?
+</p>
+<p>
+Or sometimes it is jealousy. Even an Avenue woman must love some
+one; and, because she's an elemental creature, if the object of her
+affections turns elsewhere she's rather apt to use a knife or a
+razor. In that case it is the rival who ends up on the emergency
+bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+Or the life gets her, as it does sooner or later, and she comes in
+with typhoid or a cough, or other things, and lies alone, day after
+day, without visitors or inquiries, making no effort to get better,
+because&mdash;well, why should she?
+</p>
+<p>
+And so the Dummy's Avenue Girl met her turn and rode down the street
+in a clanging ambulance, and was taken up in the elevator and along
+a grey hall to where the emergency bed was waiting; and the
+Probationer, very cold as to hands and feet, was sending mental
+appeals to the Senior to come&mdash;and come quickly. The ward got up on
+elbows and watched. Also it told the Probationer what to do.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Hot-water bottles and screens," it said variously. "Take her
+temperature. Don't be frightened! There'll be a doctor in a minute."
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl lay on the bed with her eyes shut. It was Irish Delia who
+saw the Dummy and raised a cry.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Look at the Dummy!" she said. "He's crying."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy's world had always been a small one. There was the
+superintendent, who gave him his old clothes; and there was the
+engineer, who brought him tobacco; and there were the ambulance
+horses, who talked to him now and then without speech. And, of
+course, there was his Father.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fringing this small inner circle of his heart was a kaleidoscope of
+changing faces, nurses, <i>internes</i>, patients, visitors&mdash;a wall of
+life that kept inviolate his inner shrine. And in the holiest place,
+where had dwelt only his Father, and not even the superintendent,
+the Dummy had recently placed the Avenue Girl. She was his saint,
+though he knew nothing of saints. Who can know why he chose her? A
+queer trick of the soul perhaps&mdash;or was it super-wisdom?&mdash;to choose
+her from among many saintly women and so enshrine her.
+</p>
+<p>
+Or perhaps&mdash;&mdash; Down in the chapel, in a great glass window, the
+young John knelt among lilies and prayed. When, at service on
+Sundays, the sunlight came through on to the Dummy's polished choir
+rail and candles, the young John had the face of a girl, with short
+curling hair, very yellow for the colour scheme. The Avenue Girl had
+hair like that and was rather like him in other ways.
+</p>
+<p>
+And here she was where all the others had come, and where countless
+others would come sooner or later. She was not unconscious and at
+Delia's cry she opened her eyes. The Probationer was off filling
+water bottles, and only the Dummy, stricken, round-shouldered,
+unlovely, stood beside her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Rotten luck, old top!" she said faintly.
+</p>
+<p>
+To the Dummy it was a benediction. She could open her eyes. The
+miracle of speech was still hers.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Cigarette!" explained the Avenue Girl, seeing his eyes still on
+her. "Must have gone to sleep with it and dropped it. I'm&mdash;all in!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't you talk like that," said Irish Delia, bending over from the
+next bed. "You'll get well a' right&mdash;unless you inhaled. Y'ought to
+'a' kept your mouth shut."
+</p>
+<p>
+Across the ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue
+calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old
+Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where
+squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and scorned it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Humph!" she said, without troubling to lower her voice. "I've seen
+her often. I done her washing once. She's as bad as they make 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You shut your mouth!" Irish Delia rose to the defence. "She's in
+trouble now and what she was don't matter. You go back to bed or
+I'll tell the Head Nurse on you. Look out! The Dummy&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy was advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the
+woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands
+and jerked her away from the bed. Old Maggie reeled&mdash;almost fell.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You all seen that!" she appealed to the ward. "I haven't even spoke
+to him and he attacked me! I'll go to the superintendent about it.
+I'll&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer hurried in. Her young cheeks were flushed with
+excitement and anxiety; her arms were full of jugs, towels,
+bandages&mdash;anything she could imagine as essential. She found the
+Dummy on his knees polishing a bed plate, and the ward in
+order&mdash;only Old Maggie was grumbling and making her way back to bed;
+and Irish Delia was sitting up, with her eyes shining&mdash;for had not
+the Dummy, who could not hear, known what Old Maggie had said about
+the new girl? Had she not said that he knew many things that were
+hidden, though God knows how he knew them?
+</p>
+<p>
+The next hour saw the Avenue Girl through a great deal. Her burns
+were dressed by an <i>interne</i> and she was moved back to a bed at the
+end of the ward. The Probationer sat beside her, having refused
+supper. The Dummy was gone&mdash;the Senior Nurse had shooed him off as
+one shoos a chicken.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Get out of here! You're always under my feet," she had said&mdash;not
+unkindly&mdash;and pointed to the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy had stood, with his faded old-young eyes on her, and had
+not moved. The Senior, who had the ward supper to serve and beds to
+brush out and backs to rub, not to mention having to make up the
+emergency bed and clear away the dressings&mdash;the Senior tried
+diplomacy and offered him an orange from her own corner of the
+medicine closet. He shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I guess he wants to know whether that girl from the Avenue's going
+to get well," said Irish Delia. "He seems to know her."
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a titter through the ward at this. Old Maggie's gossiping
+tongue had been busy during the hour. From pity the ward had veered
+to contempt.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Humph!" said the Senior, and put the orange back. "Why, yes; I
+guess she'll get well. But how in Heaven's name am I to let him
+know?"
+</p>
+<p>
+She was a resourceful person, however, and by pointing to the Avenue
+Girl and then nodding reassuringly she got her message of cheer over
+the gulf of his understanding. In return the Dummy told her by
+gestures how he knew the girl and how she had bound up the leg of
+the superintendent's dog. The Senior was a literal person and not
+occult; and she was very busy. When the Dummy stooped to indicate
+the dog, a foot or so from the ground, she seized that as the key of
+the situation.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He's trying to let me know that he knew her when she was a baby,"
+she observed generally. "All right, if that's the case. Come in and
+see her when you want to. And now get out, for goodness' sake!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy, with his patient shamble, made his way out of the ward
+and stored his polishes for the night in the corner of a
+scrub-closet. Then, ignoring supper, he went down the stairs, flight
+after flight, to the chapel. The late autumn sun had set behind the
+buildings across the courtyard and the lower part of the silent room
+was in shadow; but the afterglow came palely through the
+stained-glass window, with the young John and tall stalks of white
+lilies, and "To the Memory of My Daughter Elizabeth" beneath.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was only a coincidence&mdash;and not even that to the Dummy&mdash;but
+Elizabeth had been the Avenue Girl's name not so long ago.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy sat down near the door very humbly and gazed at the
+memorial window.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+II
+</p>
+<p>
+Time may be measured in different ways&mdash;by joys; by throbs of pain;
+by instants; by centuries. In a hospital it is marked by night
+nurses and day nurses; by rounds of the Staff; by visiting days; by
+medicines and temperatures and milk diets and fever baths; by the
+distant singing in the chapel on Sundays; by the shift of the
+morning sun on the east beds to the evening sun on the beds along
+the west windows.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Avenue Girl lay alone most of the time. The friendly offices of
+the ward were not for her. Private curiosity and possible kindliness
+were over-shadowed by a general arrogance of goodness. The ward
+flung its virtue at her like a weapon and she raised no defence. In
+the first days things were not so bad. She lay in shock for a time,
+and there were not wanting hands during the bad hours to lift a cup
+of water to her lips; but after that came the tedious time when
+death no longer hovered overhead and life was there for the asking.
+</p>
+<p>
+The curious thing was that the Avenue Girl did not ask. She lay for
+hours without moving, with eyes that seemed tired with looking into
+the dregs of life. The Probationer was in despair.
+</p>
+<p>
+"She could get better if she would," she said to the <i>interne</i> one
+day. The Senior was off duty and they had done the dressing
+together. "She just won't try."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Perhaps she thinks it isn't worth while," replied the <i>interne</i>,
+who was drying his hands carefully while the Probationer waited for
+the towel.
+</p>
+<p>
+She was a very pretty Probationer.
+</p>
+<p>
+"She hasn't much to look forward to, you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer was not accustomed to discussing certain things with
+young men, but she had the Avenue Girl on her mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+"She has a home&mdash;she admits it." She coloured bravely. "Why&mdash;why
+cannot she go back to it, even now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The <i>interne</i> poured a little rosewater and glycerine into the palm
+of one hand and gave the Probationer the bottle. If his fingers
+touched hers, she never knew it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Perhaps they'd not want her after&mdash;well, they'd never feel the
+same, likely. They'd probably prefer to think of her as dead and let
+it go at that. There&mdash;there doesn't seem to be any way back, you
+know."
+</p>
+<p>
+He was exceedingly self-conscious.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then life is very cruel," said the Probationer with rather shaky
+lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+And going back to the Avenue Girl's bed she filled her cup with ice
+and straightened her pillows. It was her only way of showing
+defiance to a world that mutilated its children and turned them out
+to die. The <i>interne</i> watched her as she worked. It rather galled
+him to see her touching this patient. He had no particular sympathy
+for the Avenue Girl. He was a man, and ruthless, as men are apt to
+be in such things.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Avenue Girl had no visitors. She had had one or two at
+first&mdash;pretty girls with tired eyes and apologetic glances; a
+negress who got by the hall porter with a box of cigarettes, which
+the Senior promptly confiscated; and&mdash;the Dummy. Morning and evening
+came the Dummy and stood by her bed and worshipped. Morning and
+evening he brought tribute&mdash;a flower from the masses that came in
+daily; an orange, got by no one knows what trickery from the
+kitchen; a leadpencil; a box of cheap candies. At first the girl had
+been embarrassed by his visits. Later, as the unfriendliness of the
+ward grew more pronounced, she greeted him with a faint smile. The
+first time she smiled he grew quite pale and shuffled out. Late that
+night they found him sitting in the chapel looking at the window,
+which was only a blur.
+</p>
+<p>
+For certain small services in the ward the Senior depended on the
+convalescents&mdash;filling drinking cups; passing milk at eleven and
+three; keeping the white bedspreads in geometrical order. But the
+Avenue Girl was taboo. The boycott had been instituted by Old
+Maggie. The rampant respectability of the ward even went so far as
+to refuse to wash her in those early morning hours when the night
+nurse, flying about with her cap on one ear, was carrying tin basins
+about like a blue-and-white cyclone. The Dummy knew nothing of the
+washing; the early morning was the time when he polished the brass
+doorplate which said: Hospital and Free Dispensary. But he knew
+about the drinking cup and after a time that became his
+self-appointed task.
+</p>
+<p>
+On Sundays he put on his one white shirt and a frayed collar two
+sizes too large and went to chapel. At those times he sat with his
+prayer book upside down and watched the Probationer who cared for
+his lady and who had no cap to hide her shining hair, and the
+<i>interne</i>, who was glad there was no cap because of the hair. God's
+fool he was, indeed, for he liked to look in the <i>interne's</i> eyes,
+and did not know an <i>interne</i> cannot marry for years and years, and
+that a probationer must not upset discipline by being engaged. God's
+fool, indeed, who could see into the hearts of men, but not into
+their thoughts or their lives; and who, seeing only thus, on two
+dimensions of life and not the third, found the Avenue Girl holy and
+worthy of all worship!
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+The Probationer worried a great deal.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It must hurt her so!" she said to the Senior. "Did you see them
+call that baby away on visiting day for fear she would touch it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"None are so good as the untempted," explained the Senior, who had
+been beautiful and was now placid and full of good works. "You
+cannot remake the world, child. Bodies are our business here&mdash;not
+souls." But the next moment she called Old Maggie to her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I've been pretty patient, Maggie," she said. "You know what I mean.
+You're the ringleader. Now things are going to change, or&mdash;you'll go
+back on codliver oil to-night."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes'm," said Old Maggie meekly, with hate in her heart. She loathed
+the codliver oil.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Go back and straighten her bed!" commanded the Senior sternly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Now!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"It hurts my back to stoop over," whined Old Maggie, with the ward
+watching. "The doctor said that I&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior made a move for the medicine closet and the bottles
+labelled C.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm going," whimpered Old Maggie. "Can't you give a body time?"
+</p>
+<p>
+And she went down to defeat, with the laughter of the ward in her
+ears&mdash;down to defeat, for the Avenue Girl would have none of her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You get out of here!" she said fiercely as Old Maggie set to work
+at the draw sheet. "Get out quick&mdash;or I'll throw this cup in your
+face!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior was watching. Old Maggie put on an air of benevolence and
+called the Avenue Girl an unlovely name under her breath while she
+smoothed her pillow. She did not get the cup, but the water out of
+it, in her hard old face, and matters were as they had been.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Girl did not improve as she should. The <i>interne</i> did the
+dressing day after day, while the Probationer helped him&mdash;the Senior
+disliked burned cases&mdash;and talked of skin grafting if a new powder
+he had discovered did no good. <i>Internes</i> are always trying out new
+things, looking for the great discovery.
+</p>
+<p>
+The powder did no good. The day came when, the dressing over and the
+white coverings drawn up smoothly again over her slender body, the
+Avenue Girl voiced the question that her eyes had asked each time.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Am I going to lie in this hole all my life?" she demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+The <i>interne</i> considered.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It isn't healing&mdash;not very fast anyhow," he said. "If we could get
+a little skin to graft on you'd be all right in a jiffy. Can't you
+get some friends to come in? It isn't painful and it's over in a
+minute."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Friends? Where would I get friends of that sort?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, relatives then&mdash;some of your own people?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Avenue Girl shut her eyes as she did when the dressing hurt her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"None that I'd care to see," she said. And the Probationer knew she
+lied. The <i>interne</i> shrugged his shoulders.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If you think of any let me know. We'll get them here," he said
+briskly, and turned to see the Probationer rolling up her sleeve.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please!" she said, and held out a bare white arm. The <i>interne</i>
+stared at it stupefied. It was very lovely.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I am not at all afraid," urged the Probationer, "and my blood is
+good. It would grow&mdash;I know it would."
+</p>
+<p>
+The <i>interne</i> had hard work not to stoop and kiss the blue veins
+that rose to the surface in the inner curve of her elbow. The
+dressing screens were up and the three were quite alone. To keep his
+voice steady he became stern.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Put your sleeve down and don't be a foolish girl!" he, commanded.
+"Put your sleeve down!" His eyes said: "You wonder! You beauty! You
+brave little girl!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Because the Probationer seemed to take her responsibilities rather
+to heart, however, and because, when he should have been thinking of
+other things, such as calling up the staff and making reports, he
+kept seeing that white arm and the resolute face above it, the
+<i>interne</i> worked out a plan.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I've fixed it, I think," he said, meeting her in a hallway where
+he had no business to be, and trying to look as if he had not known
+she was coming. "Father Feeny was in this morning and I tackled him.
+He's got a lot of students&mdash;fellows studying for the priesthood&mdash;and
+he says any daughter of the church shall have skin if he has to flay
+'em alive."
+</p>
+<p>
+"But&mdash;is she a daughter of the church?" asked the Probationer. "And
+even if she were, under the circumstances&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"What circumstances?" demanded the <i>interne</i>. "Here's a poor girl
+burned and suffering. The father is not going to ask whether she's
+of the anointed."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer was not sure. She liked doing things in the open and
+with nothing to happen later to make one uncomfortable; but she
+spoke to the Senior and the Senior was willing. Her chief trouble,
+after all, was with the Avenue Girl herself.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't want to get well," she said wearily when the thing was put
+up to her. "What's the use? I'd just go back to the same old thing;
+and when it got too strong for me I'd end up here again or in the
+morgue."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Tell me where your people live, then, and let me send for them."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why? To have them read in my face what I've been, and go back home
+to die of shame?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer looked at the Avenue Girl's face.
+</p>
+<p>
+"There&mdash;there is nothing in your face to hurt them," she said,
+flushing&mdash;because there were some things the Probationer had never
+discussed, even with herself. "You&mdash;look sad. Honestly, that's all."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Avenue Girl held up her thin right hand. The forefinger was
+still yellow from cigarettes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What about that?" she sneered.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If I bleach it will you let me send for your people?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll&mdash;perhaps," was the most the Probationer could get.
+</p>
+<p>
+Many people would have been discouraged. Even the Senior was a bit
+cynical. It took a Probationer still heartsick for home to read in
+the Avenue Girl's eyes the terrible longing for the things she had
+given up&mdash;for home and home folks; for a clean slate again. The
+Probationer bleached and scrubbed the finger, and gradually a little
+of her hopeful spirit touched the other girl.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What day is it?" the Avenue Girl asked once.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Friday."
+</p>
+<p>
+"That's baking day at home. We bake in an out-oven. Did you ever
+smell bread as it comes from an out-oven?" Or: "That's a pretty
+shade of blue you nurses wear. It would be nice for working in the
+dairy, wouldn't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Fine!" said the Probationer, and scrubbed away to hide the triumph
+in her eyes.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+III
+</p>
+<p>
+That was the day the Dummy stole the parrot. The parrot belonged to
+the Girl; but how did he know it? So many things he should have
+known the Dummy never learned; so many things he knew that he seemed
+never to have learned! He did not know, for instance, of Father
+Feeny and the Holy Name students; but he knew of the Avenue Girl's
+loneliness and heartache, and of the cabal against her. It is one of
+the black marks on record against him that he refused to polish the
+plate on Old Maggie's bed, and that he shook his fist at her more
+than once when the Senior was out of the ward.
+</p>
+<p>
+And he knew of the parrot. That day, then, a short, stout woman with
+a hard face appeared in the superintendent's office and demanded a
+parrot.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Parrot?" said the superintendent blandly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Parrot! That crazy man you keep here walked into my house to-day
+and stole a parrot&mdash;and I want it."
+</p>
+<p>
+"The Dummy! But what on earth&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"It was my parrot," said the woman. "It belonged to one of my
+boarders. She's a burned case up in one of the wards&mdash;and she owed
+me money. I took it for a debt. You call that man and let him look
+me in the eye while I say parrot to him."
+</p>
+<p>
+"He cannot speak or hear."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You call him. He'll understand me!"
+</p>
+<p>
+They found the Dummy coming stealthily down from the top of the
+stable and haled him into the office. He was very calm&mdash;quite
+impassive. Apparently he had never seen the woman before; as she
+raged he smiled cheerfully and shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+"As a matter of fact," said the superintendent, "I don't believe he
+ever saw the bird; but if he has it we shall find it out and you'll
+get it again."
+</p>
+<p>
+They let him go then; and he went to the chapel and looked at a dove
+above the young John's head. Then he went up to the kitchen and
+filled his pockets with lettuce leaves. He knew nothing at all of
+parrots or how to care for them.
+</p>
+<p>
+Things, you see, were moving right for the Avenue Girl. The stain
+was coming off&mdash;she had been fond of the parrot and now it was close
+at hand; and Father Feeny's lusty crowd stood ready to come into a
+hospital ward and shed skin that they generally sacrificed on the
+football field. But the Avenue Girl had two years to account
+for&mdash;and there was the matter of an alibi.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I might tell the folks at home anything and they'd believe it
+because they'd want to believe it," said the Avenue Girl. "But
+there's the neighbours. I was pretty wild at home. And&mdash;there's a
+fellow who wanted to marry me&mdash;he knew how sick I was of the old
+place and how I wanted my fling. His name was Jerry. We'd have to
+show Jerry."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer worried a great deal about this matter of the alibi.
+It had to be a clean slate for the folks back home, and especially
+for Jerry. She took her anxieties out walking several times on her
+off-duty, but nothing seemed to come of it. She walked on the Avenue
+mostly, because it was near and she could throw a long coat over her
+blue dress. And so she happened to think of the woman the girl had
+lived with.
+</p>
+<p>
+"She got her into all this," thought the Probationer. "She's just
+got to see her out."
+</p>
+<p>
+It took three days' off-duty to get her courage up to ringing the
+doorbell of the house with the bowed shutters, and after she had
+rung it she wanted very much to run and hide; but she thought of the
+girl and everything going for nothing for the want of an alibi, and
+she stuck. The negress opened the door and stared at her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"She's dead, is she?" she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"No. May I come in? I want to see your mistress."
+</p>
+<p>
+The negress did not admit her, however. She let her stand in the
+vestibule and went back to the foot of a staircase.
+</p>
+<p>
+"One of these heah nurses from the hospital!" she said. "She wants
+to come in and speak to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Let her in, you fool!" replied a voice from above stairs.
+</p>
+<p>
+The rest was rather confused. Afterward the Probationer remembered
+putting the case to the stout woman who had claimed the parrot and
+finding it difficult to make her understand.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't you see?" she finished desperately. "I want her to go
+home&mdash;to her own folks. She wants it too. But what are we going to
+say about these last two years?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The stout woman sat turning over her rings. She was most
+uncomfortable. After all, what had she done? Had she not warned them
+again and again about having lighted cigarettes lying round.
+</p>
+<p>
+"She's in bad shape, is she?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"She may recover, but she'll be badly scarred&mdash;not her face, but her
+chest and shoulders."
+</p>
+<p>
+That was another way of looking at it. If the girl was scarred&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+"Just what do you want me to do?" she asked. Now that it was down
+to brass tacks and no talk about home and mother, she was more
+comfortable.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If you could just come over to the hospital while her people are
+there and&mdash;and say she'd lived with you all the time&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"That's the truth all right!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"And&mdash;that she worked for you, sewing&mdash;she sews very well, she
+says. And&mdash;oh, you'll know what to say; that she's been&mdash;all right,
+you know; anything to make them comfortable and happy."
+</p>
+<p>
+Now the stout woman was softening&mdash;not that she was really hard, but
+she had developed a sort of artificial veneer of hardness, and good
+impulses had a hard time crawling through.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I guess I could do that much," she conceded. "She nursed me when I
+was down and out with the grippe and that worthless nigger was drunk
+in the kitchen. But you folks over there have got a parrot that
+belongs to me. What about that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer knew about the parrot. The Dummy had slipped it
+into the ward more than once and its profanity had delighted the
+patients. The Avenue Girl had been glad to see it too; and as it sat
+on the bedside table and shrieked defiance and oaths the Dummy had
+smiled benignly. John and the dove&mdash;the girl and the parrot!
+</p>
+<p>
+"I am sorry about the parrot. I&mdash;perhaps I could buy him from you."
+</p>
+<p>
+She got out her shabby little purse, in which she carried her
+munificent monthly allowance of eight dollars and a little money she
+had brought from home.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Twenty dollars takes him. That's what she owed me."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer had seventeen dollars and eleven cents. She spread
+it out in her lap and counted it twice.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm afraid that's all," she said. She had hoped the second count
+would show up better. "I could bring the rest next month."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer folded the money together and held it out. The stout
+woman took it eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He's yours," she said largely. "Don't bother about the balance.
+When do you want me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll send you word," said the Probationer, and got up. She was
+almost dizzy with excitement and the feeling of having no money at
+all in the world and a parrot she did not want. She got out into the
+air somehow and back to the hospital. She took a bath immediately
+and put on everything fresh, and felt much better&mdash;but very
+poor. Before she went on duty she said a little prayer about
+thermometers&mdash;that she should not break hers until she had money for
+a new one.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+Father Feeny came and lined up six budding priests outside the door
+of the ward. He was a fine specimen of manhood and he had asked no
+questions at all. The Senior thought she had better tell him
+something, but he put up a white hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What does it matter, sister?" he said cheerfully. "Yesterday is
+gone and to-day is a new day. Also there is to-morrow"&mdash;his Irish
+eyes twinkled&mdash;"and a fine day it will be by the sunset."
+</p>
+<p>
+Then he turned to his small army.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Boys," he said, "it's a poor leader who is afraid to take chances
+with his men. I'm going first"&mdash;he said fir-rst. "It's a small
+thing, as I've told you&mdash;a bit of skin and it's over. Go in smiling
+and come out smiling! Are you ready, sir?" This to the <i>interne</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+That was a great day in the ward. The inmates watched Father Feeny
+and the <i>interne</i> go behind the screens, both smiling, and they
+watched the father come out very soon after, still smiling but a
+little bleached. And they watched the line patiently waiting outside
+the door, shortening one by one. After a time the smiles were rather
+forced, as if waiting was telling on them; but there was no
+deserter&mdash;only one six-foot youth, walking with a swagger to
+contribute his little half inch or so of cuticle, added a sensation
+to the general excitement by fainting halfway up the ward; and he
+remained in blissful unconsciousness until it was all over.
+</p>
+<p>
+Though the <i>interne</i> had said there was no way back, the first step
+had really been taken; and he was greatly pleased with himself and
+with everybody because it had been his idea. The Probationer tried
+to find a chance to thank him; and, failing that, she sent a
+grateful little note to his room:
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+      Is Mimi the Austrian to have a baked apple?
+</p>
+<p class="closing">  [Signed]&nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="sc">Ward A.</span>
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+      P.S.&mdash;It went through wonderfully! She is so cheerful
+      since it is over. How can I ever thank you?
+</p>
+<p>
+The reply came back very quickly:
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+      Baked apple, without milk, for Mimi. <span class="sc">Ward A.</span>
+</p>
+<p class="closing">                  [Signed]&nbsp; &nbsp;     D. L. S.
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+      P.S.&mdash;Can you come up on the roof for a little air?
+</p>
+<p>
+She hesitated over that for some time. A really honest-to-goodness
+nurse may break a rule now and then and nothing happen; but
+a probationer is only on trial and has to be exceedingly
+careful&mdash;though any one might go to the roof and watch the sunset.
+She decided not to go. Then she pulled her soft hair down over her
+forehead, where it was most becoming, and fastened it with tiny
+hairpins, and went up after all&mdash;not because she intended to, but
+because as she came out of her room the elevator was going up&mdash;not
+down. She was on the roof almost before she knew it.
+</p>
+<p>
+The <i>interne</i> was there in fresh white ducks, smoking. At first they
+talked of skin grafting and the powder that had not done what was
+expected of it. After a time, when the autumn twilight had fallen on
+them like a benediction, she took her courage in her hands and told
+of her visit to the house on the Avenue, and about the parrot and
+the plot.
+</p>
+<p>
+The <i>interne</i> stood very still. He was young and intolerant. Some
+day he would mellow and accept life as it is&mdash;not as he would have
+it. When she had finished he seemed to have drawn himself into a
+shell, turtle fashion, and huddled himself together. The shell was
+pride and old prejudice and the intolerance of youth. "She had to
+have an alibi!" said the Probationer.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, of course," very stiffly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I cannot see why you disapprove. Something had to be done."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I cannot see that you had to do it; but it's your own affair, of
+course. Only&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please go on."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, one cannot touch dirt without being soiled."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I think you will be sorry you said that," said the Probationer
+stiffly. And she went down the staircase, leaving him alone. He was
+sorry, of course; but he would not say so even to himself. He
+thought of the Probationer, with her eager eyes and shining hair and
+her warm little heart, ringing the bell of the Avenue house and
+making her plea&mdash;and his blood ran hot in him. It was just then
+that the parrot spoke on the other side of the chimney.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Gimme a bottle of beer!" it said. "Nice cold beer! Cold beer!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The <i>interne</i> walked furiously toward the sound. Must this girl of
+the streets and her wretched associates follow him everywhere? She
+had ruined his life already. He felt that it was ruined. Probably
+the Probationer would never speak to him again.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy was sitting on a bench, with the parrot on his knee
+looking rather queer from being smuggled about under a coat and fed
+the curious things that the Dummy thought a bird should eat. It had
+a piece of apple pie in its claw now.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Cold beer!" said the parrot, and eyed the <i>interne</i> crookedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy had not heard him, of course. He sat looking over the
+parapet toward the river, with one knotted hand smoothing the bird's
+ruffled plumage and such a look of wretchedness in his eyes that it
+hurt to see it. God's fools, who cannot reason, can feel. Some
+instinct of despair had seized him for its own&mdash;some conception,
+perhaps, of what life would never mean to him. Before it, the
+<i>interne's</i> wrath gave way to impotency.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Cold beer!" said the parrot wickedly.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+IV
+</p>
+<p>
+The Avenue Girl improved slowly. Morning and evening came the Dummy
+and smiled down at her, with reverence in his eyes. She could smile
+back now and sometimes she spoke to him. There was a change in the
+Avenue Girl. She was less sullen. In the back of her eyes each
+morning found a glow of hope&mdash;that died, it is true, by noontime;
+but it came again with the new day.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How's Polly this morning, Montmorency?" she would say, and give him
+a bit of toast from her breakfast for the bird. Or: "I wish you
+could talk, Reginald. I'd like to hear what Rose said when you took
+the parrot. It must have been a scream!"
+</p>
+<p>
+He brought her the first chrysanthemums of the fall and laid them on
+her pillow. It was after he had gone, while the Probationer was
+combing out the soft short curls of her hair, that she mentioned the
+Dummy. She strove to make her voice steady, but there were tears in
+her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The old goat's been pretty good to me, hasn't he?" she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I believe it is very unusual. I wonder"&mdash;the Probationer poised the
+comb&mdash;"perhaps you remind him of some one he used to know."
+</p>
+<p>
+They knew nothing, of course, of the boy John and the window.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He's about the first decent man I ever knew," said the Avenue
+Girl&mdash;"and he's a fool!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Either a fool or very, very wise," replied the Probationer.
+</p>
+<p>
+The <i>interne</i> and the Probationer were good friends again, but they
+had never quite got back to the place they had lost on the roof.
+Over the Avenue Girl's dressing their eyes met sometimes, and there
+was an appeal in the man's and tenderness; but there was pride too.
+He would not say he had not meant it. Any man will tell you that he
+was entirely right, and that she had been most unwise and needed a
+good scolding&mdash;only, of course, it is never the wise people who make
+life worth the living.
+</p>
+<p>
+And an important thing had happened&mdash;the Probationer had been
+accepted and had got her cap. She looked very stately in it, though
+it generally had a dent somewhere from her forgetting she had it on
+and putting her hat on over it. The first day she wore it she knelt
+at prayers with the others, and said a little Thank You! for getting
+through when she was so unworthy. She asked to be made clean and
+pure, and delivered from vanity, and of some use in the world. And,
+trying to think of the things she had been remiss in, she went out
+that night in a rain and bought some seed and things for the parrot.
+</p>
+<p>
+Prodigal as had been Father Feeny and his battalion, there was more
+grafting needed before the Avenue Girl could take her scarred body
+and soul out into the world again. The Probationer offered, but was
+refused politely.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You are a part of the institution now," said the <i>interne</i>, with
+his eyes on her cap. He was rather afraid of the cap. "I cannot
+cripple the institution."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the Dummy who solved that question. No one knew how he knew
+the necessity or why he had not come forward sooner; but come he did
+and would not be denied. The <i>interne</i> went to a member of the staff
+about it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The fellow works round the house," he explained; "but he's taken a
+great fancy to the girl and I hardly know what to do."
+</p>
+<p>
+"My dear boy," said the staff, "one of the greatest joys in the
+world is to suffer for a woman. Let him go to it."
+</p>
+<p>
+So the Dummy bared his old-young arm&mdash;not once, but many times.
+Always as the sharp razor nicked up its bit of skin he looked at the
+girl and smiled. In the early evening he perched the parrot on his
+bandaged arm and sat on the roof or by the fountain in the
+courtyard. When the breeze blew strong enough the water flung over
+the rim and made little puddles in the hollows of the cement
+pavement. Here belated sparrows drank or splashed their dusty
+feathers, and the parrot watched them crookedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Avenue Girl grew better with each day, but remained
+wistful-eyed. The ward no longer avoided her, though she was never
+one of them. One day the Probationer found a new baby in the
+children's ward; and, with the passion of maternity that is the real
+reason for every good woman's being, she cuddled the mite in her
+arms. She visited the nurses in the different wards.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Just look!" she would say, opening her arms. "If I could only steal
+it!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior, who had once been beautiful and was now calm and placid,
+smiled at her. Old Maggie must peer and cry out over the child.
+Irish Delia must call down a blessing on it. And so up the ward to
+the Avenue Girl; the Probationer laid the baby in her arms.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Just a minute," she explained. "I'm idling and I have no business
+to. Hold it until I give the three o'clocks." Which means the
+three-o'clock medicines.
+</p>
+<p>
+When she came back the Avenue Girl had a new look in her eyes; and
+that day the little gleam of hope, that usually died, lasted and
+grew.
+</p>
+<p>
+At last came the day when the alibi was to be brought forward. The
+girl had written home and the home folks were coming. In his strange
+way the Dummy knew that a change was near. The kaleidoscope would
+shift again and the Avenue Girl would join the changing and
+disappearing figures that fringed the inner circle of his heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+One night he did not go to bed in the ward bed that was his only
+home, beside the little stand that held his only possessions. The
+watchman missed him and found him asleep in the chapel in one of the
+seats, with the parrot drowsing on the altar.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rose&mdash;who was the stout woman&mdash;came early. She wore a purple dress,
+with a hat to match, and purple gloves. The ward eyed her with scorn
+and a certain deference. She greeted the Avenue Girl effusively
+behind the screens that surrounded the bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, you do look pinched!" she said. "Ain't it a mercy it didn't
+get to your face! Pretty well chewed up, aren't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Do you want to see it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good land! No! Now look here, you've got to put me wise or I'll
+blow the whole thing. What's my little stunt? The purple's all right
+for it, isn't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"All you need to do," said the Avenue Girl wearily, "is to say that
+I've been sewing for you since I came to the city. And&mdash;if you can
+say anything good&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll do that all right," Rose affirmed. She put a heavy silver bag
+on the bedside table and lowered herself into a chair. "You leave it
+to me, dearie. There ain't anything I won't say."
+</p>
+<p>
+The ward was watching with intense interest. Old Maggie, working the
+creaking bandage machine, was palpitating with excitement. From her
+chair by the door she could see the elevator and it was she who
+announced the coming of destiny.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Here comes the father," she confided to the end of the ward. "Guess
+the mother couldn't come."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was not the father though. It was a young man who hesitated in
+the doorway, hat in hand&mdash;a tall young man, with a strong and not
+unhandsome face. The Probationer, rather twitchy from excitement and
+anxiety, felt her heart stop and race on again. Jerry, without a
+doubt!
+</p>
+<p>
+The meeting was rather constrained. The girl went whiter than her
+pillows and half closed her eyes; but Rose, who would have been
+terrified at the sight of an elderly farmer, was buoyantly relieved
+and at her ease.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm sorry," said Jerry. "I&mdash;we didn't realise it had been so bad.
+The folks are well; but&mdash;I thought I'd better come. They're
+expecting you back home."
+</p>
+<p>
+"It was nice of you to come," said the girl, avoiding his eyes.
+"I&mdash;I'm getting along fine."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I guess introductions ain't necessary," put in Rose briskly. "I'm
+Mrs. Sweeney. She's been living with me&mdash;working for me, sewing.
+She's sure a fine sewer! She made this suit I'm wearing."
+</p>
+<p>
+Poor Rose, with "custom made" on every seam of the purple! But Jerry
+was hardly listening. His eyes were on the girl among the pillows.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I see," said Jerry slowly. "You haven't said yet, Elizabeth. Are
+you going home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"If&mdash;they want me."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Of course they want you!" Again Rose: "Why shouldn't they? You've
+been a good girl and a credit to any family. If they say anything
+mean to you you let me know."
+</p>
+<p>
+"They'll not be mean to her. I'm sure they'll want to write and
+thank you. If you'll just give me your address, Mrs. Sweeney&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+He had a pencil poised over a notebook. Rose hesitated. Then she
+gave her address on the Avenue, with something of bravado in her
+voice. After all, what could this country-store clerk know of the
+Avenue? Jerry wrote it down carefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Sweeney&mdash;with an e?" he asked politely.
+</p>
+<p>
+"With three e's," corrected Rose, and got up with dignity.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, good-bye, dearie," she said. "You've got your friends now and
+you don't need me. I guess you've had your lesson about going to
+sleep with a cig&mdash;about being careless with fire. Drop me a postal
+when you get the time."
+</p>
+<p>
+She shook hands with Jerry and rustled and jingled down the ward,
+her chin well up. At the door she encountered Old Maggie, her arms
+full of bandages.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How's the Avenue?" asked Old Maggie.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rose, however, like all good actresses, was still in the part
+as she made her exit. She passed Old Maggie unheeding, severe
+respectability in every line of her figure, every nod of her purple
+plumes. She was still in the part when she encountered the
+Probationer.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's going like a house afire!" she said. "He swallowed it
+all&mdash;hook and bait! And&mdash;oh, yes, I've got something for you." She
+went down into her silver bag and pulled out a roll of bills. "I've
+felt meaner'n a dog every time I've thought of you buying that
+parrot. I've got a different view of life&mdash;maybe&mdash;from yours; but
+I'm not taking candy from a baby."
+</p>
+<p>
+When the Probationer could speak Rose was taking herself and the
+purple into the elevator and waving her a farewell.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good-bye!" she said. "If ever you get stuck again just call on me."
+</p>
+<p>
+With Rose's departure silence fell behind the screen. The girl broke
+it first.
+</p>
+<p>
+"They're all well, are they?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"All well. Your mother's been kind of poorly. She thought you'd
+write to her." The girl clenched her hands under the bedclothing.
+She could not speak just then. "There's nothing much happened. The
+post office burned down last summer. They're building a new one.
+And&mdash;I've been building. I tore down the old place."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Are you going to be married, Jerry?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Some day, I suppose. I'm not worrying about it. It was something to
+do; it kept me from&mdash;thinking."
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl looked at him and something gripped her throat. He knew!
+Rose might have gone down with her father, but Jerry knew! Nothing
+was any use. She knew his rigid morality, his country-bred horror of
+the thing she was. She would have to go back&mdash;to Rose and the
+others. He would never take her home.
+</p>
+<p>
+Down at the medicine closet the Probationer was carbolising
+thermometers and humming a little song. Everything was well. The
+Avenue Girl was with her people and at seven o'clock the Probationer
+was going to the roof&mdash;to meet some one who was sincerely repentant
+and very meek.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the convalescent ward next door they were singing softly&mdash;one of
+those spontaneous outbursts that have their origin in the hearts of
+people and a melody all their own:
+</p>
+<p class="verse2">
+          <i>'Way down upon de S'wanee Ribber,</i> <br />
+           &nbsp; &nbsp;  <i>Far, far away,</i> <br />
+           <i>Dere's wha my heart is turnin' ebber&mdash;</i> <br />
+          &nbsp; &nbsp;   <i>Dere's wha de old folks stay.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+It penetrated back of the screen, where the girl lay in white
+wretchedness&mdash;and where Jerry, with death in his eyes, sat rigid in
+his chair.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Jerry?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I&mdash;I guess I've been pretty far away."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't tell me about it!" A cry, this.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You used to care for me, Jerry. I'm not expecting that now; but if
+you'd only believe me when I say I'm sorry&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I believe you, Elizabeth."
+</p>
+<p>
+"One of the nurses here says&mdash;&mdash;Jerry, won't you look at me?" With
+some difficulty he met her eyes. "She says that because one starts
+wrong one needn't go wrong always. I was ashamed to write. She made
+me do it."
+</p>
+<p>
+She held out an appealing hand, but he did not take it. All his life
+he had built up a house of morality. Now his house was crumbling and
+he stood terrified in the wreck. "It isn't only because I've been
+hurt that I&mdash;am sorry," she went on. "I loathed it! I'd have
+finished it all long ago, only&mdash;I was afraid."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I would rather have found you dead!"
+</p>
+<p>
+There is a sort of anesthesia of misery. After a certain amount of
+suffering the brain ceases to feel. Jerry watched the white curtain
+of the screen swaying in the wind, settled his collar, glanced at
+his watch. He was quite white. The girl's hand still lay on the
+coverlet. Somewhere back in the numbed brain that would think only
+little thoughts he knew that if he touched that small, appealing
+hand the last wall of his house would fall.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the Dummy, after all, who settled that for him. He came with
+his afternoon offering of cracked ice just then and stood inside the
+screen, staring. Perhaps he had known all along how it would end,
+that this, his saint, would go&mdash;and not alone&mdash;to join the vanishing
+circle that had ringed the inner circle of his heart. Just at the
+time it rather got him. He swayed a little and clutched at the
+screen; but the next moment he had placed the bowl on the stand and
+stood smiling down at the girl.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The only person in the world who believes in me!" said the girl
+bitterly. "And he's a fool!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Dummy smiled into her eyes. In his faded, childish eyes there
+was the eternal sadness of his kind, eternal tenderness, and the
+blur of one who has looked much into a far distance. Suddenly he
+bent over and placed the man's hand over the girl's.
+</p>
+<p>
+The last wall was down! Jerry buried his face in the white
+coverlet.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+The <i>interne</i> was pacing the roof anxiously. Golden sunset had faded
+to lavender&mdash;to dark purple&mdash;to night.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Probationer came up at last&mdash;not a probationer now, of course;
+but she had left off her cap and was much less stately.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm sorry," she explained; "but I've been terribly busy. It went
+off so well!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Of course&mdash;if you handled it."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You know&mdash;don't you?&mdash;it was the lover who came. He looks so strong
+and good&mdash;oh, she is safe now!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"That's fine!" said the <i>interne</i> absently. They were sitting on the
+parapet now and by sliding his hand along he found her fingers.
+"Isn't it a glorious evening?" He had the fingers pretty close by
+that time; and suddenly gathering them up he lifted the hand to his
+lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Such a kind little hand!" he said over it. "Such a dear, tender
+little hand! My hand!" he said, rather huskily.
+</p>
+<p>
+Down in the courtyard the Dummy sat with the parrot on his knee. At
+his feet the superintendent's dog lay on his side and dreamed of
+battle. The Dummy's eyes lingered on the scar the Avenue Girl had
+bandaged&mdash;how long ago!
+</p>
+<p>
+His eyes wandered to the window with the young John among the
+lilies. In the stable were still the ambulance horses that talked to
+him without words. And he had the parrot. If he thought at all it
+was that his Father was good and that, after all, he was not alone.
+The parrot edged along his knee and eyed him with saturnine
+affection.
+</p>
+<a name="2H_4_0006"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+
+<h2>
+    THE MIRACLE
+</h2>
+<p class="sec">
+I
+</p>
+<p>
+Big Mary was sweeping the ward with a broom muffled in a white bag.
+In the breeze from the open windows, her blue calico wrapper
+ballooned about her and made ludicrous her frantic thrusts after the
+bits of fluff that formed eddies under the beds and danced in the
+spring air.
+</p>
+<p>
+She finished her sweeping, and, with the joyous scraps captured in
+her dust-pan, stood in the doorway, critically surveying the ward.
+It was brilliantly clean and festive; on either side a row of beds,
+fresh white for the day; on the centre table a vase of Easter
+lilies, and on the record-table near the door a potted hyacinth. The
+Nurse herself wore a bunch of violets tucked in her apron-band. One
+of the patients had seen the Junior Medical give them to her. The
+Eastern sun, shining across the beds, made below them, on the
+polished floor, black islands of shadow in a gleaming sea of light.
+</p>
+<p>
+And scattered here and there, rocking in chairs or standing at
+windows, enjoying the Sunday respite from sewing or the
+bandage-machine, women, grotesque and distorted of figure, in
+attitudes of weariness and expectancy, with patient eyes awaited
+their crucifixion. Behind them, in the beds, a dozen perhaps who had
+come up from death and held the miracle in their arms.
+</p>
+<p>
+The miracles were small and red, and inclined to feeble and
+ineffectual wrigglings. Fists were thrust in the air and brought
+down on smiling, pale mother faces. With tight-closed eyes and open
+mouths, each miracle squirmed and nuzzled until the mother would
+look with pleading eyes at the Nurse. And the Nurse would look
+severe and say:
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good gracious, Annie Petowski, surely you don't want to feed that
+infant again! Do you want the child to have a dilated stomach?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Fear of that horrible and mysterious condition, a dilated stomach,
+would restrain Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara
+for a time. With the wisdom of the serpent, she would give the child
+her finger to suck&mdash;a finger so white, so clean, so soft in the last
+week that she was lost in admiration of it. And the child would take
+hold, all its small body set rigid in lines of desperate effort.
+Then it would relax suddenly, and spew out the finger, and the quiet
+hospital air would be rent with shrieks of lost illusion. Then Annie
+Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara would watch the
+Nurse with open hostility and defiance, and her rustling exit from
+the ward would be followed by swift cessation of cries, and, close
+to Annie or Jennie or Maggie's heart, there would be small ecstatic
+gurglings&mdash;and peace.
+</p>
+<p>
+In her small domain the Nurse was queen. From her throne at the
+record-table, she issued proclamations of baths and fine combs, of
+clean bedding and trimmed nails, of tea and toast, of regular hours
+for the babies. From this throne, also, she directed periodic
+searches of the bedside stands, unearthing scraps of old toast,
+decaying fruit, candy, and an occasional cigarette. From the throne,
+too, she sent daily a blue-wrappered and pig-tailed brigade to the
+kitchen, armed with knives, to attack the dinner potatoes.
+</p>
+<p>
+But on this Easter morning, the queen looked tired and worn. Her
+crown, a starched white cap, had slipped back on her head, and her
+blue-and-white dress was stained and spotted. Even her fresh apron
+and sleevelets did not quite conceal the damage. She had come in for
+a moment at the breakfast hour, and asked the Swede, Ellen Ollman,
+to serve the breakfast for her; and at half past eight she had
+appeared again for a moment, and had turned down one of the beds and
+put hot-water bottles in it.
+</p>
+<p>
+The ward ate little breakfast. It was always nervous when a case was
+"on." Excursions down the corridor by one or another of the
+blue-wrappered brigade brought back bits of news:
+</p>
+<p>
+"The doctor is smoking a cigarette in the hall;" or, "Miss Jones,
+the day assistant, has gone in;" and then, with bated breath, "The
+doctor with the red mustache has come"&mdash;by which it was known that
+things were going badly, the staff man having been summoned.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suggestions of Easter began to appear even in this isolated ward,
+denied to all visitors except an occasional husband, who was usually
+regarded with a mixture of contempt and scepticism by the other
+women. But now the lilies came, and after them a lame young woman
+who played the organ in the chapel on Sundays, and who afterward
+went from ward to ward, singing little songs and accompanying
+herself on the mandolin she carried with her. The lame young woman
+seated herself in the throne-chair and sang an Easter anthem, and
+afterward limped around and placed a leaflet and a spray of
+lilies-of-the-valley on each bedside stand.
+</p>
+<p>
+She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as "Liz"
+in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse. Elizabeth
+always read the tracts. She had been there four times, and knew all
+the nurses and nearly all the doctors. "Liz" had been known, in a
+shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the
+hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white
+gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the
+queen herself in regalness and authority.
+</p>
+<p>
+The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed.
+"Shall I put one here?" she asked, fingering a tract.
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz meditated majestically.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, I guess I would," she said. "Not that it'll do any good."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.
+</p>
+<p>
+"She's not getting on very well," she said; "and, even if she gets
+through, she won't read the tract. She held her fingers in her ears
+last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here. She's young. Says she
+hopes she and the kid'll both die."
+</p>
+<p>
+The mandolin-player was not unversed in the psychology of the ward.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then she&mdash;isn't married?" she asked, and because she was young, she
+flushed painfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her
+eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, no," she admitted; "I guess that's what's worrying her. She's
+a fool, she is. She can put the kid in a home. That's what I do.
+Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble? Wouldn't
+he be always throwing it up to her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy
+of life.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Have&mdash;have you a baby here?" she asked timidly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Have I!" said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed. She
+turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red
+atom, so like the others that only mother love could have
+distinguished it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"This is mine," she said airily. "Funny little mutt, isn't he?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He&mdash;he's very little," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Little!" said Liz. "He holds the record here for the last six
+months&mdash;eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived. The
+little devil!"
+</p>
+<p>
+She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil's sleeping
+form. The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing
+to say.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Does&mdash;does he look like his father?" she asked timidly. But
+apparently Liz did not hear. She had moved down the ward. The
+mandolin-player heard only a snicker from Annie Petowski's bed, and,
+vaguely uncomfortable, she moved toward the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz was turning down the cover of the empty bed, and the Nurse, with
+tired but shining eyes, was wheeling in the operating table.
+</p>
+<p>
+The mandolin-player stepped aside to let the table pass. From the
+blankets she had a glimpse of a young face, bloodless and wan&mdash;of
+hurt, defiant blue eyes. She had never before seen life so naked, so
+relentless. She shrank back against the wall, a little sick. Then
+she gathered up her tracts and her mandolin, and limped down the
+hall.
+</p>
+<p>
+The door of the mysterious room was open, and from it came a shrill,
+high wail, a rising and falling note of distress&mdash;the voice of a new
+soul in protest. She went past with averted face.
+</p>
+<p>
+Back in the ward Liz leaned over the table and, picking the girl up
+bodily, deposited her tenderly in the warm bed. Then she stood back
+and smiled down at her, with her hands on her hips.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well," she said kindly, "it's over, and here you are! But it's no
+picnic, is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl on the bed turned her head away. The coarsening of her
+features in the last month or two had changed to an almost bloodless
+refinement. With her bright hair, she looked as if she had been
+through the furnace of pain and had come out pure gold. But her eyes
+were hard.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Go away," she said petulantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz leaned down and pulled the blanket over her shoulders.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You sleep now," she said soothingly. "When you wake up you can have
+a cup of tea."
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl threw the cover off and looked up despairingly into Liz's
+face.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't want to sleep," she said. "My God, Liz, it's going to live
+and so am I!"
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+II
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, the Nurse had been up all night, and at noon, after she had
+oiled the new baby and washed out his eyes and given him a
+teaspoonful of warm water, she placed Liz in charge of the ward, and
+went to her room to put on a fresh uniform. The first thing she did,
+when she got there, was to go to the mirror, with the picture of her
+mother tucked in its frame, and survey herself. When she saw her cap
+and the untidiness of her hair and her white collar all spotted, she
+frowned.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she took the violets out of her belt and put them carefully in
+a glass of water, and feeling rather silly, she leaned over and
+kissed them. After that she felt better.
+</p>
+<p>
+She bathed her face in hot water and then in cold, which brought her
+colour back, and she put on everything fresh, so that she rustled
+with each step, which is proper for trained nurses; and finally she
+tucked the violets back where they belonged, and put on a new cap,
+which is also proper for trained nurses on gala occasions.
+</p>
+<p>
+If she had not gone back to the mirror to see that the general
+effect was as crisp as it should be, things would have been
+different for Liz, and for the new mother back in the ward. But she
+did go back; and there, lying on the floor in front of the bureau,
+all folded together, was a piece of white paper exactly as if it has
+been tucked in her belt with the violets.
+</p>
+<p>
+She opened it rather shakily, and it was a leaf from the ward
+order-book, for at the top it said:
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+      Annie Petowski&mdash;may sit up for one hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+And below that:
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+          Goldstein baby&mdash;bran baths.
+</p>
+<p>
+And below that:
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+          I love you. E. J.
+</p>
+<p>
+"E. J." was the Junior Medical.
+</p>
+<p>
+So the Nurse went back to the ward, and sat down, palpitating, in
+the throne-chair by the table, and spread her crisp skirts, and
+found where the page had been torn out of the order-book.
+</p>
+<p>
+And as the smiles of sovereigns are hailed with delight by their
+courts, so the ward brightened until it seemed to gleam that Easter
+afternoon. And a sort of miracle happened: none of the babies had
+colic, and the mothers mostly slept. Also, one of the ladies of the
+House Committee looked in at the door and said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"How beautiful you are here, and how peaceful! Your ward is always a
+sort of benediction."
+</p>
+<p>
+The lady of the House Committee looked across and saw the new
+mother, with the sunshine on her yellow braids, and her face refined
+from the furnace of pain.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What a sweet young mother!" she said, and rustled out, leaving an
+odor of peau d'Espagne.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl lay much as Liz had left her. Except her eyes, there was
+nothing in her face to show that despair had given place to wild
+mutiny. But Liz knew; Liz had gone through it all when "the first
+one" came; and so, from the end of the ward, she rocked and watched.
+</p>
+<p>
+The odor of peau d'Espagne was still in the air, eclipsing the
+Easter lilies, when Liz got up and sauntered down to the girl's bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How are you now, dearie?" she asked, and, reaching under the
+blankets, brought out the tiny pearl-handled knife with which the
+girl had been wont to clean her finger-nails. The girl eyed her
+savagely, but said nothing; nor did she resist when Liz brought out
+her hands and examined the wrists. The left had a small cut on it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Now listen to me," said Liz. "None of that, do you hear? You ain't
+the only one that's laid here and wanted to end it all. And what
+happened? Inside of a month they're well and strong again, and they
+put the kid somewhere, and the folks that know what's happened get
+used to it, and the ones that don't know don't need to know. Don't
+be a fool!"
+</p>
+<p>
+She carried the knife off, but the girl made no protest. There were
+other ways.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse was very tired, for she had been up almost all night. She
+sat at the record-table with her Bible open, and, in the intervals
+of taking temperatures, she read it. But mostly she read about Annie
+Petowski being allowed to sit up, and the Goldstein baby having bran
+baths, and the other thing written below!
+</p>
+<p>
+At two o'clock came the Junior Medical, in a frock-coat and grey
+trousers. He expected to sing "The Palms" at the Easter service
+downstairs in the chapel that afternoon, and, according to
+precedent, the one who sings "The Palms" on Easter in the chapel
+must always wear a frock-coat.
+</p>
+<p>
+Very conscious, because all the ward was staring at his
+gorgeousness, he went over to the bed where the new mother lay. Then
+he came back and stood by the table, looking at a record.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Have you taken her temperature?" he said, businesslike and erect.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Ninety-eight."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Her pulse is strong?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes; she's resting quietly."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good.&mdash;And&mdash;did you get my note?"
+</p>
+<p>
+This, much as if he had said, "Did you find my scarf-pin?" or
+anything merely casual; for Liz was hovering near.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes." The nurse's red lips were trembling, but she smiled up at
+him. Liz came nearer. She was only wishing him Godspeed with his
+wooing, but it made him uncomfortable.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Watch her closely," he said, "she's pretty weak and despondent."
+And he looked at Liz.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Elizabeth," said the Nurse, "won't you sit by Claribel and fan
+her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Claribel was the new mother. Claribel is, of course, no name for a
+mother, but she had been named when she was very small.
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz went away and sat by the girl's bed, and said a little prayer to
+the effect that they were both so damned good to everybody, she
+hoped they'd hit it off. But perhaps the prayer of the wicked
+availeth nothing.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You know I meant that," he said, from behind a record. "I&mdash;I love
+you with all my heart&mdash;and if only you&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+The nurse shook down a thermometer and examined it closely. "I love
+you, too!" she said. And, walking shakily to one of the beds, she
+put the thermometer upside down in Maggie McNamara's mouth.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Junior Medical went away with his shoulders erect in his
+frock-coat, and his heavy brown hair, which would never part
+properly and had to be persuaded with brilliantine, bristling with
+happiness.
+</p>
+<p>
+And the Nurse-Queen, looking over her kingdom for somebody to lavish
+her new joy on, saw Claribel lying in bed, looking at the ceiling
+and reading there all the tragedy of her broken life, all her
+despair.
+</p>
+<p>
+So she rustled out to the baby-room, where the new baby had never
+batted an eye since her bath and was lying on her back with both
+fists clenched on her breast, and she did something that no trained
+nurse is ever supposed to do.
+</p>
+<p>
+She lifted the baby, asleep and all, and carried her to her mother.
+</p>
+<p>
+But Claribel's face only darkened when she saw her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Take the brat away," she said, and went on reading tragedies on the
+ceiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz came and proffered her the little mite with every art she knew.
+She showed her the wrinkled bits of feet, the tiny, ridiculous
+hands, and how long the hair grew on the back of her head. But when
+Liz put the baby on her arm, she shuddered and turned her head away.
+So finally Liz took it back to the other room, and left it there,
+still sleeping.
+</p>
+<p>
+The fine edge of the Nurse's joy was dulled. It is a characteristic
+of great happiness to wish all to be well with the world; and here
+before her was dry-eyed despair. It was Liz who finally decided her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I guess I'll sit up with her to-night," she said, approaching the
+table with the peculiar gait engendered of heel-less hospital
+carpet-slippers and Mother Hubbard wrappers. "I don't like the way
+she watches the ceiling."
+</p>
+<p>
+"What do you mean, Elizabeth?" asked the Nurse.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Time I had the twins&mdash;that's before your time," said Liz&mdash;"we had
+one like that. She went out the window head first the night after
+the baby came, and took the kid with her."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse rose with quick decision.
+</p>
+<p>
+"We must watch her," she said. "Perhaps if I could find&mdash;I think
+I'll go to the telephone. Watch the ward carefully, Elizabeth, and
+if Annie Petowski tries to feed her baby before three o'clock, take
+it from her. The child's stuffed like a sausage every time I'm out
+for five minutes."
+</p>
+<p>
+Nurses know many strange things: they know how to rub an aching back
+until the ache is changed to a restful thrill, and how to change the
+bedding and the patient's night-dress without rolling the patient
+over more than once, which is a high and desirable form of
+knowledge. But also they get to know many strange people; their
+clean starchiness has a way of rubbing up against the filth of the
+world and coming away unsoiled. And so the Nurse went downstairs to
+the telephone, leaving Liz to watch for nefarious feeding.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse called up Rose Davis; and Rosie, who was lying in bed with
+the Sunday papers scattered around her and a cigarette in her
+manicured fingers, reached out with a yawn and, taking the
+telephone, rested it on her laced and ribboned bosom.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes," she said indolently.
+</p>
+<p>
+The nurse told her who she was, and Rosie's voice took on a warmer
+tinge.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, yes," she said. "How are you?... Claribel? Yes; what about
+her?... What!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes," said the Nurse. "A girl&mdash;seven pounds."
+</p>
+<p>
+"My Gawd! Well, what do you think of that! Excuse me a moment; my
+cigarette's set fire to the sheet. All right&mdash;go ahead."
+</p>
+<p>
+"She's taking it pretty hard, and I&mdash;I thought you might help her.
+She&mdash;she&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"How much do you want?" said Rose, a trifle coldly. She turned in
+the bed and eyed the black leather bag on the stand at her elbow.
+"Twenty enough?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't think it's money," said the Nurse, "although she needs that
+too; she hasn't any clothes for the baby. But&mdash;she's awfully
+despondent&mdash;almost desperate. Have you any idea who the child's
+father is?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Rosie considered, lighting a new cigarette with one hand and
+balancing the telephone with the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+"She left me a year ago," she said. "Oh, yes; I know now. What time
+is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Two o'clock."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Rosie. "I'll get the fellow on
+the wire and see what he's willing to do. Maybe he'll give her a
+dollar or two a week."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Do you think you could bring him to see her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Say, what do you think I am&mdash;a missionary?" The Nurse was wise, so
+she kept silent. "Well, I'll tell you what I will do. If I can bring
+him, I will. How's that yellow-haired she-devil you've got over
+there? I've got that fixed all right. She pulled a razor on me
+first&mdash;I've got witnesses. Well, if I can get Al, I'll do it. So
+long."
+</p>
+<p>
+It did not occur to the Nurse to deprecate having used an evil
+medium toward a righteous end. She took life much as she found it.
+And so she tiptoed past the chapel again, where a faint odour of
+peau d'Espagne came stealing out into the hall, and where the
+children from the children's ward, in roller-chairs and on crutches,
+were singing with all their shrill young voices, earnest eyes
+uplifted.
+</p>
+<p>
+The white Easter lilies on the altar sent their fragrance out over
+the gathering, over the nurses, young and placid, over the hopeless
+and the hopeful, over the faces where death had passed and left its
+inevitable stamp, over bodies freshly risen on this Easter Sunday
+to new hope and new life&mdash;over the Junior Medical, waiting with the
+manuscript of "The Palms" rolled in his hand and his heart singing a
+hymn of happiness.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Nurse went up to her ward, and put a screen around Claribel,
+and, with all her woman's art, tidied the immaculate white bed and
+loosened the uncompromising yellow braids, so that the soft hair
+fell across Claribel's bloodless forehead and softened the defiance
+in her blue eyes. She brought the pink hyacinth in its pot, too, and
+placed it on the bedside table. Then she stood off and looked at her
+work. It was good.
+</p>
+<p>
+Claribel submitted weakly. She had stopped staring at the wall, and
+had taken to watching the open window opposite with strange
+intentness. Only when the Nurse gave a final pat to the bedspread
+she spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Was it a boy&mdash;or a girl?" she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Girl," said the nurse briskly. "A little beauty, perfect in every
+way."
+</p>
+<p>
+"A girl&mdash;to grow up and go through this hell!" she muttered, and her
+eyes wandered back to the window.
+</p>
+<p>
+But the Nurse was wise with the accumulated wisdom of a sex that has
+had to match strength with wile for ages, and she was not yet ready.
+She went into the little room where eleven miracles lay in eleven
+cribs, and, although they all looked exactly alike, she selected
+Claribel's without hesitation, and carried it to the mysterious room
+down the hall&mdash;which was no longer a torture-chamber, but a
+resplendently white place, all glass and tile and sunlight, and
+where she did certain things that are not prescribed in the hospital
+rules.
+</p>
+<p>
+First of all, she opened a cupboard and took out a baby dress of
+lace and insertion,&mdash;and everybody knows that such a dress is used
+only when a hospital infant is baptised,&mdash;and she clothed Claribel's
+baby in linen and fine raiment, and because they are very, very red
+when they are so new, she dusted it with a bit of talcum&mdash;to break
+the shock, as you may say. It was very probable that Al had never
+seen so new a baby, and it was useless to spoil the joy of
+parenthood unnecessarily. For it really was a fine child, and
+eventually it would be white and beautiful.
+</p>
+<p>
+The baby smelled of violet, for the christening-robe was kept in a
+sachet.
+</p>
+<p>
+Finally she gave it another teaspoonful of warm water and put it
+back in its crib. And then she rustled starchily back to the
+throne-chair by the record-table, and opened her Bible at the place
+where it said that Annie Petowski might sit up, and the Goldstein
+baby&mdash;bran baths, and the other thing written just below.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+III
+</p>
+<p>
+The music poured up the well of the staircase; softened by distance,
+the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty basses of the medical
+staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty.
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz sat on the top step of the stairs, with her baby in her arms;
+and, as the song went on, Liz's eyes fell to her child and stayed
+there.
+</p>
+<p>
+At three o'clock the elevator-man brought Rosie Davis along the
+hall&mdash;Rosie, whose costume betrayed haste, and whose figure, under a
+gaudy motor-coat, gave more than a suggestion of being unsupported
+and wrapper-clad. She carried a clinking silver chatelaine, however,
+and at the door she opened it and took out a quarter, extending it
+with a regal gesture to the elevator-man.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Here, old sport," she said, "go and blow yourself to a drink. It's
+Easter."
+</p>
+<p>
+Such munificence appalled the ward.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rosie was not alone. Behind her, uncomfortable and sullen, was Al.
+The ward, turning from the episode of the quarter, fixed on him
+curious and hostile eyes; and Al, glancing around the ward from the
+doorway, felt their hostility, and plucked Rosie's arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Gee, Rose, I'm not going in there," he said. But Rosie pulled him
+in and presented him to the Nurse.
+</p>
+<p>
+Behind the screen, Claribel, shut off from her view of the open
+window, had taken to staring at the ceiling again.
+</p>
+<p>
+When the singing came up the staircase from the chapel, she had
+moaned and put her fingers in her ears.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, I found him," said Rosie cheerfully. "Had the deuce of a time
+locating him." And the Nurse, apprising in one glance his stocky
+figure and heavy shoulders, his ill-at-ease arrogance, his weak, and
+just now sullen but not bad-tempered face, smiled at him.
+</p>
+<p>
+"We have a little girl here who will be glad to see you," she said,
+and took him to the screen. "Just five minutes, and you must do the
+talking."
+</p>
+<p>
+Al hesitated between the visible antagonism of the ward and the
+mystery of the white screen. A vision of Claribel as he had seen her
+last, swollen with grief and despair, distorted of figure and
+accusing of voice, held him back. A faint titter of derision went
+through the room. He turned on Rosie's comfortable back a look of
+black hate and fury. Then the Nurse gave him a gentle shove, and he
+was looking at Claribel&mdash;a white, Madonna-faced Claribel, lying now
+with closed eyes, her long lashes sweeping her cheek.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl did not open her eyes at his entrance. He put his hat
+awkwardly on the foot of the bed, and, tiptoeing around, sat on the
+edge of the stiff chair.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well, how are you, kid?" he asked, with affected ease.
+</p>
+<p>
+She opened her eyes and stared at him. Then she made a little clutch
+at her throat, as if she were smothering.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How did you&mdash;how did you know I was here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Saw it in the paper, in the society column." She winced at that,
+and some fleeting sense of what was fitting came to his aid. "How
+are you?" he asked more gently. He had expected a flood of
+reproaches, and he was magnanimous in his relief.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I've been pretty bad; I'm better."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, you'll be around soon, and going to dances again. The Maginnis
+Social Club's having a dance Saturday night in Mason's Hall."
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl did not reply. She was wrestling with a problem that is as
+old as the ages, although she did not know it&mdash;why this tragedy of
+hers should not be his. She lay with her hands crossed quietly on
+her breast and one of the loosened yellow braids was near his hand.
+He picked it up and ran it through his fingers.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Hasn't hurt your looks any," he said awkwardly. "You're looking
+pretty good."
+</p>
+<p>
+With a jerk of her head she pulled the braid out of his fingers.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't," she said and fell to staring at the ceiling, where she had
+written her problem.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How's the&mdash;how's the kid?"&mdash;after a moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't know&mdash;or care."
+</p>
+<p>
+There was nothing strange to Al in this frame of mind. Neither did
+he know or care.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What are you goin' to do with it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Kill it!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Al considered this a moment. Things were bad enough now, without
+Claribel murdering the child and making things worse.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wouldn't do that," he said soothingly. "You can put it somewhere,
+can't you? Maybe Rosie'll know."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't want it to live."
+</p>
+<p>
+For the first time he realised her despair. She turned on him her
+tormented eyes, and he quailed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll find a place for it, kid," he said. "It's mine, too. I guess
+I'm it, all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yours!" She half rose on her elbow, weak as she was. "Yours! Didn't
+you throw me over when you found I was going to have it? Yours! Did
+you go through hell for twenty-four hours to bring it into the
+world? I tell you, it's mine&mdash;mine! And I'll do what I want with it.
+I'll kill it, and myself too!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"You don't know what you're saying!"
+</p>
+<p>
+She had dropped back, white and exhausted.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't I?" she said, and fell silent.
+</p>
+<p>
+Al felt defrauded, ill-treated. He had done the right thing; he had
+come to see the girl, which wasn't customary in those circles where
+Al lived and worked and had his being; he had acknowledged his
+responsibility, and even&mdash;why, hang it all&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+"Say the word and I'll marry you," he said magnanimously.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't want to marry you."
+</p>
+<p>
+He drew a breath of relief. Nothing could have been fairer than his
+offer, and she had refused it. He wished Rosie had been there to
+hear.
+</p>
+<p>
+And just then Rosie came. She carried the baby, still faintly
+odorous of violets, held tight in unaccustomed arms. She looked
+awkward and conscious, but her amused smile at herself was half
+tender.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Hello, Claribel," she said. "How are you? Just look here, Al! What
+do you think of this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Al got up sheepishly and looked at the child.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Boy or girl?" he asked politely.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Girl; but it's the living image of you," said Rose&mdash;for Rose and
+the Nurse were alike in the wiles of the serpent.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Looks like me!" Al observed caustically. "Looks like an over-ripe
+tomato!"
+</p>
+<p>
+But he drew himself up a trifle. Somewhere in his young and
+hardened soul the germs of parental pride, astutely sowed, had taken
+quick root.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Feel how heavy she is," Rose commanded. And Al held out two arms
+unaccustomed to such tender offices.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Heavy! She's about as big as a peanut."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Mind her back," said Rose, remembering instructions.
+</p>
+<p>
+After her first glance Claribel had not looked at the child. But
+now, in its father's arms, it began to whimper. The mother stirred
+uneasily, and frowned.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Take it away!" she ordered. "I told them not to bring it here."
+</p>
+<p>
+The child cried louder. Its tiny red face, under the powder, turned
+purple. It beat the air with its fists. Al, still holding it in his
+outstretched arms, began vague motions to comfort it, swinging it up
+and down and across. But it cried on, drawing up its tiny knees in
+spasms of distress. Claribel put her fingers in her ears.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You'll have to feed it!" Rose shouted over the din.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl comprehended without hearing, and shook her head in sullen
+obstinacy.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What do you think of that for noise?" said Al, not without pride.
+"She's like me, all right. When I'm hungry, there's hell to pay if
+I'm not fed quick. Here,"&mdash;he bent down over Claribel,&mdash;"you might
+as well have dinner now, and stop the row."
+</p>
+<p>
+Not ungently, he placed the squirming mass in the baptismal dress
+beside the girl on the bed. With the instinct of ages, the baby
+stopped wailing and opened her mouth.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The little cuss!" cried Al, delighted. "Ain't that me all over?
+Little angel-face the minute I get to the table!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Unresisting now, Claribel let Rose uncover her firm white breast.
+The mother's arm, passively extended by Rose to receive the small
+body, contracted around it unconsciously.
+</p>
+<p>
+She turned and looked long at the nuzzling, eager mouth, at the red
+hand lying trustfully open on her breast, at the wrinkled face, the
+indeterminate nose, the throbbing fontanelle where the little life
+was already beating so hard.
+</p>
+<p>
+"A girl, Rose!" she said. "My God, what am I going to do with her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Rose was not listening. The Junior Medical's turn had come at last.
+Downstairs in the chapel, he was standing by the organ, his head
+thrown back, his heavy brown hair (which would never stay parted
+without the persuasion of brilliantine) bristling with earnestness.
+</p>
+<p class="verse">
+       "<i>O'er all the way, green palms and blossoms gay,</i>"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+he sang, and his clear tenor came welling up the staircase to Liz,
+and past her to the ward, and to the group behind the screen.
+</p>
+<p class="verse">
+       "<i>Are strewn this day in festal preparation,</i> <br />
+        <i>Where Jesus comes to wipe our tears away&mdash;</i> <br />
+        <i>E'en now the throng to welcome Him prepare.</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+On the throne-chair by the record-table, the Nurse sat and listened.
+And because it was Easter and she was very happy and because of the
+thrill in the tenor voice that came up the stairs to her, and
+because of the page in the order-book about bran baths and the rest
+of it, she cried a little, surreptitiously, and let the tears drop
+down on a yellow hospital record.
+</p>
+<p>
+The song was almost done. Liz, on the stairs, had fed her baby
+twenty minutes too soon, and now it lay, sleeping and sated, in her
+lap. Liz sat there, brooding over it, and the last line of the song
+came up the staircase.
+</p>
+<p class="verse">
+      "<i>Blessed is He who comes bringing sal-va-a-a-ation!</i>"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+the Junior Medical sang.
+</p>
+<p>
+The services were over. Downstairs the small crowd dispersed slowly.
+The minister shook hands with the nurses at the door, and the Junior
+Medical rolled up his song and wondered how soon he could make
+rounds upstairs again.
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz got up, with her baby in her arms, and padded in to the
+throne-chair by the record-table.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He can sing some, can't he!" she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He has a beautiful voice." The Nurse's eyes were shining.
+</p>
+<p>
+Liz moved off. Then she turned and came back.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I&mdash;I know you'll tell me I'm a fool," she said; "but I've decided
+to keep the kid, this time. I guess I'll make out, somehow."
+</p>
+<p>
+Behind the screen, Rosie had lighted a cigarette and was smoking,
+sublimely unconscious of the blue smoke swirl that rose in telltale
+clouds high above her head. The baby had dropped asleep, and
+Claribel lay still. But her eyes were not on the ceiling; they were
+on the child.
+</p>
+<p>
+Al leaned forward and put his lips to the arm that circled the baby.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm sorry, kid," he said. "I guess it was the limit, all right. Do
+you hate me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+She looked at him, and the hardness and defiance died out of her
+eyes. She shook her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+"No."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Do you&mdash;still&mdash;like me a little?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes," in a whisper.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then what's the matter with you and me and the little mutt getting
+married and starting all over&mdash;eh?"
+</p>
+<p>
+He leaned over and buried his face with a caressing movement in the
+hollow of her neck.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rose extinguished her cigarette on the foot of the bed, and, careful
+of appearances, put the butt in her chatelaine.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I guess you two don't need me any more," she said yawning. "I'm
+going back home to bed."
+</p>
+<a name="2H_4_0007"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+
+<h2>
+    "ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!"
+</h2>
+<p class="sec">
+I
+</p>
+<p>
+There are certain people who will never understand this story,
+people who live their lives by rule of thumb. Little lives they are,
+too, measured by the letter and not the spirit. Quite simple too.
+Right is right and wrong is wrong.
+</p>
+<p>
+That shadowy No Man's Land between the trenches of virtue and sin,
+where most of us fight our battles and are wounded, and even die,
+does not exist for them.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boy in this story belonged to that class. Even if he reads it he
+may not recognise it. But he will not read it or have it read to
+him. He will even be somewhat fretful if it comes his way.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If that's one of those problem things," he will say, "I don't want
+to hear it. I don't see why nobody writes adventure any more."
+</p>
+<p>
+Right is right and wrong is wrong. Seven words for a creed, and all
+of life to live!
+</p>
+<p>
+This is not a war story. But it deals, as must anything that
+represents life in this year of our Lord of Peace, with war. With
+war in its human relations. Not with guns and trenches, but with
+men and women, with a boy and a girl.
+</p>
+<p>
+For only in the mass is war vast. To the man in the trench it
+reduces itself to the man on his right, the man on his left, the man
+across, beyond the barbed wire, and a woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boy was a Canadian. He was twenty-two and not very tall. His
+name in this story is Cecil Hamilton. He had won two medals for
+life-saving, each in a leather case. He had saved people from
+drowning. When he went abroad to fight he took the medals along. Not
+to show. But he felt that the time might come when he would not be
+sure of himself. A good many men on the way to war have felt that
+way. The body has a way of turning craven, in spite of high
+resolves. It would be rather comforting, he felt, to have those
+medals somewhere about him at that time. He never looked at them
+without a proud little intake of breath and a certain swelling of
+the heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+On the steamer he found that a medal for running had slipped into
+one of the cases. He rather chuckled over that. He had a sense of
+humour, in spite of his seven-word creed. And a bit of superstition,
+for that night, at dusk, he went out on to the darkened deck and
+flung it overboard.
+</p>
+<p>
+The steamer had picked him up at Halifax&mdash;a cold dawn, with a few
+pinched faces looking over the rail. Forgive him if he swaggered up
+the gangway. He was twenty-two, he was a lieutenant, and he was a
+fighting man.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl in the story saw him then. She was up and about, in a short
+sport suit, with a white tam-o'-shanter on her head and a white
+woolen scarf tucked round her neck. Under her belted coat she wore a
+middy blouse, and when she saw Lieutenant Cecil Hamilton, with
+his eager eyes&mdash;not unlike her own, his eyes were young and
+inquiring&mdash;she reached into a pocket of the blouse and dabbed her
+lips with a small stick of cold cream.
+</p>
+<p>
+Cold air has a way of drying lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+He caught her at it, and she smiled. It was all over for him then,
+poor lad!
+</p>
+<p>
+Afterward, when he was in the trenches, he wondered about that. He
+called it "Kismet" to himself. It was really a compound, that first
+day or two, of homesickness and a little furtive stirring of anxiety
+and the thrill of new adventure that was in his blood.
+</p>
+<p>
+On the second afternoon out they had tea together, she in her
+steamer chair and he calmly settled next to her, in a chair
+belonging to an irritated English lawyer. Afterward he went down to
+his cabin, hung round with his new equipment, and put away the
+photograph of a very nice Toronto girl, which had been propped up
+back of his hairbrushes.
+</p>
+<p>
+They got rather well acquainted that first day.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You know," he said, with his cup in one hand and a rather stale
+cake in the other, "it's awfully bully of you to be so nice to me."
+</p>
+<p>
+She let that go. She was looking, as a matter of fact, after a tall
+man with heavily fringed eyes and English clothes, who had just gone
+by.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You know," he confided&mdash;he frequently prefaced his speeches with
+that&mdash;"I was horribly lonely when I came up the gangway. Then I saw
+you, and you were smiling. It did me a lot of good."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I suppose I really should not have smiled." She came back to him
+with rather an effort. "But you caught me, you know. It wasn't
+rouge. It was cold cream. I'll show you."
+</p>
+<p>
+She unbuttoned her jacket, against his protest, and held out the
+little stick. He took it and looked at it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You don't need even this," he said rather severely. He disapproved
+of cosmetics. "You have a lovely mouth."
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's rather large. Don't you think so?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's exactly right."
+</p>
+<p>
+He was young, and as yet more interested in himself than in anything
+in the world. So he sat there and told her who he was, and what he
+hoped to do and, rather to his own astonishment, about the medals.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How very brave you are!" she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+That made him anxious. He hoped she did not think he was swanking.
+It was only that he did not make friends easily, and when he did
+meet somebody he liked he was apt to forget and talk too much about
+himself. He was so afraid that he gulped down his tepid tea in a
+hurry and muttered something about letters to write, and got himself
+away. The girl stared after him with a pucker between her eyebrows.
+And the tall man came and took the place he vacated.
+</p>
+<p>
+Things were worrying the girl&mdash;whose name, by the way, was Edith. On
+programs it was spelled "Edythe," but that was not her fault. Yes,
+on programs&mdash;Edythe O'Hara. The business manager had suggested
+deHara, but she had refused. Not that it mattered much. She had been
+in the chorus. She had a little bit of a voice, rather sweet, and
+she was divinely young and graceful.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the chorus she would have remained, too, but for one of those
+queer shifts that alter lives. A girl who did a song and an
+eccentric dance had wrenched her knee, and Edith had gone on in her
+place. Something of her tomboy youth remained in her, and for a few
+minutes, as she frolicked over the stage, she was a youngster,
+dancing to her shadow.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had not brought down the house, but a man with heavily fringed
+eyes, who watched her from the wings, made a note of her name. He
+was in America for music-hall material for England, and he was
+shrewd after the manner of his kind. Here was a girl who frolicked
+on the stage. The English, accustomed to either sensuous or sedate
+dancing, would fall hard for her, he decided. Either that, or she
+would go "bla." She was a hit or nothing.
+</p>
+<p>
+And that, in so many words, he told her that afternoon.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Feeling all right?" he asked her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Better than this morning. The wind's gone down, hasn't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+He did not answer her. He sat on the side of the chair and looked
+her over.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You want to keep well," he warned her. "The whole key to your doing
+anything is vitality. That's the word&mdash;Life."
+</p>
+<p>
+She smiled. It seemed so easy. Life? She was full-fed with the joy
+of it. Even as she sat, her active feet in their high-heeled shoes
+were aching to be astir.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Working in the gymnasium?" he demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Two hours a day, morning and evening. Feel."
+</p>
+<p>
+She held out her arm to him, and he felt its small, rounded muscle,
+with a smile. But his heavily fringed eyes were on her face, and he
+kept his hold until she shook it off.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Who's the soldier boy?" he asked suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Lieutenant Hamilton. He's rather nice. Don't you think so?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"He'll do to play with on the trip. You'll soon lose him in London."
+</p>
+<p>
+The winter darkness closed down round them. Stewards were busy
+closing ports and windows with fitted cardboards. Through the night
+the ship would travel over the dangerous lanes of the sea with only
+her small port and starboard lights. A sense of exhilaration
+possessed Edith. This hurling forward over black water, this sense
+of danger, visualised by precautions, this going to something new
+and strange, set every nerve to jumping. She threw back her rug, and
+getting up went to the rail. Lethway, the manager, followed her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Nervous, aren't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not frightened, anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was then that he told her how he had sized the situation up. She
+was a hit or nothing.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If you go all right," he said, "you can have the town. London's for
+you or against you, especially if you're an American. If you go
+flat&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+She had not thought of that. What would she do then? Her salary was
+not to begin until the performances started. Her fare and expenses
+across were paid, but how about getting back? Even at the best her
+salary was small. That had been one of her attractions to Lethway.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll have to go home, of course," she said. "If they don't like me,
+and decide in a hurry, I&mdash;I may have to borrow money from you to get
+back."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't worry about that." He put a hand over hers as it lay on the
+rail, and when she made no effort to release it he bent down and
+kissed her warm fingers. "Don't you worry about that," he repeated.
+</p>
+<p>
+She did worry, however. Down in her cabin, not so tidy as the
+boy's&mdash;littered with her curiously anomalous belongings, a great
+bunch of violets in the wash bowl, a cheap toilet set, elaborate
+high-heeled shoes, and a plain muslin nightgown hanging to the
+door&mdash;down there she opened her trunk and got out her contract.
+There was nothing in it about getting back home.
+</p>
+<p>
+For a few minutes she was panicky. Her hands shook as she put the
+document away. She knew life with all the lack of illusion of two
+years in the chorus. Even Lethway&mdash;not that she minded his casual
+caress on the deck. She had seen a lot of that. It meant nothing.
+Stage directors either bawled you out or petted you. That was part
+of the business.
+</p>
+<p>
+But to-night, all day indeed, there had been something in Lethway's
+face that worried her. And there were other things.
+</p>
+<p>
+The women on the boat replied coldly to her friendly advances. She
+had spoken to a nice girl, her own age or thereabouts, and the
+girl's mother or aunt or chaperon, whoever it was, had taken her
+away. It had puzzled her at the time. Now she knew. The crowd that
+had seen her off, from the Pretty Coquette Company&mdash;that had queered
+her, she decided. That and Lethway.
+</p>
+<p>
+None of the girls had thought it odd that she should cross the ocean
+with Lethway. They had been envious, as a matter of fact. They had
+brought her gifts, the queer little sachets and fruit and boxes of
+candy that littered the room. In that half hour before sailing they
+had chattered about her, chorus unmistakably, from their smart,
+cheap little hats to their short skirts and fancy shoes. Her
+roommate, Mabel, had been the only one she had hated to leave. And
+Mabel had queered her, too, with her short-bobbed yellow hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+She did a reckless thing that night, out of pure defiance. It was a
+winter voyage in wartime. The night before the women had gone down,
+sedately dressed, to dinner. The girl she had tried to speak to had
+worn a sweater. So Edith dressed for dinner.
+</p>
+<p>
+She whitened her neck and arms with liquid powder, and slicked up
+her brown hair daringly smooth and flat. Then she put on her one
+evening dress, a black net, and pinned on her violets. She rouged
+her lips a bit too.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boy, meeting her on the companionway, gasped.
+</p>
+<p>
+That night he asked permission to move over to her table, and after
+that the three of them ate together, Lethway watching and saying
+little, the other two chattering. They were very gay. They gambled
+to the extent of a quarter each, on the number of fronds, or
+whatever they are, in the top of a pineapple that Cecil ordered in,
+and she won. It was delightful to gamble, she declared, and put the
+fifty cents into a smoking-room pool.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boy was clearly infatuated. She looked like a debutante, and,
+knowing it, acted the part. It was not acting really. Life had only
+touched her so far, and had left no mark. When Lethway lounged away
+to an evening's bridge Cecil fetched his military cape and they went
+on deck.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm afraid it's rather lonely for you," he said. "It's always like
+this the first day or two. Then the women warm up and get friendly."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't want to know them. They are a stupid-looking lot. Did you
+ever see such clothes?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"You are the only person who looks like a lady to-night," he
+observed. "You look lovely. I hope you don't mind my saying it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+She was a downright young person, after all. And there was something
+about the boy that compelled candour. So, although she gathered
+after a time that he did not approve of chorus girls, was even
+rather skeptical about them and believed that the stage should be an
+uplifting influence, she told him about herself that night.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a blow. He rallied gallantly, but she could see him
+straggling to gain this new point of view.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Anyhow," he said at last, "you're not like the others." Then
+hastily: "I don't mean to offend you when I say that, you know. Only
+one can tell, to look at you, that you are different." He thought
+that sounded rather boyish, and remembered that he was going to the
+war, and was, or would soon be, a fighting man. "I've known a lot of
+girls," he added rather loftily. "All sorts of girls."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the next night that Lethway kissed her. He had left her alone
+most of the day, and by sheer gravitation of loneliness she and the
+boy drifted together. All day long they ranged the ship, watched a
+boxing match in the steerage, fed bread to the hovering gulls from
+the stern. They told each other many things. There had been a man in
+the company who had wanted to marry her, but she intended to have a
+career. Anyhow, she would not marry unless she loved a person very
+much.
+</p>
+<p>
+He eyed her wistfully when she said that.
+</p>
+<p>
+At dusk he told her about the girl in Toronto.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It wasn't an engagement, you understand. But we've been awfully
+good friends. She came to see me off. It was rather awful. She
+cried. She had some sort of silly idea that I'll get hurt."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was her turn to look wistful. Oh, they were getting on! When he
+went to ask the steward to bring tea to the corner they had found,
+she looked after him. She had been so busy with her own worries that
+she had not thought much of the significance of his neatly belted
+khaki. Suddenly it hurt her. He was going to war.
+</p>
+<p>
+She knew little about the war, except from the pictures in
+illustrated magazines. Once or twice she had tried to talk about it
+with Mabel, but Mabel had only said, "It's fierce!" and changed the
+subject.
+</p>
+<p>
+The uniforms scattered over the ship and the precautions taken at
+night, however, were bringing this thing called war very close to
+her. It was just beyond that horizon toward which they were heading.
+And even then it was brought nearer to her.
+</p>
+<p>
+Under cover of the dusk the girl she had tried to approach came up
+and stood beside her. Edith was very distant with her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The nights make me nervous," the girl said. "In the daylight it is
+not so bad. But these darkened windows bring it all home to me&mdash;the
+war, you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I guess it's pretty bad."
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's bad enough. My brother has been wounded. I am going to him."
+</p>
+<p>
+Even above the sound of the water Edith caught the thrill in her
+voice. It was a new tone to her, the exaltation of sacrifice.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm sorry," she said. And some subconscious memory of Mabel made
+her say: "It's fierce!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl looked at her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"That young officer you're with, he's going, of course. He seems
+very young. My brother was older. Thirty."
+</p>
+<p>
+"He's twenty-two."
+</p>
+<p>
+"He has such nice eyes," said the girl. "I wish&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+But he was coming back, and she slipped away.
+</p>
+<p>
+During tea Cecil caught her eyes on him more than once. He had taken
+off his stiff-crowned cap, and the wind blew his dark hair round.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wish you were not going to the war," she said unexpectedly. It
+had come home to her, all at once, the potentialities of that trim
+uniform. It made her a little sick.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's nice of you to say that."
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a new mood on her, of confession, almost of consecration.
+He asked her if he might smoke. No one in her brief life had ever
+before asked her permission to smoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll have to smoke all I can," he said. "The fellows say cigarettes
+are scarce in the trenches. I'm taking a lot over."
+</p>
+<p>
+He knew a girl who smoked cigarettes, he said. She was a nice girl
+too. He couldn't understand it. The way he felt about it, maybe
+a cigarette for a girl wasn't a crime. But it led to other
+things&mdash;drinking, you know, and all that.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The fellows don't respect a girl that smokes," he said. "That's the
+plain truth. I've talked to her a lot about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+"It wasn't your friend in Toronto, was it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good heavens, no!" He repudiated the idea with horror.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the girl who had to readjust her ideas of life that day. She
+had been born and raised in that neutral ground between the lines of
+right and wrong, and now suddenly her position was attacked and she
+must choose sides. She chose.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I've smoked a cigarette now and then. If you think it is wrong I'll
+not do it any more."
+</p>
+<p>
+He was almost overcome, both at the confession and at her
+renunciation. To tell the truth, among the older Canadian officers
+he had felt rather a boy. Her promise reinstated him in his own
+esteem. He was a man, and a girl was offering to give something up
+if he wished it. It helped a lot.
+</p>
+<p>
+That evening he laid out his entire equipment in his small cabin,
+and invited her to see it. He put his mother's picture behind his
+brushes, where the other one had been, and when all was ready he
+rang for a stewardess.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I am going to show a young lady some of my stuff," he explained.
+"And as she is alone I wish you'd stay round, will you? I want her
+to feel perfectly comfortable."
+</p>
+<p>
+The stewardess agreed, and as she was an elderly woman, with a son
+at the front, a boy like Cecil, she went back to her close little
+room over the engines and cried a little, very quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was unfortunate that he did not explain the presence of the
+stewardess to the girl. For when it was all over, and she had stood
+rather awed before his mother's picture, and rather to his surprise
+had smoothed her hair with one of his brushes, she turned to him
+outside the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+"That stewardess has a lot of nerve," she said. "The idea of
+standing in the doorway, rubbering!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I asked her," he explained. "I thought you'd prefer having some one
+there."
+</p>
+<p>
+She stared at him.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+II
+</p>
+<p>
+Lethway had won the ship's pool that day. In the evening he played
+bridge, and won again. He had been drinking a little. Not much, but
+enough to make him reckless.
+</p>
+<p>
+For the last rubber or two the thought of Edith had obsessed him,
+her hand on the rail as he had kissed it, her cool eyes that were at
+once so wise and so ignorant, her lithe body in the short skirt and
+middy blouse. He found her more alluring, so attired, than she had
+been in the scant costume of what to him was always "the show."
+</p>
+<p>
+He pondered on that during all of a dummy hand, sitting low in his
+chair with his feet thrust far under the table. The show business
+was going to the bad. Why? Because nobody connected with it knew
+anything about human nature. He formulated a plan, compounded of
+liquor and real business acumen, of dressing a chorus, of suggesting
+the feminine form instead of showing it, of veiling it in chiffons
+of soft colours and sending a draft of air from electric fans in the
+wings to set the chiffons in motion.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Like the Aurora," he said to himself. "Only not so beefy. Ought to
+be a hit. Pretty? It will be the real thing!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The thought of Edith in such a costume, playing like a dryad over
+the stage, stayed with him when the dummy hand had been played and
+he had been recalled to the game by a thump on the shoulder. Edith
+in soft, pastel-coloured chiffons, dancing in bare feet to light
+string music. A forest setting, of course. Pan. A goat or two. All
+that sort of thing.
+</p>
+<p>
+On his way down to his cabin he passed her door. He went on,
+hesitated, came back and knocked.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now Edith had not been able to sleep. Her thrifty soul, trained
+against waste, had urged her not to fling her cigarettes overboard,
+but to smoke them.
+</p>
+<p>
+"And then never again," she said solemnly.
+</p>
+<p>
+The result was that she could not get to sleep. Blanketed to the
+chin she lay in her bunk, reading. The book had been Mabel's
+farewell offering, a thing of perverted ideals, or none, of cheap
+sentiment, of erotic thought overlaid with words. The immediate
+result of it, when she yawned at last and turned out the light over
+her bed, was a new light on the boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Little prig!" she said to herself, and stretched her round arms
+luxuriously above her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then Lethway rapped. She sat up and listened. Then, grumbling, she
+got out and opened the door an inch or two. The lights were low
+outside and her own cabin dark. But she knew him.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Are we chased?" she demanded. In the back of her mind, fear of
+pursuit by a German submarine was dogging her across the Atlantic.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Sure we are!" he said. "What are you so stingy about the door for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+She recognised his condition out of a not inconsiderable experience
+and did her best to force the door shut, but he put his foot over
+the sill and smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please go away, Mr. Lethway."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll go if you'll kiss me good night."
+</p>
+<p>
+She calculated the situation, and surrendered. There was nothing
+else to do. But when she upturned her face he slipped past her and
+into the room. Just inside the door, swinging open and shut with
+every roll of the ship, he took her in his arms and kissed her, not
+once but many times.
+</p>
+<p>
+She did not lose her head. She had an arm free and she rang the
+bell. Then she jerked herself loose.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I have rung for the stewardess," she said furiously. "If you are
+here when she comes I'll ask for help."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You young devil!" was all he said, and went, slamming the door
+behind him. His rage grew as he reached his own cabin. Damn the
+girl, anyhow! He had not meant anything. Here he was, spending money
+he might never get back to give her a chance, and she called the
+stewardess because he kissed her!
+</p>
+<p>
+As for the girl, she went back to bed. For a few moments sheer rage
+kept her awake. Then youth and fatigue triumphed and she fell
+asleep. Her last thought was of the boy, after all. "He wouldn't do
+a thing like that," she reflected. "He's a gentleman. He's the real
+thing. He's&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+Her eyes closed.
+</p>
+<p>
+Lethway apologised the next day, apologised with an excess of manner
+that somehow made the apology as much of an insult as the act. But
+she matched him at that game&mdash;took her cue from him, even went him
+one better as to manner. When he left her he had begun to feel that
+she was no unworthy antagonist. The game would be interesting. And
+she had the advantage, if she only knew it. Back of his desire to
+get back at her, back of his mocking smile and half-closed eyes, he
+was just a trifle mad about her since the night before.
+</p>
+<p>
+That is the way things stood when they reached the Mersey. Cecil was
+in love with the girl. Very earnestly in love. He did not sleep at
+night for thinking about her. He remembered certain semi-harmless
+escapades of his college days, and called himself unworthy and
+various other things. He scourged himself by leaving her alone in
+her steamer chair and walking by at stated intervals. Once, in a
+white sweater over a running shirt, he went to the gymnasium and
+found her there. She had on a "gym" suit of baggy bloomers and the
+usual blouse. He backed away from the door hastily.
+</p>
+<p>
+At first he was jealous of Lethway. Then that passed. She confided
+to him that she did not like the manager. After that he was sorry
+for him. He was sorry for any one she did not like. He bothered
+Lethway by walking the deck with him and looking at him with what
+Lethway refused to think was compassion.
+</p>
+<p>
+But because, contrary to the boy's belief, none of us is quite good
+or quite evil, he was kind to the boy. The khaki stood for something
+which no Englishman could ignore.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Poor little devil!" he said on the last day in the smoking room,
+"he's going to a bad time, all right. I was in Africa for eight
+years. Boer war and the rest of it. Got run through the thigh in a
+native uprising, and they won't have me now. But Africa was cheery
+to this war."
+</p>
+<p>
+He asked the boy into the smoking room, which he had hitherto
+avoided. He had some queer idea that he did not care to take his
+uniform in there. Absurd, of course. It made him rather lonely in
+the hours Edith spent in her cabin, preparing variations of costume
+for the evening out of her small trunk. But he was all man, and he
+liked the society of men; so he went at last, with Lethway, and
+ordered vichy!
+</p>
+<p>
+He had not allowed himself to think much beyond the end of the
+voyage. As the ship advanced, war seemed to slip beyond the edge of
+his horizon. Even at night, as he lay and tossed, his thoughts were
+either of the next day, when he would see Edith again, or of that
+indefinite future when he would return, covered with honors, and go
+to her, wherever she was.
+</p>
+<p>
+He never doubted the honors now. He had something to fight for. The
+medals in their cases looked paltry to him, compared with what was
+coming. In his sleep he dreamed of the V.C., dreams he was too
+modest to put into thoughts in waking hours.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then they reached the Mersey. On the last evening of the voyage he
+and Edith stood on the upper deck. It was a zone of danger. From
+each side of the narrowing river flashlights skimmed the surface of
+the water, playing round but never on the darkened ship. Red and
+green lights blinked signals. Their progress was a devious one
+through the mine-strewn channel. There was a heavy sea even there,
+and the small lights on the mast on the pilot boat, as it came to a
+stop, described great arcs that seemed, first to starboard, then to
+port, to touch the very tips of the waves.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm not crazy about this," the girl said, as the wind tugged at her
+skirts. "It frightens me. Brings the war pretty close, doesn't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Emotion swelled his heart and made him husky&mdash;love and patriotism,
+pride and hope, and a hot burst of courage.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What if we strike a mine?" she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wouldn't care so much. It would give me a chance to save you."
+</p>
+<p>
+Overhead they were signalling the shore with a white light. Along
+with the new emotions that were choking him came an unaccustomed
+impulse of boastfulness.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I can read that," he said when she ignored his offer to save her.
+"Of course it's code, but I can spell it out."
+</p>
+<p>
+He made a move to step forward and watch the signaler, but she put
+her hand on his arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't go. I'm nervous, Cecil," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had called him by his first name. It shook him profoundly, that
+and the touch of her hand on his arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, I love you, love you!" he said hoarsely. But he did not try to
+take her in his arms, or attempt to caress the hand that still clung
+to him. He stood very erect, looking at the shadowy outline of her.
+Then, her long scarf blowing toward him, he took the end of it and
+kissed that very gravely.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I would die for you," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then Lethway joined them.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+III
+</p>
+<p>
+London was not kind to him. He had felt, like many Canadians, that
+in going to England he was going home. But England was cold.
+</p>
+<p>
+Not the people on the streets. They liked the Canadians and they
+cheered them when their own regiments went by unhailed. It appealed
+to their rampant patriotism that these men had come from across the
+sea to join hands with them against common foe. But in the clubs,
+where his letters admitted the boy, there was a different
+atmosphere. Young British officers were either cool or, much worse,
+patronising. They were inclined to suspect that his quiet confidence
+was swanking. One day at luncheon he drank a glass of wine, not
+because he wanted it but because he did not like to refuse. The
+result was unfortunate. It loosened his tongue a bit, and he
+mentioned the medals.
+</p>
+<p>
+Not noisily, of course. In an offhand manner, to his next neighbor.
+It went round the table, and a sort of icy silence, after that,
+greeted his small sallies. He never knew what the trouble was, but
+his heart was heavy in him.
+</p>
+<p>
+And it rained.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was always raining. He had very little money beyond his pay, and
+the constant hiring of taxicabs worried him. Now and then he saw
+some one he knew, down from Salisbury for a holiday, but they had
+been over long enough to know their way about. They had engagements,
+things to buy. He fairly ate his heart out in sheer loneliness.
+</p>
+<p>
+There were two hours in the day that redeemed the others. One was
+the hour late in the afternoon when, rehearsal over, he took Edith
+O'Hara to tea. The other was just before he went to bed, when he
+wrote her the small note that reached her every morning with her
+breakfast.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the seven days before he joined his regiment at Salisbury he
+wrote her seven notes. They were candid, boyish scrawls, not love
+letters at all. This was one of them:
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+      <i>Dear Edith</i>: I have put in a rotten evening and am just
+      going to bed. I am rather worried because you looked so
+      tired to-day. Please don't work too hard.
+</p>
+<p class="bquote">
+      I am only writing to say how I look forward each night to
+      seeing you the next day. I am sending with this a small
+      bunch of lilies of the valley. They remind me of you.
+</p>
+<p class="ar">
+                                 <span class="sc">Cecil.</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl saved those letters. She was not in love with him, but he
+gave her something no one else had ever offered: a chivalrous
+respect that pleased as well as puzzled her.
+</p>
+<p>
+Once in a tea shop he voiced his creed, as it pertained to her, over
+a plate of muffins.
+</p>
+<p>
+"When we are both back home, Edith," he said, "I am going to ask you
+something."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why not now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Because it wouldn't be quite fair to you. I&mdash;I may be killed, or
+something. That's one thing. Then, it's because of your people."
+</p>
+<p>
+That rather stunned her. She had no people. She was going to tell
+him that, but she decided not to. She felt quite sure that he
+considered "people" essential, and though she felt that, for any
+long period of time, these queer ideas and scruples of his would be
+difficult to live up to, she intended to do it for that one week.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, all right," she said, meekly enough.
+</p>
+<p>
+She felt very tender toward him after that, and her new gentleness
+made it all hard for him. She caught him looking at her wistfully at
+times, and it seemed to her that he was not looking well. His eyes
+were hollow, his face thin. She put her hand over his as it lay on
+the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Look here," she said, "you look half sick, or worried, or
+something. Stop telling me to take care of myself, and look after
+yourself a little better."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm all right," he replied. Then soon after: "Everything's strange.
+That's the trouble," he confessed. "It's only in little things that
+don't matter, but a fellow feels such a duffer."
+</p>
+<p>
+On the last night he took her to dinner&mdash;a small French restaurant
+in a back street in Soho. He had heard about it somewhere. Edith
+classed it as soon as she entered. It was too retiring, too demure.
+Its very location was clandestine.
+</p>
+<p>
+But he never knew. He was divided that night between joy at getting
+to his regiment and grief at leaving her. Rather self-engrossed, she
+thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+They had a table by an open grate fire, with a screen "to shut off
+the draft," the waiter said. It gave the modest meal a delightfully
+homey air, their isolation and the bright coal fire. For the first
+time they learned the joys of mussels boiled in milk, of French
+<i>soufflé</i> and other things.
+</p>
+<p>
+At the end of the evening he took her back to her cheap hotel in a
+taxicab. She expected him to kiss her. Her experience of taxicabs
+had been like that. But he did not. He said very little on the way
+home, but sat well back and eyed her wistful eyes. She chattered to
+cover his silence&mdash;of rehearsals, of&mdash;with reservations&mdash;of Lethway,
+of the anticipated London opening. She felt very sad herself. He had
+been a tie to America, and he had been much more than that. Though
+she did not realise it, he had had a profound effect on her. In
+trying to seem what he thought her she was becoming what he thought
+her. Her old reckless attitude toward life was gone, or was going.
+</p>
+<p>
+The day before she had refused an invitation to a night club, and
+called herself a fool for doing it. But she had refused.
+</p>
+<p>
+Not that he had performed miracles with her. She was still frankly a
+dweller on the neutral ground. But to that instinct that had kept
+her up to that time what she would have called "straight" had been
+added a new refinement. She was no longer the reckless and romping
+girl whose abandon had caught Lethway's eye.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had gained a soul, perhaps, and lost a livelihood.
+</p>
+<p>
+When they reached the hotel he got out and went in with her. The
+hall porter was watching and she held out her hand. But he shook his
+head.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If I touched your hand," he said, "I would have to take you in my
+arms. Good-bye, dear."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good-bye," she said. There were tears in her eyes. It was through a
+mist that she saw him, as the elevator went up, standing at salute,
+his eyes following her until she disappeared from sight.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+IV
+</p>
+<p>
+Things were going wrong with Lethway. The management was ragging
+him, for one thing.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Give the girl time," he said almost viciously, at the end of a
+particularly bad rehearsal. "She's had a long voyage and she's
+tired. Besides," he added, "these acts never do go at rehearsal.
+Give me a good house at the opening and she'll show you what she can
+do."
+</p>
+<p>
+But in his soul he was worried. There was a change in Edith O'Hara.
+Even her voice had altered. It was not only her manner to him. That
+was marked enough, but he only shrugged his shoulders over it. Time
+enough for that when the production was on.
+</p>
+<p>
+He had engaged a hoyden, and she was by way of becoming a lady.
+During the first week or so he had hoped that it was only the
+strangeness of her surroundings. He had been shrewd enough to lay
+some of it, however, to Cecil's influence.
+</p>
+<p>
+"When your soldier boy gets out of the way," he sneered one day in
+the wings, "perhaps you'll get down to earth and put some life in
+your work."
+</p>
+<p>
+But to his dismay she grew steadily worse. Her dancing was delicate,
+accurate, even graceful, but the thing the British public likes to
+think typically American, a sort of breezy swagger, was gone. To
+bill her in her present state as the Madcap American would be sheer
+folly.
+</p>
+<p>
+Ten days before the opening he cabled for another girl to take her
+place.
+</p>
+<p>
+He did not tell her. Better to let her work on, he decided. A German
+submarine might sink the ship on which the other girl was coming,
+and then where would they be?
+</p>
+<p>
+Up to the last, however, he had hopes of Edith. Not that he cared to
+save her. But he hated to acknowledge a failure. He disliked to
+disavow his own judgment.
+</p>
+<p>
+He made a final effort with her, took her one day to luncheon at
+Simpson's, and in one of the pewlike compartments, over mutton and
+caper sauce, he tried to "talk a little life into her."
+</p>
+<p>
+"What the devil has come over you?" he demanded savagely. "You were
+larky enough over in New York. There are any number of girls in
+London who can do what you are doing now, and do it better."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm doing just what I did in New York."
+</p>
+<p>
+"The hell you are! I could do what you're doing with a jointed doll
+and some wires. Now see here, Edith," he said, "either you put some
+go into the thing, or you go. That's flat."
+</p>
+<p>
+Her eyes filled.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I&mdash;maybe I'm worried," she said. "Ever since I found out that I've
+signed up, with no arrangement about sending me back, it's been on
+my mind."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't you worry about that."
+</p>
+<p>
+"But if they put some one on in my place?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"You needn't worry about that either. I'll look after you. You know
+that. If I hadn't been crazy about you I'd have let you go a week
+ago. You know that too."
+</p>
+<p>
+She knew the tone, knew instantly where she stood. Knew, too, that
+she would not play the first night in London. She went rather white,
+but she faced him coolly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't look like that," he said. "I'm only telling you that if you
+need a friend I'll be there."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was two days before the opening, however, when the blow fell. She
+had not been sleeping, partly from anxiety about herself, partly
+about the boy. Every paper she picked up was full of the horrors of
+war. There were columns filled with the names of those who had
+fallen. Somehow even his uniform had never closely connected the boy
+with death in her mind. He seemed so young.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had had a feeling that his very youth would keep him from
+danger. War to her was a faintly conceived struggle between men, and
+he was a boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+But here were boys who had died, boys at nineteen. And the lists of
+missing startled her. One morning she read in the personal column a
+query, asking if any one could give the details of the death of a
+young subaltern. She cried over that. In all her care-free life
+never before had she wept over the griefs of others.
+</p>
+<p>
+Cecil had sent her his photograph taken in his uniform. Because he
+had had it taken to give her he had gazed directly into the eye of
+the camera. When she looked at it it returned her glance. She took
+to looking at it a great deal.
+</p>
+<p>
+Two days before the opening she turned from a dispirited rehearsal
+to see Mabel standing in the wings. Then she knew. The end had come.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mabel was jaunty, but rather uneasy.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You poor dear!" she said, when Edith went to her. "What on earth's
+happened? The cable only said&mdash;honest, dearie, I feel like a dog!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"They don't like me. That's all," she replied wearily, and picked
+up her hat and jacket from a chair. But Mabel was curious.
+Uncomfortable, too, as she had said. She slipped an arm round
+Edith's waist.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Say the word and I'll throw them down," she cried. "It looks like
+dirty work to me. And you're thin. Honest, dearie, I mean it."
+</p>
+<p>
+Her loyalty soothed the girl's sore spirit.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't know what's come over me," she said. "I've tried hard
+enough. But I'm always tired. I&mdash;I think it's being so close to the
+war."
+</p>
+<p>
+Mabel stared at her. There was a war. She knew that. The theatrical
+news was being crowded to a back page to make space for disagreeable
+diagrams and strange, throaty names.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I know. It's fierce, isn't it?" she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+Edith took her home, and they talked far into the night. She had
+slipped Cecil's picture into the wardrobe before she turned on the
+light. Then she explained the situation.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's pep they want, is it?" said Mabel at last. "Well, believe me,
+honey, I'll give it to them. And as long as I've got a cent it's
+yours."
+</p>
+<p>
+They slept together in Edith's narrow bed, two slim young figures
+delicately flushed with sleep. As pathetic, had they known it, as
+those other sleepers in their untidy billets across the channel.
+Almost as hopeless too. Dwellers in the neutral ground.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+V
+</p>
+<p>
+Now war, after all, is to each fighting man an affair of small
+numbers, an affair of the men to his right and his left, of the
+A.M.S.C. in the rear and of a handful of men across. On his days of
+rest the horizon is somewhat expanded. It becomes then a thing of
+crowded and muddy village streets, of food and drink and tobacco and
+a place to sleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+Always, of course, it is a thing of noises.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is not a narrative of war. It matters very little, for
+instance, how Cecil's regiment left Salisbury and went to Soissons,
+in France. What really matters is that at last the Canadian-made
+motor lorries moved up their equipment, and that, after digging
+practice trenches in the yellow clay of old battlefields, they were
+moved up to the front.
+</p>
+<p>
+Once there, there seemed to be a great deal of time. It was the lull
+before Neuve Chapelle. Cecil's spirit grew heavy with waiting. Once,
+back on rest at his billet, he took a long walk over the half-frozen
+side roads and came without warning on a main artery. Three traction
+engines were taking to the front the first of the great British
+guns, so long awaited. He took the news back to his mess. The
+general verdict was that there would be something doing now.
+</p>
+<p>
+Cecil wrote a letter to Edith that day. He had written before, of
+course, but this was different. He wrote first to his mother, just
+in case anything happened, a long, boyish letter with a misspelled
+word here and there. He said he was very happy and very comfortable,
+and that if he did get his he wanted her to know that it was all
+perfectly cheerful and not anything like the war correspondents said
+it was. He'd had a bully time all his life, thanks to her. He hadn't
+let her know often enough how he felt about her, and she knew he was
+a dub at writing. There were a great many things worse than "going
+out" in a good fight. "It isn't at all as if you could see the
+blooming thing coming," he wrote. "You never know it's after you
+until you've got it, and then you don't."
+</p>
+<p>
+The letter was not to be sent unless he was killed. So he put in a
+few anecdotes to let her know exactly how happy and contented he
+was. Then he dropped the whole thing in the ten inches of mud and
+water he was standing in, and had to copy it all over.
+</p>
+<p>
+To Edith he wrote a different sort of letter. He told her that he
+loved her. "It's almost more adoration than love," he wrote, while
+two men next to him were roaring over a filthy story. "I mean by
+that, that I feel every hour of every day how far above me you are.
+It's like one of these <i>fusées</i> the Germans are always throwing up
+over us at night. It's perfectly dark, and then something bright and
+clear and like a star, only nearer, is overhead. Everything looks
+different while it floats there. And so, my dear, my dear,
+everything has been different to me since I knew you."
+</p>
+<p>
+Rather boyish, all of it, but terribly earnest. He said he had
+wanted to ask her to marry him, but that the way he felt about it, a
+fellow had no right to ask a girl such a thing when he was going to
+a war. If he came back he would ask her. And he would love her all
+his life.
+</p>
+<p>
+The next day, at dawn, he went out with eighty men to an outpost
+that had been an abandoned farm. It was rather a forlorn hope. They
+had one machine gun. At nine o'clock the enemy opened fire on them
+and followed it by an attack. The major in charge went down early.
+At two Cecil was standing in the loft of the farmhouse, firing with
+a revolver on men who beneath him, outside, were placing dynamite
+under a corner of the building.
+</p>
+<p>
+To add to the general hopelessness, their own artillery, believing
+them all dead, opened fire on the building. They moved their wounded
+to the cellar and kept on fighting.
+</p>
+<p>
+At eight o'clock that night Cecil's right arm was hanging helpless,
+and the building was burning merrily. There were five of them left.
+They fixed bayonets and charged the open door.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+When the boy opened his eyes he was lying in six inches of manure in
+a box car. One of his men was standing over him, keeping him from
+being trampled on. There was no air and no water. The ammonia fumes
+from the manure were stifling.
+</p>
+<p>
+The car lurched and jolted along. Cecil opened his eyes now and
+then, and at first he begged for water. When he found there was none
+he lay still. The men hammered on the door and called for air. They
+made frantic, useless rushes at the closed and barred door. Except
+Cecil, all were standing. They were herded like cattle, and there
+was no room to lie or sit.
+</p>
+<p>
+He lay there, drugged by weakness. He felt quite sure that he was
+dying, and death was not so bad. He voiced this feebly to the man
+who stood over him.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's not so bad," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The hell it's not!" said the man.
+</p>
+<p>
+For the time Edith was effaced from his mind. He remembered the
+wounded men left in the cellar with the building burning over them.
+That, and days at home, long before the war.
+</p>
+<p>
+Once he said "Mother." The soldier who was now standing astride of
+him, the better to keep off the crowding men, thought he was asking
+for water again.
+</p>
+<p>
+Thirty hours of that, and then air and a little water. Not enough
+water. Not all the water in all the cool streams of the earth would
+have slaked the thirst of his wound.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boy was impassive. He was living in the past. One day he recited
+at great length the story of his medals. No one listened.
+</p>
+<p>
+And all the time his right arm lay or hung, as he was prone or
+erect, a strange right arm that did not belong to him. It did not
+even swell. When he touched it the fingers were cold and bluish. It
+felt like a dead hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then, at the end of it all, was a bed, and a woman's voice, and
+quiet.
+</p>
+<p>
+The woman was large and elderly, and her eyes were very kind. She
+stirred something in the boy that had been dead of pain.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Edith!" he said.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+VI
+</p>
+<p>
+Mabel had made a hit. Unconscious imitator that she was, she stole
+Edith's former recklessness, and added to it something of her own
+dash and verve. Lethway, standing in the wings, knew she was not and
+never would be Edith. She was not fine enough. Edith at her best
+had frolicked. Mabel romped, was almost wanton. He cut out the
+string music at the final rehearsal. It did not fit.
+</p>
+<p>
+On the opening night the brass notes of the orchestra blared and
+shrieked. Mabel's bare feet flew, her loose hair, cut to her ears
+and held only by a band over her forehead, kept time in ecstatic
+little jerks. When at last she pulled off the fillet and bowed to
+the applause, her thick short hair fell over her face as she jerked
+her head forward. They liked that. It savoured of the abandoned. She
+shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her
+scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish
+body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its passion, its
+fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+Edith had been spring, palpitant with gladness.
+</p>
+<p>
+Lethway, looking with tired eyes from the wings, knew that he had
+made a commercial success. But back of his sordid methods there was
+something of the soul of an artist. And this rebelled.
+</p>
+<p>
+But he made a note to try flame-coloured chiffon for Mabel. Edith
+was to have danced in the pale greens of a water nymph.
+</p>
+<p>
+On the night of her triumph Mabel returned late to Edith's room,
+where she was still quartered. She was moving the next day to a
+small apartment. With the generosity of her class she had urged
+Edith to join her, and Edith had perforce consented.
+</p>
+<p>
+"How did it go?" Edith asked from the bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Pretty well," said Mabel. "Nothing unusual."
+</p>
+<p>
+She turned up the light, and from her radiant reflection in the
+mirror Edith got the truth. She lay back with a dull, sickening
+weight round her heart. Not that Mabel had won, but that she herself
+had failed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You're awfully late."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I went to supper. Wish you'd been along, dearie. Terribly swell
+club of some sort." Then her good resolution forgotten: "I made them
+sit up and take notice, all right. Two invitations for supper
+to-morrow night and more on the way. And when I saw I'd got the
+house going to-night, and remembered what I was being paid for it,
+it made me sick."
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's better than nothing."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why don't you ask Lethway to take you on in the chorus? It would do
+until you get something else."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I have asked him. He won't do it."
+</p>
+<p>
+Mabel was still standing in front of the mirror. She threw her head
+forward so her short hair covered her face, and watched the effect
+carefully. Then she came over and sat on the bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"He's a dirty dog," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+The two girls looked at each other. They knew every move in the game
+of life, and Lethway's methods were familiar ones.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What are you going to do about it?" Mabel demanded at last.
+"Believe me, old dear, he's got a bad eye. Now listen here," she
+said with impulsive generosity. "I've got a scheme. I'll draw enough
+ahead to send you back. I'll do it to-morrow, while the drawing's
+good."
+</p>
+<p>
+"And queer yourself at the start?" said Edith scornfully. "Talk
+sense, Mabel, I'm up against it, but don't you worry. I'll get
+something."
+</p>
+<p>
+But she did not get anything. She was reduced in the next week to
+entire dependence on the other girl. And, even with such miracles of
+management as they had both learned, it was increasingly difficult
+to get along.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a new element too. Edith was incredulous at first, but at
+last she faced it. There was a change in Mabel. She was not less
+hospitable nor less generous. It was a matter of a point of view.
+Success was going to her head. Her indignation at certain phases of
+life was changing to tolerance. She found Edith's rampant virtue a
+trifle wearing. She took to staying out very late, and coming in
+ready to meet Edith's protest with defiant gaiety. She bought
+clothes too.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You'll have to pay for them sometime," Edith reminded her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I should worry. I've got to look like something if I'm going to go
+out at all."
+</p>
+<p>
+Edith, who had never thought things out before, had long hours to
+think now. And the one thing that seemed clear and undeniable was
+that she must not drive Mabel into debt. Debt was the curse of most
+of the girls she knew. As long as they were on their own they could
+manage. It was the burden of unpaid bills, lightly contracted, that
+drove so many of them wrong.
+</p>
+<p>
+That night, while Mabel was asleep, she got up and cautiously
+lighted the gas. Then she took the boy's photograph out of its
+hiding place and propped it on top of her trunk. For a long time she
+sat there, her chin in her hands, and looked at it.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the next day that she saw his name among the missing.
+</p>
+<p>
+She did not cry, not at first. The time came when it seemed to her
+she did nothing else. But at first she only stared. She was too
+young and too strong to faint, but things went gray for her.
+</p>
+<p>
+And gray they remained&mdash;through long spring days and eternal
+nights&mdash;days when Mabel slept all morning, rehearsed or played in
+the afternoons, was away all evening and far into the night. She did
+not eat or sleep. She spent money that was meant for food on papers
+and journals and searched for news. She made a frantic but
+ineffectual effort to get into the War Office.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had received his letter two days after she had seen his name
+among the missing. She had hardly dared to open it, but having read
+it, for days she went round with a strange air of consecration that
+left Mabel uneasy.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wish you wouldn't look like that!" she said one morning. "You get
+on my nerves."
+</p>
+<p>
+But as time went on the feeling that he was dead overcame everything
+else. She despaired, rather than grieved. And following despair came
+recklessness. He was dead. Nothing else mattered. Lethway, meeting
+her one day in Oxford Circus, almost passed her before he knew her.
+He stopped her then.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Haven't been sick, have you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Me? No."
+</p>
+<p>
+"There's something wrong."
+</p>
+<p>
+She did not deny it and he fell into step beside her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Doing anything?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+She shook her head. With all the power that was in her she was
+hating his tall figure, his heavy-lashed eyes, even the familiar
+ulster he wore.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I wish you were a sensible young person," he said. But something in
+the glance she gave him forbade his going on. It was not an ugly
+glance. Rather it was cold, appraising&mdash;even, if he had known it,
+despairing.
+</p>
+<p>
+Lethway had been busy. She had been in the back of his mind rather
+often, but other things had crowded her out. This new glimpse of her
+fired him again, however. And she had a new quality that thrilled
+even through the callus of his soul. The very thing that had
+foredoomed her to failure in the theatre appealed to him strongly&mdash;a
+refinement, a something he did not analyse.
+</p>
+<p>
+When she was about to leave him he detained her with a hand on her
+arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You know you can always count on me, don't you?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I know I can't," she flashed back at him with a return of her old
+spirit.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm crazy about you."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Old stuff!" she said coolly, and walked off. But there was a tug of
+fear at her heart. She told Mabel, but it was typical of the change
+that Mabel only shrugged her shoulders.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was Lethway's shrewdness that led to his next move. He had tried
+bullying, and failed. He had tried fear, with the same lack of
+effect. Now he tried kindness.
+</p>
+<p>
+She distrusted him at first, but her starved heart was crying out
+for the very thing he offered her. As the weeks went on, with no
+news of Cecil, she accepted his death stoically at last. Something
+of her had died. But in a curious way the boy had put his mark on
+her. And as she grew more like the thing he had thought her to be
+the gulf between Mabel and herself widened. They had, at last, only
+in common their room, their struggle, the contacts of their daily
+life.
+</p>
+<p>
+And Lethway was now always in the background. He took her for quiet
+meals and brought her home early. He promised her that sometime he
+would see that she got back home.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But not just yet," he added as her colour rose. "I'm selfish,
+Edith. Give me a little time to be happy."
+</p>
+<p>
+That was a new angle. It had been a part of the boy's quiet creed to
+make others happy.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why don't you give me something to do, since you're so crazy to
+have me hanging about?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Can't do it. I'm not the management. And they're sore at you. They
+think you threw them down." He liked to air his American slang.
+</p>
+<p>
+Edith cupped her chin in her hand and looked at him. There was no
+mystery about the situation, no shyness in the eyes with which she
+appraised him. She was beginning to like him too.
+</p>
+<p>
+That night when she got back to Mabel's apartment her mood was
+reckless. She went to the window and stood looking at the crooked
+and chimney-potted skyline that was London.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Oh, what's the use?" she said savagely, and gave up the fight.
+</p>
+<p>
+When Mabel came home she told her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm going to get out," she said without preamble.
+</p>
+<p>
+She caught the relief in Mabel's face, followed by a purely
+conventional protest.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Although," she hedged cautiously, "I don't know, dearie. People
+look at things sensibly these days. You've got to live, haven't you?
+They're mighty quick to jail a girl who tries to jump in the river
+when she's desperate."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll probably end there. And I don't much care."
+</p>
+<p>
+Mabel gave her a good talking to about that. Her early training had
+been in a church which regarded self-destruction as a cardinal sin.
+Then business acumen asserted itself:
+</p>
+<p>
+"He'll probably put you on somewhere. He's crazy about you, Ede."
+</p>
+<p>
+But Edith was not listening. She was standing in front of her opened
+trunk tearing into small pieces something that had been lying in the
+tray.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+VII
+</p>
+<p>
+Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that
+had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use
+his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land
+but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried
+feebly to move his right arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+But it was gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there
+beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But
+when he looked it was not there.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was not one shock of discovery, but many. For each time he
+roused from sleep he had forgotten, and must learn the thing again.
+</p>
+<p>
+The elderly German woman stayed close. She was wise, and war had
+taught her many things. So when he opened his eyes she was always
+there. She talked to him very often of his mother, and he listened
+with his eyes on her face&mdash;eyes like those of a sick child.
+</p>
+<p>
+In that manner they got by the first few days.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It won't make any difference to her," he said once. "She'd take me
+back if I was only a fragment." Then bitterly: "That's all I am&mdash;a
+fragment! A part of a man!"
+</p>
+<p>
+After a time she knew that there was a some one else, some one he
+was definitely relinquishing. She dared not speak to him about it.
+His young dignity was militant. But one night, as she dozed beside
+him in the chair, he reached the limit of his repression and told
+her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"An actress!" she cried, sitting bolt upright. "<i>Du lieber</i>&mdash;an
+actress!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Not an actress," he corrected her gravely. "A&mdash;a dancer. But good.
+She's a very good girl. Even when I was&mdash;was whole"&mdash;raging
+bitterness there&mdash;"I was not good enough for her."
+</p>
+<p>
+"No actress is good. And dancers!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"You don't know what you are talking about," he said roughly, and
+turned his back to her. It was almost insulting to have her assist
+him to his attitude of contempt, and to prop him in it with pillows
+behind his back. Lying there he tried hard to remember that this
+woman belonged to his hereditary foes. He was succeeding in hating
+her when he felt her heavy hand on his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Poor boy! Poor little one!" she said. And her voice was husky.
+</p>
+<p>
+When at last he was moved from the hospital to the prison camp she
+pinned the sleeve of his ragged uniform across his chest and kissed
+him, to his great discomfiture. Then she went to the curtained
+corner that was her quarters and wept long and silently.
+</p>
+<p>
+The prison camp was overcrowded. Early morning and late evening
+prisoners were lined up to be counted. There was a medley of
+languages&mdash;French, English, Arabic, Russian. The barracks were built
+round a muddy inclosure in which the men took what exercise they
+could.
+</p>
+<p>
+One night a boy with a beautiful tenor voice sang Auld Lang Syne
+under the boy's window. He stood with his hand on the cuff of his
+empty sleeves and listened. And suddenly a great shame filled him,
+that with so many gone forever, with men dying every minute of
+every hour, back at the lines, he had been so obsessed with himself.
+He was still bitter, but the bitterness was that he could not go
+back again and fight.
+</p>
+<p>
+When he had been in the camp a month he helped two British officers
+to escape. One of them had snubbed him in London months before. He
+apologised before he left.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You're a man, Hamilton," he said. "All you Canadians are men. I've
+some things to tell when I get home."
+</p>
+<p>
+The boy could not go with them. There would be canals to swim
+across, and there was his empty sleeve and weakness. He would never
+swim again, he thought. That night, as he looked at the empty beds
+of the men who had gone, he remembered his medals and smiled grimly.
+</p>
+<p>
+He was learning to use his left hand. He wrote letters home with it
+for soldiers who could not write. He went into the prison hospital
+and wrote letters for those who would never go home. But he did not
+write to the girl.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+He went back at last, when the hopelessly wounded were exchanged. To
+be branded "hopelessly wounded" was to him a stain, a stigma. It put
+him among the clutterers of the earth. It stranded him on the shore
+of life. Hopelessly wounded!
+</p>
+<p>
+For, except what would never be whole, he was well again. True,
+confinement and poor food had kept him weak and white. His legs had
+a way of going shaky at nightfall. But once he knocked down an
+insolent Russian with his left hand, and began to feel his own man
+again. That the Russian was weak from starvation did not matter. The
+point to the boy was that he had made the attempt.
+</p>
+<p>
+Providence has a curious way of letting two lives run along, each
+apparently independent of the other. Parallel lines they seem,
+hopeless of meeting. Converging lines really, destined, through long
+ages, by every deed that has been done to meet at a certain point
+and there fuse.
+</p>
+<p>
+Edith had left Mabel, but not to go to Lethway. When nothing else
+remained that way was open. She no longer felt any horror&mdash;only a
+great distaste. But two weeks found her at her limit. She, who had
+rarely had more than just enough, now had nothing.
+</p>
+<p>
+And no glory of sacrifice upheld her. She no longer believed that by
+removing the burden of her support she could save Mabel. It was
+clear that Mabel would not be saved. To go back and live on her,
+under the circumstances, was but a degree removed from the other
+thing that confronted her.
+</p>
+<p>
+There is just a chance that, had she not known the boy, she would
+have killed herself. But again the curious change he had worked in
+her manifested itself. He thought suicide a wicked thing.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I take it like this," he had said in his eager way: "life's a thing
+that's given us for some purpose. Maybe the purpose gets
+clouded&mdash;I'm afraid I'm an awful duffer at saying what I mean. But
+we've got to work it out, do you see? Or&mdash;or the whole scheme is
+upset."
+</p>
+<p>
+It had seemed very clear then.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then, on a day when the rare sun made even the rusty silk hats of
+clerks on tops of omnibuses to gleam, when the traffic glittered on
+the streets and the windows of silversmiths' shops shone painful to
+the eye, she met Lethway again.
+</p>
+<p>
+The sun had made her reckless. Since the boy was gone life was
+wretchedness, but she clung to it. She had given up all hope of
+Cecil's return, and what she became mattered to no one else.
+</p>
+<p>
+Perhaps, more than anything else, she craved companionship. In
+all her crowded young life she had never before been alone.
+Companionship and kindness. She would have followed to heel, like
+a dog, for a kind word.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she met Lethway. They walked through the park. When he left her
+her once clear, careless glance had a suggestion of furtiveness in
+it.
+</p>
+<p>
+That afternoon she packed her trunk and sent it to an address he
+had given her. In her packing she came across the stick of cold
+cream, still in the pocket of the middy blouse. She flung it, as
+hard as she could, across the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+She paid her bill with money Lethway had given her. She had exactly
+a sixpence of her own. She found herself in Trafalgar Square late in
+the afternoon. The great enlisting posters there caught her eye,
+filled her with bitterness.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Your king and your country need you," she read. She had needed the
+boy, too, but this vast and impersonal thing, his mother country,
+had taken him from her&mdash;taken him and lost him. She wanted to stand
+by the poster and cry to the passing women to hold their men back.
+As she now knew she hated Lethway, she hated England.
+</p>
+<p>
+She wandered on. Near Charing Cross she spent the sixpence for a
+bunch of lilies of the valley, because he had said once that she was
+like them. Then she was for throwing them in the street, remembering
+the thing she would soon be.
+</p>
+<p>
+"For the wounded soldiers," said the flower girl. When she
+comprehended that, she made her way into the station. There was a
+great crowd, but something in her face made the crowd draw back and
+let her through. They nudged each other as she passed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Looking for some one, poor child!" said a girl and, following her,
+thrust the flowers she too carried into Edith's hand. She put them
+with the others, rather dazed.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+To Cecil the journey had been a series of tragedies. Not his own.
+There were two hundred of them, officers and men, on the boat across
+the Channel. Blind, maimed, paralysed, in motley garments, they were
+hilariously happy. Every throb of the turbine engines was a thrust
+toward home. They sang, they cheered.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now and then some one would shout: "Are we downhearted?" And
+crutches and canes would come down on the deck to the unanimous
+shout: "No!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Folkestone had been trying, with its parade of cheerfulness, with
+kindly women on the platform serving tea and buns. In the railway
+coach to London, where the officers sat, a talking machine played
+steadily, and there were masses of flowers, violets and lilies of
+the valley. At Charing Cross was a great mass of people, and as they
+slowly disembarked he saw that many were crying. He was rather
+surprised. He had known London as a cold and unemotional place. It
+had treated him as an alien, had snubbed and ignored him.
+</p>
+<p>
+He had been prepared to ask nothing of London, and it lay at his
+feet in tears.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then he saw Edith.
+</p>
+<p>
+Perhaps, when in the fullness of years the boy goes over to the
+life he so firmly believes awaits him, the one thing he will carry
+with him through the open door will be the look in her eyes when she
+saw him. Too precious a thing to lose, surely, even then. Such
+things make heaven.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What did I tell you?" cried the girl who had given Edith her
+flowers. "She has found him. See, he has lost his arm. Look
+out&mdash;catch him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+But he did not faint. He went even whiter, and looking at Edith he
+touched his empty sleeve.
+</p>
+<p>
+"As if that would make any difference to her!" said the girl, who
+was in black. "Look at her face! She's got him."
+</p>
+<p>
+Neither Edith nor the boy could speak. He was afraid of unmanly
+tears. His dignity was very dear to him. And the tragedy of his
+empty sleeve had her by the throat. So they went out together and
+the crowd opened to let them by.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+At nine o'clock that night Lethway stormed through the stage
+entrance of the theatre and knocked viciously at the door of Mabel's
+dressing room. Receiving no attention, he opened the door and went
+in.
+</p>
+<p>
+The room was full of flowers, and Mabel, ready to go on, was having
+her pink toes rouged for her barefoot dance.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You've got a nerve!" she said coolly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Where's Edith?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I don't know and I don't care. She ran away, when I was stinting
+myself to keep her. I'm done. Now you go out and close that door,
+and when you want to enter a lady's dressing room, knock."
+</p>
+<p>
+He looked at her with blazing hatred.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Right-o!" was all he said. And he turned and left her to her
+flowers.
+</p>
+<p>
+At exactly the same time Edith was entering the elevator of a small,
+very respectable hotel in Kensington. The boy, smiling, watched her
+in.
+</p>
+<p>
+He did not kiss her, greatly to the disappointment of the hall
+porter. As the elevator rose the boy stood at salute, the fingers of
+his left hand to the brim of his shabby cap. In his eyes, as they
+followed her, was all that there is of love&mdash;love and a new
+understanding.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had told him, and now he knew. His creed was still the same.
+Right was right and wrong was wrong. But he had learned of that
+shadowy No Man's Land between the lines, where many there were who
+fought their battles and were wounded, and even died.
+</p>
+<p>
+As he turned and went out two men on crutches were passing along the
+quiet street. They recognised him in the light of the doorway, and
+stopped in front of him. Their voices rang out in cheerful unison:
+</p>
+<p>
+"Are we downhearted? No!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Their crutches struck the pavement with a resounding thump.
+</p>
+<a name="2H_4_0008"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+
+<h2>
+    THE GAME
+</h2>
+<p class="sec">
+I
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un was very red; even his freckles were red rather than
+copper-coloured. And he was more prodigal than most kings, for he
+had two crowns on his head. Also his hair grew in varying
+directions, like a wheatfields after a storm. He wore a coat without
+a tail, but with brass buttons to compensate, and a celluloid collar
+with a front attached. It was the Red Un's habit to dress first and
+wash after, as saving labour; instead of his neck he washed his
+collar.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un was the Chief Engineer's boy and rather more impressive
+than the Chief, who was apt to decry his own greatness. It was the
+Red Un's duty to look after the Chief, carry in his meals, make his
+bed, run errands, and remind him to get his hair cut now and then.
+It was the Red Un's pleasure to assist unassumingly in the
+surveillance of that part of the ship where the great god, Steam,
+ruled an underworld of trimmers and oilers and stokers and assistant
+engineers&mdash;and even, with reservations, the Chief. The Red Un kept a
+sharp eye on the runs and read the Chief's log daily&mdash;so much coal
+in the bunkers; so much water in the wells; so many engine-room
+miles in twenty-four hours&mdash;which, of course, are not sea miles
+exactly, there being currents and winds, and God knows what, to
+waste steam on.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un, like the assistants, was becoming a bear on the speed
+market. He had learned that, just when the engines get heated enough
+to work like demons, and there is a chance to break a record and get
+a letter from the management, some current or other will show up&mdash;or
+a fog, which takes the very tripe out of the cylinders and sends the
+bridge yapping for caution.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un was thirteen; and he made the Chief's bed by pulling the
+counterpane neatly and smoothly over the chaos underneath&mdash;and got
+away with it, the Chief being weary at night. Also, in odd moments
+he made life miserable for the crew. Up to shortly before, he had
+had to use much energy and all his wits to keep life in his starved
+little body; and even keeping an eye on the log and the Chief's
+hair, and slipping down into the engine room, where he had no manner
+of business, hardly used up his activities. However, he did not lie
+and he looked the Chief square in the eye, as man to man.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief had salvaged him out of the Hudson, when what he had taken
+for a bobbing red tomato had suddenly revealed a blue face and two
+set and desperate eyes. After that the big Scot had forgotten all
+about him, except the next day when he put on his shoes, which had
+shrunk in the drying. The liner finished coaling about that time,
+took on passengers, luggage, steamer baskets and a pilot, and,
+having stowed the first two, examined the cards on the third and
+dropped the last, was pointed, nose to the east wind, for the race.
+</p>
+<p>
+The arrow on the twin dials pointed to Stand By! for the long
+voyage&mdash;three thousand miles or so without a stop. The gong, and
+then Half Ahead!&mdash;great elbows thrust up and down, up and down; the
+grunt of power overcoming inertia, followed by the easy swing of
+limitless strength. Full Ahead!&mdash;and so off again for the great
+struggle&mdash;man's wits and the engines and the mercy of God against
+the upreaching of the sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief, who sometimes dreamed his greatness, but who ignored it
+waking, snapped his watch shut.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Eleven-eleven!" he said to the Senior Second. "Well, here's luck!"
+That is what he said aloud; to himself he always said a bit of a
+prayer, realising perhaps even more than the bridge how little man's
+wits count in the great equation. He generally said something to the
+effect that "After all, it's up to Thee, O Lord!"
+</p>
+<p>
+He shook hands with the Senior Second, which also was his habit; and
+he smiled too, but rather grimly. They were playing a bit of a
+game, you see; and so far the Chief had won all the tricks&mdash;just an
+amusing little game and nothing whatever to do with a woman; the
+Second was married, but the Chief had put all such things out of his
+head years before, when he was a youngster and sailing to the Plate.
+Out of his head, quite certainly; but who dreams of greatness for
+himself alone? So the Chief, having glanced about and run his hand
+caressingly over various fearful and pounding steel creatures, had
+climbed up the blistering metal staircase to his room at the top and
+was proceeding to put down eleven-eleven and various other things
+that the first cabin never even heard of, when he felt that he was
+being stared at from behind.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now and then, after shore leave, a drunken trimmer or stoker gets up
+to the Chief's room and has to be subdued by the power of executive
+eye or the strength of executive arm. As most Chiefs are Scots, the
+eye is generally sufficient. So the Chief, mightily ferocious,
+turned about, eye set, as one may say, to annihilate a six-foot
+trimmer in filthy overalls and a hangover, and saw&mdash;a small
+red-haired boy in a Turkish towel.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boy quailed rather at the eye, but he had the courage of nothing
+to lose&mdash;not even a pair of breeches&mdash;and everything to gain.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please," said the apparition, "the pilot's gone, and you can't put
+me off!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief opened his mouth and shut it again. The mouth, and the
+modification of an eye set for a six-foot trimmer to an eye for a
+four-foot-ten urchin in a Turkish towel, produced a certain
+softening. The Red Un, who was like the Chief in that he earned his
+way by pitting his wits against relentless Nature, smiled a
+little&mdash;a surface smile, with fear just behind.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The Captain's boy's my size; I could wear his clothes," he
+suggested.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, back in that time when the Chief had kept a woman's picture in
+his breast pocket instead of in a drawer of his desk, there had been
+small furtive hopes, the pride of the Scot to perpetuate his line,
+the desire of a man for a manchild. The Chief had buried all that in
+the desk drawer with the picture; but he had gone overboard in his
+best uniform to rescue a wharf-rat, and he had felt a curious sense
+of comfort when he held the cold little figure in his arms and was
+hauled on deck, sputtering dirty river water and broad Scotch, as
+was his way when excited.
+</p>
+<p>
+"And where ha' ye been skulking since yesterday?" he demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+"In the bed where I was put till last night. This morning early&mdash;&mdash;"
+he hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't lie! Where were ye?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"In a passenger's room, under a bed. When the passengers came aboard
+I had to get out."
+</p>
+<p>
+"How did ye get here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+This met with silence. Quite suddenly the Chief recognised the
+connivance of the crew, perhaps, or of a kindly stewardess.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Who told you this was my cabin?" A smile this time, rather like the
+Senior Second's when the Chief and he had shaken hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+"A nigger!" he said. "A coloured fella in a white suit."
+</p>
+<p>
+There was not a darky on the boat. The Red Un, whose code was the
+truth when possible, but any lie to save a friend&mdash;and that's the
+code of a gentleman&mdash;sat, defiantly hopeful, arranging the towel to
+cover as much as possible of his small person.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You're lying! Do you know what we do with liars on this ship? We
+throw them overboard!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Then I'm thinking," responded the Turkish towel, "that you'll be
+needing another Chief Engineer before long!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, as it happened, the Chief had no boy that trip. The previous
+one had been adopted after the last trip by a childless couple who
+had liked the shape of his nose and the way his eyelashes curled on
+his cheek. The Chief looked at the Red Un; it was perfectly clear
+that no one would ever adopt him for the shape of his nose, and he
+apparently lacked lashes entirely. He rose and took a bathrobe from
+a hook on the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Here," he said; "cover your legs wi' that, and say a prayer if ye'
+know wan. The Captain's a verra hard man wi' stowaways."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Captain, however, who was a gentleman and a navigator and had a
+sense of humour also, was not hard with the Red Un. It being
+impracticable to take the boy to him, the great man made a special
+visit to the boy. The Red Un, in the Chief's bathrobe, sat on a
+chair, with his feet about four inches from the floor, and returned
+the Captain's glare with wide blue eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Is there any reason, young man, why I shouldn't order you to the
+lockup for the balance of this voyage?" the Captain demanded, extra
+grim, and trying not to smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well," said the Red Un, wiggling his legs nervously, "you'd have to
+feed me, wouldn't you? And I might as well work for my keep."
+</p>
+<p>
+This being a fundamental truth on which most economics and all
+governments are founded, and the Captain having a boy of his own at
+home, he gave a grudging consent, for the sake of discipline, to the
+Red Un's working for his keep as the Chief's boy, and left. Outside
+the door he paused.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The little devil's starved," he said. "Put some meat on those
+ribs, Chief, and&mdash;be a bit easy with him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+This last was facetious, the Chief being known to have the heart of
+a child.
+</p>
+<p>
+So the Red Un went on the payroll of the line, and requisition was
+made on the storekeeper for the short-tailed coat and the long
+trousers, and on the barber for a hair-cut. And in some curious way
+the Red Un and the Chief hit it off. It might have been a matter of
+red blood or of indomitable spirit.
+</p>
+<p>
+Spirit enough and to spare had the Red Un. On the trip out he had
+licked the Captain's boy and the Purser's boy; on the incoming trip
+he had lashed the Doctor's boy to his triumphant mast, and only
+three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting
+hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his
+attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.
+</p>
+<p>
+He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every
+corner of the ship&mdash;called the engines by name and the men by
+epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior
+Second's best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the
+eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Aw, gwan!" he said to the Captain's boy. "Where'd you and your Old
+Man be but for us? In a blasted steel tank, floating about on the
+bloomin' sea! What's a ship without insides?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Captain's boy, who was fourteen, and kept his bath sponge in a
+rubber bag, and shaved now and then with the Captain's razor,
+retorted in kind.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You fellows below think you're the whole bally ship!" he said
+loftily. "Insides is all right&mdash;we need 'em in our business. But
+what'd your steel tank do, with the engines goin', if she
+wasn't bein' navigated? Steamin' in circles, like a tinklin'
+merry-go-round!"
+</p>
+<p>
+It was some seconds after this that the Purser, a well-intentioned
+but interfering gentleman with a beard, received the kick that put
+him in dry dock for two days.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+II
+</p>
+<p>
+They were three days out of New York on the Red Un's second round
+trip when the Second, still playing the game and almost despairing,
+made a strategic move. The Red Un was laying out the Chief's
+luncheon on his desk&mdash;a clean napkin for a cloth; a glass; silver; a
+plate; and the menu from the first-cabin dining saloon. The menu was
+propped against a framed verse:
+</p>
+<p class="verse2">
+          <i>But I ha' lived and I ha' worked!</i> <br />
+          <i>All thanks to Thee, Most High.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+And as he placed the menu, the Red Un repeated the words from
+McAndrew's hymn. It had rather got him at first; it was a new
+philosophy of life. To give thanks for life was understandable, even
+if unnecessary. But thanks for work! There was another framed card
+above the desk, more within the Red Un's ken: "Cable crossing! Do
+not anchor here!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The card worked well with the first class, resting in the Chief's
+cabin after the arduous labours of seeing the engines.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief was below, flat on his back in a manhole looking for a
+staccato note that did not belong in his trained and orderly chorus.
+There was grease in his sandy hair, and the cranks were only a few
+inches from his nose. By opening the door the Red Un was able to
+command the cylinder tops, far below, and the fiddley, which is the
+roof of hell or a steel grating over the cylinders to walk
+on&mdash;depending on whether one is used to it or not. The Chief was
+naturally not in sight.
+</p>
+<p>
+This gave the Red Un two minutes' leeway&mdash;two minutes for
+exploration. A drawer in the desk, always heretofore locked, was
+unfastened&mdash;that is, the bolt had been shot before the drawer was
+entirely closed. The Red Un was jealous of that drawer. In two
+voyages he had learned most of the Chief's history and, lacking one
+of his own, had appropriated it to himself. Thus it was not unusual
+for him to remark casually, as he stood behind the Chief's chair at
+dinner: "We'd better send this here postcard to Cousin Willie, at
+Edinburgh."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Ou-ay!" the Chief would agree, and tear off the postcard of the
+ship that topped each day's menu; but, so far, all hints as to this
+one drawer had been futile; it remained the one barrier to their
+perfect confidence, the fly in the ointment of the Red Un's content.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now, at last&mdash;&mdash; Below, a drop of grease in the Chief's eye set him
+wiping and cursing; over his head hammered, banged and lunged his
+great babies; in the stokehole a gaunt and grimy creature, yclept
+the Junior Second, stewed in his own sweat and yelled for steam.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un opened the drawed quickly and thrust in a hand. At first
+he thought it was empty, working as he did by touch, his eye on the
+door. Then he found a disappointing something&mdash;the lid of a
+cigar-box! Under that was a photograph. Here was luck! Had the Red
+Un known it, he had found the only two secrets in his Chief's open
+life. But the picture was disappointing&mdash;a snapshot of a young
+woman, rather slim, with the face obscured by a tennis racket,
+obviously thrust into the picture at the psychological moment. Poor
+spoil this&mdash;a cigar-box lid and a girl without a face! However,
+marred as it was, it clearly meant something to the Chief. For on
+its reverse side was another stanza from McAndrew's hymn:
+</p>
+<p class="verse2">
+          <i>Ye know how hard an idol dies,</i> <br />
+           &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>An' what that meant to me&mdash;</i> <br />
+          <i>E'en tak' it for a sacrifice</i> <br />
+           &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>Acceptable to Thee.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un thrust it back into the drawer, with the lid. If she was
+dead what did it matter? He was a literal youth&mdash;so far, his own
+words had proved sufficient for his thoughts; it is after thirty
+that a man finds his emotions bigger than his power of expressing
+them, and turns to those that have the gift. The Chief was over
+thirty.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was as he shut the drawer that he realised he was not alone. The
+alley door was open and in it stood the Senior Second. The Red Un
+eyed him unpleasantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Sneaking!" said the Second.
+</p>
+<p>
+"None of your blamed business!" replied the Red Un.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Second, who was really an agreeable person, with a sense of
+humour, smiled. He rather liked the Red Un.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Do you know, William," he observed&mdash;William was the Red Un's
+name&mdash;"I'd be willing to offer two shillings for an itemised
+account of what's in that drawer?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Fill it with shillings," boasted the Red Un, "and I'll not tell
+you."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Three?" said the Second cheerfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+"No."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Four?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Why don't you look yourself?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Just between gentlemen, that isn't done, young man. But if you
+volunteered the information, and I saw fit to make you a present of,
+say, a pipe, with a box of tobacco&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"What do you want to know for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I guess you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un knew quite well. The Chief and the two Seconds were still
+playing their game, and the Chief was still winning; but even the
+Red Un did not know how the Chief won&mdash;and as for the two Seconds
+and the Third and the Fourth, they were quite stumped.
+</p>
+<p>
+This was the game: In bad weather, when the ports are closed and
+first-class passengers are yapping for air, it is the province of
+the engine room to see that they get it. An auxiliary engine pumps
+cubic feet of atmosphere into every cabin through a series of
+airtrunks.
+</p>
+<p>
+So far so good. But auxiliaries take steam; and it is exceedingly
+galling to a Junior or Senior, wagering more than he can afford on
+the run in his watch, to have to turn valuable steam to
+auxiliaries&mdash;"So that a lot of blooming nuts may smoke in their
+bunks!" as the Third put it.
+</p>
+<p>
+The first move in the game is the Chief's, who goes to bed and
+presumably to sleep. After that it's the engine-room move, which
+gives the first class time to settle down and then shuts off the
+airpumps. Now there is no noise about shutting off the air in the
+trunks. It flows or it does not flow. The game is to see whether the
+Chief wakens when the air stops or does not. So far he had always
+wakened.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was uncanny. It was worse than that&mdash;it was damnable! Did not the
+Old Man sleep at all?&mdash;not that he was old, but every Chief is the
+Old Man behind his back. Everything being serene, and the
+engine-room clock marking twelve-thirty, one of the Seconds would
+shut off the air very gradually; the auxiliary would slow down,
+wheeze, pant and die&mdash;and within two seconds the Chief's bell would
+ring and an angry voice over the telephone demand what the several
+kinds of perdition had happened to the air! Another trick in the
+game to the Chief!
+</p>
+<p>
+It had gone past joking now: had moved up from the uncanny to the
+impossible, from the impossible to the enraging. Surreptitious
+search of the Chief's room had shown nothing but the one locked
+drawer. They had taken advantage of the Chief's being laid up in
+Antwerp with a boil on his neck to sound the cabin for hidden wires.
+They had asked the ship's doctor anxiously how long a man could do
+without sleep. The doctor had quoted Napoleon.
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+"If at any time," observed the Second pleasantly, "you would like
+that cigarette case the barber is selling, you know how to get it."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Thanks, old man," said the Red Un loftily, with his eye on the
+wall.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Second took a step forward and thought better of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Better think about it!"
+</p>
+<p>
+"I was thinking of something else," said the Red Un, still staring
+at the wall. The Second followed his eye. The Red Un was gazing
+intently at the sign which said: "Cable crossing! Do not anchor
+here!"
+</p>
+<p>
+As the Second slammed out, the Chief crawled from his manhole and
+struggled out of his greasy overalls. Except for his face, he was
+quite tidy. He ran an eye down the port tunnel, where the shaft
+revolved so swiftly that it seemed to be standing still, to where at
+the after end came the racing of the screw as it lifted, bearded
+with scud, out of the water.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It looks like weather to-night," he observed, with a twinkle, to
+the Fourth. "There'll aye be air wanted." But the Fourth was gazing
+at a steam gauge.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+III
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un's story, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts&mdash;his
+temptation, his fall and his redemption. All lives are so divided: a
+step back; a plunge; and then, in desperation and despair, a little
+climb up God's ladder.
+</p>
+<p>
+Seven days the liner lay in New York&mdash;seven days of early autumn
+heat, of blistering decks, of drunken and deserting trimmers, of
+creaking gear and grime of coal-dust. The cabin which held the Red
+Un and the Purser's boy was breathless. On Sunday the four ship's
+boys went to Coney Island and lay in the surf half the afternoon.
+The bliss of the water on their thin young legs and scrawny bodies
+was Heaven. They did not swim; they lay inert, letting the waves
+move them about, and out of the depths of a deep content making
+caustic comments about the human form as revealed by the relentless
+sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+"That's a pippin!" they would say; or, "My aunt! looks at his legs!"
+They voiced their opinions audibly and were ready to back them up
+with flight or fight.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was there that the Red Un saw the little girl. She had come from
+a machine, and her mother stood near. She was not a Coney Islander.
+She was first-cabin certainly&mdash;silk stockings on her thin ankles,
+sheer white frock; no jewelry. She took a snapshot of the four
+boys&mdash;to their discomfiture&mdash;and walked away while they were still
+writhing.
+</p>
+<p>
+"That for mine!" said the Red Un in one of his rare enthusiasms.
+</p>
+<p>
+They had supper&mdash;a sandwich and a glass of beer; they would have
+preferred pop, but what deep-water man on shore drinks pop?&mdash;and
+made their way back to the ship by moonlight. The Red Un was terse
+in his speech on the car: mostly he ate peanuts abstractedly. If he
+evolved any clear idea out of the chaos of his mind it was to wish
+she had snapped him in his uniform with the brass buttons.
+</p>
+<p>
+The heat continued; the men in the stokehole, keeping up only enough
+steam for the dynamos and donkey engines, took turns under the
+ventilators or crawled up to the boatdeck at dusk, too exhausted to
+dress and go ashore. The swimmers were overboard in the cool river
+with the first shadows of night; the Quartermaster, so old that he
+dyed his hair for fear he'd be superannuated, lowered his lean body
+hand over hand down a rope and sat by the hour on a stringpiece of
+the dock, with the water laving his hairy and tattooed old breast.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un was forbidden the river. To be honest, he was rather
+relieved&mdash;not twice does a man dare the river god, having once been
+crowned with his slime and water-weed. When the boy grew very hot
+he slipped into a second-cabin shower, and stood for luxurious
+minutes with streams running off his nose and the ends of his
+fingers and splashing about his bony ankles.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then, one night, some of the men took as many passengers' lifebelts
+and went in. The immediate result was fun combined with safety; the
+secondary result was placards over the ship and the dock, forbidding
+the use of the ship's lifebelts by the crew.
+</p>
+<p>
+From that moment the Red Un was possessed for the river and a
+lifebelt. So were the other three. The signs were responsible.
+Permitted, a ship's lifebelt was a subterfuge of the cowardly,
+white-livered skunks who were afraid of a little water; forbidden, a
+ship's lifebelt took on the qualities of enemy's property&mdash;to be
+reconnoitred, assaulted, captured and turned to personal advantage.
+</p>
+<p>
+That very night, then, four small bodies, each naked save for a
+lifebelt, barrelshaped and extending from breast almost to knee,
+slipped over the side of the ship with awkward splashes and
+proceeded to disport themselves in the river. Scolding tugs sent
+waves for them to ride; ferries crawled like gigantic bugs with a
+hundred staring eyes. They found the Quartermaster on a stringpiece
+immersed to the neck and smoking his pipe, and surrounded him&mdash;four
+small, shouting imps, floating barrels with splashing hands and
+kicking feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Gwan, ye little devils!" said the Quartermaster, clutching the
+stringpiece and looking about in the gloom for a weapon. The Red Un,
+quite safe and audacious in his cork jacket, turned over on his back
+and kicked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Gwan yerself, Methuselah!" he sang.
+</p>
+<p>
+They stole the old man's pipe and passed it from mouth to mouth;
+they engaged him in innocent converse while one of them pinched his
+bare old toe under water, crab-fashion. And at last they prepared to
+shin up the rope again and sleep the sleep of the young, the
+innocent and the refreshed.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief was leaning over the rail, just above, smoking!
+</p>
+<p>
+He leaned against the rail and smoked for three hours! Eight eyes,
+watching him from below, failed to find anything in his face but
+contemplation; eight hands puckered like a washerwoman's; eight feet
+turned from medium to clean, from clean to bleached&mdash;and still the
+Chief smoked on. He watched the scolding tugs and the ferryboats
+that crawled over the top of the water; he stood in rapt
+contemplation of the electric signs in Jersey, while the ship's
+bells marked the passage of time to eternity, while the
+Quartermaster slept in his bed, while the odours of the river stank
+in their nostrils and the pressure of the ship's lifebelts weighed
+like lead on their clammy bodies.
+</p>
+<p>
+At eight bells&mdash;which is midnight&mdash;the Chief emptied his
+twenty-fourth pipe over the rail and smiled into the gloom beneath.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Ye'll better be coming up," he remarked pleasantly. "I'm for
+turning in mysel'."
+</p>
+<p>
+He wandered away; none of the watch was near. The ship was dark,
+save for her riding lights. Hand over puckered hand they struggled
+up and wriggled out of the belts; stark naked they ducked through
+passageways and alleys, and stowed their damp and cringing forms
+between sheets.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un served the Chief's breakfast the next morning very
+carefully. The Chief's cantaloupe was iced; his kipper covered with
+a hot plate; the morning paper propped against McAndrew's hymn. The
+Red Un looked very clean and rather bleached.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief was busy; he read the night reports, which did not amount
+to much, the well soundings, and a letter from a man offering to
+show him how to increase the efficiency of his engines fifty per
+cent, and another offering him a rake-off on a new lubricant.
+</p>
+<p>
+Outwardly the Chief was calm&mdash;even cold. Inwardly he was rather
+uncomfortable: he could feel two blue eyes fixed on his back and
+remembered the day he had pulled them out of the river, and how
+fixed and desperate they were then. But what was it McAndrew said?
+"Law, order, duty an' restraint, obedience, discipline!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Besides, if the boys were going to run off with the belts some
+damned first-class passenger was likely to get a cabin minus a belt
+and might write to the management. The line had had bad luck; it did
+not want another black eye. He cleared his throat; the Red Un
+dropped a fork.
+</p>
+<p>
+"That sort of thing last night won't do, William."
+</p>
+<p>
+"N-No, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Ye had seen the signs, of course?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes, sir." The Red Un never lied to the Chief; it was useless.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief toyed with his kipper.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Ye'll understand I'd ha' preferred dealin' with the matter mysel';
+but it's&mdash;gone up higher."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Quartermaster, of course! The Chief rose and pretended to glance
+over the well soundings.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The four of ye will meet me in the Captain's room in fifteen
+minutes," he observed casually.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Captain was feeding his cat when the Red Un got there. The four
+boys lined up uncomfortably; all of them looked clean, subdued,
+apprehensive. If they were to be locked up in this sort of weather,
+and only three days to sailing time&mdash;even a fine would be better.
+The Captain stroked the cat and eyed them.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Well," he said curtly, "what have you four young imps been up to
+now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The four young imps stood panicky. They looked as innocent as choir
+boys. The cat, eating her kipper, wheezed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please, sir," said the Captain's boy solicitously, "Peter has
+something in his throat."
+</p>
+<p>
+"Perhaps it's a ship's lifebelt," said the Captain grimly, and
+caught the Chief's eye.
+</p>
+<p>
+The line palpitated; under cover of its confusion the Chief,
+standing in the doorway with folded arms, winked swiftly at the
+Captain; the next moment he was more dour than ever.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You are four upsetters of discipline," said the Captain, suddenly
+pounding the table. "You four young monkeys have got the crew by the
+ears, and I'm sick of it! Which one of you put the fish in Mrs.
+Schmidt's bed?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. Schmidt was a stewardess. The Red Un stepped forward.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Who turned the deckhose into the Purser's cabin night before last?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please," said the Doctor's boy pallidly, "I made a mistake in the
+room. I thought&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Who," shouted the Captain, banging again, "cut the Quartermaster's
+rope two nights ago and left him sitting under the dock for four
+hours?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Purser's boy this time, white to the lips! Fresh panic seized
+them; it could hardly be mere arrest if he knew all this; he might
+order them hanged from a yardarm or shot at sunrise. He looked like
+the latter. The Red Un glanced at the Chief, who looked apprehensive
+also, as if the thing was going too far. The Captain may have read
+their thoughts, for he said:
+</p>
+<p>
+"You're limbs of Satan, all of you, and hanging's too good for you.
+What do you say, Chief? How can we make these young scamps lessons
+in discipline to the crew?"
+</p>
+<p>
+Everybody breathed again and looked at the Chief&mdash;who stood tall and
+sandy and rather young to be a Chief&mdash;in the doorway.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Eh, mon," he said, and smiled, "I'm aye a bit severe. Don't ask me
+to punish the bairns."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Captain sniffed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Severe!" he observed. "You Scots are hard in the head, but soft in
+the disposition. Come, Chief&mdash;shall they walk the plank?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Good deescipline," assented the Chief, "but it would leave us a bit
+shorthanded."
+</p>
+<p>
+"True," said the Captain gloomily.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I was thinkin'," remarked the Chief diffidently&mdash;one hates to think
+before the Captain; that's always supposed to be his job.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"That we could make a verra fine example of them and still retain
+their services. Ha' ye, by chance, seen a crow hangin' head down in
+the field, a warnin' to other mischief-makers?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Ou-ay!" said the Captain, who had a Scotch mother. The line wavered
+again; the Captain's boy, who pulled his fingers when he was
+excited, cracked three knuckles.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It would be good deescipline," continued the Chief, "to stand the
+four o' them in ship's belt at the gangway, say for an hour, morning
+and evening&mdash;clad, ye ken, as they were during the said
+infreengements."
+</p>
+<p>
+"You're a great man, Chief!" said the Captain. "You hear that,
+lads'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"With&mdash;with no trousers'?" gasped the Doctor's boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+"If you wore trousers last night. If not&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+The thing was done that morning. Four small boys, clad only in
+ship's belts, above which rose four sheepish heads and freckled
+faces, below which shifted and wriggled eight bare legs, stood in
+line at the gangway and suffered agonies of humiliation at the hands
+of crew and dockmen, grinning customs inspectors, coalpassers, and a
+newspaper photographer hunting a human-interest bit for a Sunday
+paper. The cooks came up from below and peeped out at them; the
+ship's cat took up a position in line and came out in the Sunday
+edition as "a fellow conspirator."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un, owing to an early training that had considered clothing
+desirable rather than essential, was not vitally concerned. The
+Quartermaster had charge of the line; he had drawn a mark with chalk
+along the deck, and he kept their toes to it by marching up and down
+in front of them with a broomhandle over his shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Toe up, you little varmints!" he would snap. "God knows I'd be glad
+to get a rap at you&mdash;keeping an old man down in the water half the
+night! Toe up!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Whereupon, aiming an unlucky blow at the Purser's boy, he hit the
+Captain's cat. The line snickered.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was just after that the Red Un, surmising a snap by the
+photographer on the dock and thwarting it by putting his thumb to
+his nose, received the shock of his small life. The little girl from
+Coney Island, followed by her mother, was on the pier&mdash;was showing
+every evidence of coming up the gangway to where he stood. Was
+coming! Panic seized the Red Un&mdash;panic winged with flight. He
+turned&mdash;to face the Chief. Appeal sprang to the Red Un's lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Please!" he gasped. "I'm sick, sick as h&mdash;, sick as a dog, Chief.
+I've got a pain in my chest&mdash;I&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+Curiously enough, the Chief did not answer or even hear. He, too,
+was looking at the girl on the gangway and at her mother. The next
+moment the Chief was in full flight, ignominious flight, his face,
+bleached with the heat of the engine room and the stokehole, set as
+no emergency of broken shaft or flying gear had ever seen it. Broken
+shaft indeed! A man's life may be a broken shaft.
+</p>
+<p>
+The woman and the girl came up the gangway, exidently to inspect
+staterooms. The Quartermaster had rallied the Red Un back to the
+line and stood before him, brandishing his broomhandle. Black fury
+was in the boy's eye; hate had written herself on his soul. His
+Chief had ignored his appeal&mdash;had left him to his degradation&mdash;had
+deserted him.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl saw the line, started, blushed, recognised the Red Un&mdash;and
+laughed!
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+IV
+</p>
+<p>
+The great voyage began&mdash;began with the band playing and much waving
+of flags and display of handkerchiefs; began with the girl and her
+mother on board; began with the Chief eating his heart out over coal
+and oil vouchers and well soundings and other things; began with the
+Red Un in a new celluloid collar, lying awake at night to hate his
+master, adding up his injury each day to greater magnitude.
+</p>
+<p>
+The voyage began. The gong rang from the bridge. Stand By! said the
+twin dials. Half Ahead! Full Ahead! Full Ahead! Man's wits once more
+against the upreaching of the sea! The Chief, who knew that
+somewhere above was his woman and her child, which was not his,
+stood under a ventilator and said the few devout words with which he
+commenced each voyage:
+</p>
+<p>
+"With Thy help!" And then, snapping his watch: "Three minutes past
+ten!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The chief engineer of a liner is always a gentleman and frequently a
+Christian. He knows, you see, how much his engines can do and how
+little. It is not his engines alone that conquer the sea, nor his
+engines plus his own mother wit. It is engines plus wit plus <i>x</i>,
+and the <i>x</i> is God's mercy. Being responsible for two quantities out
+of the three of the equation, he prays&mdash;if he does&mdash;with an eye on a
+gauge and an ear open for a cylinder knock.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was gossip in the engineers' mess those next days: the Old Man
+was going to pieces. A man could stand so many years of the strain
+and then where was he? In a land berth, growing fat and paunchy, and
+eating his heart out for the sea, or&mdash;&mdash; The sea got him one way or
+another!
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Second stood out for the Chief.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Wrong with him? There's nothing wrong with him," he declared. "If
+he was any more on the job than he is I'd resign. He's on the job
+twenty-four hours a day, nights included."
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a laugh at this; the mess was on to the game. Most of them
+were playing it.
+</p>
+<p>
+So now we have the Red Un looking for revenge and in idle moments
+lurking about the decks where the girl played. He washed his neck
+under his collar those days.
+</p>
+<p>
+And we have the Chief fretting over his engines, subduing drunken
+stokers, quelling the frequent disturbances of Hell Alley, which led
+to the firemen's quarters, eating little and smoking much, devising
+out of his mental disquietude a hundred possible emergencies
+and&mdash;keeping away from the passengers. The Junior Second took down
+the two parties who came to see the engine room and gave them
+lemonade when they came up. The little girl's mother came with the
+second party and neither squealed nor asked questions&mdash;only at the
+door into the stokeholes she stood a moment with dilated eyes. She
+was a little woman, still slim, rather tragic. She laid a hand on
+the Junior's arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The&mdash;the engineers do not go in there, do they?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Yes, madam. We stand four-hour watches. That is the Senior Second
+Engineer on that pile of cinders."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Second was entirely black, except for his teeth and the
+whites of his eyes. There was a little trouble in a coalbunker;
+they had just discovered it. There would be no visitors after this
+until the trouble was over.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl's mother said nothing more. The Junior Second led them
+around, helping a pretty young woman about and explaining to her.
+</p>
+<p>
+"This," he said, smiling at the girl, "is a pump the men have
+nicknamed Marguerite, because she takes most of one man's time and
+is always giving trouble."
+</p>
+<p>
+The young woman tossed her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Perhaps she would do better if she were left alone," she suggested.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girl's mother said nothing, but, before she left, she took one
+long look about the engine room. In some such bedlam of noise and
+heat <i>he</i> spent his life. She was wrong, of course, to pity him; one
+need not measure labour by its conditions or by its cost, but by the
+joy of achievement. The woman saw the engines&mdash;sinister, menacing,
+frightful; the man saw power that answered to his hand&mdash;conquest,
+victory. The beat that was uproar to her ears was as the throbbing
+of his own heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was after they had gone that the Chief emerged from the forward
+stokehole where the trouble was. He had not seen her; she would not
+have known him, probably, had they met face to face. He was quite
+black and the light of battle gleamed in his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+They fixed the trouble somehow. It was fire in a coalbunker, one of
+the minor exigencies. Fire requiring air they smothered it one way
+and another. It did not spread, but it did not quite die. And each
+day's run was better than the day before.
+</p>
+<p>
+The weather was good. The steerage, hanging over the bow, saw far
+below the undercurling spray, white under dark blue&mdash;the blue
+growing paler, paler still, until the white drops burst to the top
+and danced free in the sun. A Greek, going home to Crete to marry a
+wife, made all day long tiny boats of coloured paper, weighted with
+corks, and sailed them down into the sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+"They shall carry back to America my farewells!" he said, smiling.
+"This to Pappas, the bootblack, who is my friend. This to a girl
+back in America, with eyes&mdash;behold that darkest blue, my children;
+so are her eyes! And this black one to my sister, who has lost a
+child."
+</p>
+<p>
+The first class watched the spray also&mdash;as it rose to the lip of a
+glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+Now at last it seemed they would break a record. Then rain set in,
+without enough wind to make a sea, but requiring the starboard ports
+to be closed. The Senior Second, going on duty at midnight that
+night, found his Junior railing at fate and the airpumps going.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Shut 'em off!" said the Senior Second furiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Shut 'em off yourself. I've tried it twice."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Second gave a lever a vicious tug and the pump stopped.
+Before it had quite lapsed into inertia the Chief's bell rang.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Can you beat it?" demanded the Junior sulkily. "The old fox!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior cursed. Then he turned abruptly and climbed the steel
+ladder he had just descended. The Junior, who was anticipating a
+shower and bed, stared after him.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior thought quickly&mdash;that was why he was a Senior. He found
+the Red Un's cabin and hammered at the door. Then, finding it was
+not locked, he walked in. The Red Un lay perched aloft; the shirt of
+his small pajamas had worked up about his neck and his thin torso
+lay bare. In one hand he clutched the dead end of a cigarette. The
+Senior wakened him by running a forefinger down his ribs, much as a
+boy runs a stick along a paling fence.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Wha' ish it?" demanded the Red Un in sleepy soprano. And then "Wha'
+d'ye want?" in bass. His voice was changing; he sounded like two
+people in animated discussion most of the time.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You boys want to earn a sovereign?"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Purser's boy, who had refused to rouse to this point, sat up in
+bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Whaffor?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Get the Chief here some way. You"&mdash;to the Purser's boy&mdash;"go and
+tell him the Red Un's ill and asking for him. You"&mdash;to the Red
+Un&mdash;"double up; cry; do something. Start him off for the
+doctor&mdash;anything, so you keep him ten minutes or so!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un was still drowsy, and between sleeping and waking we are
+what we are.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I won't do it!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Senior Second held out a gold sovereign on his palm.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Don't be a bally little ass!" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un, waking full, now remembered that he hated the Chief; for
+fear he did not hate him enough, he recalled the lifebelt, and his
+legs, and the girl laughing.
+</p>
+<p>
+"All right!" he said. "Gwan, Pimples! What'll I have?
+Appendiceetis?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"Have a toothache," snapped the Senior Second. "Tear off a few
+yells&mdash;anything to keep him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+It worked rather well; plots have a way of being successful in
+direct proportion to their iniquity. Beneficent plots, like loving
+relatives dressed as Santa Claus, frequently go wrong; while it has
+been shown that the leakiest sort of scheme to wreck a bank will go
+through with the band playing.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief came and found the Red Un in agony, holding his jaw. Owing
+to the fact that he lay far back in an upper bunk, it took time to
+drag him into the light. It took more time to get his mouth open;
+once open, the Red Un pointed to a snag that should have given him
+trouble if it didn't, and set up a fresh outcry.
+</p>
+<p>
+Not until long after could the Red Un recall without shame his share
+in that night's work&mdash;recall the Chief, stubby hair erect, kind blue
+eyes searching anxiously for the offending tooth. Recall it? Would
+he ever forget the arm the Chief put about him, and him: "Ou-ay!
+laddie; it's a weeked snag!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief, to whom God had denied a son of his flesh, had taken Red
+Un to his heart, you see&mdash;fatherless wharf-rat and childless
+engineer; the man acting on the dour Scot principle of chastening
+whomsoever he loveth, and the boy cherishing a hate that was really
+only hurt love.
+</p>
+<p>
+And as the Chief, who had dragged the Red Un out of eternity and was
+not minded to see him die of a toothache, took him back to his cabin
+the pain grew better, ceased, turned to fright. The ten minutes or
+so were over and what would they find? The Chief opened the door; he
+had in mind a drop of whisky out of the flask he never touched on a
+trip&mdash;whisky might help the tooth.
+</p>
+<p>
+On the threshold he seemed to scent something amiss. He glanced at
+the ceiling over his bunk, where the airtrunk lay, and then&mdash;he
+looked at the boy. He stooped down and put a hand on the boy's head,
+turning it to the light.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Tell me now, lad," he said quietly, "did ye or did ye no ha' the
+toothache?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's better now," sullenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Did ye or did ye no?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"No."
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief turned the boy about and pushed him through the doorway
+into outer darkness. He said nothing. Down to his very depths he was
+hurt. To have lost the game was something; but it was more than
+that. Had he been a man of words he might have said that once again
+a creature he loved had turned on him to his injury. Being a Scot
+and a man of few words he merely said he was damned, and crawled
+back into bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+The game? Well, that was simple enough. Directly over his pillow, in
+the white-painted airtrunk, was a brass plate, fastened with four
+screws. In case of anything wrong with the ventilator the plate
+could be taken off for purposes of investigation.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief's scheme had been simplicity itself&mdash;so easy that the
+Seconds, searching for concealed wires and hidden alarm bells, had
+never thought of it. On nights when the air must be pumped, and
+officious Seconds were only waiting the Chief's first sleep to shut
+off steam and turn it back to the main engines, the Chief unlocked
+the bolted drawer in his desk. First he took out the woman's picture
+and gazed at it; quite frequently he read the words on the
+back&mdash;written out of a sore heart, be sure. And then he took out
+the cigar-box lid.
+</p>
+<p>
+When he had unscrewed the brass plate over his head he replaced it
+with the lid of the cigar-box. So long as the pumps in the engine
+room kept the air moving, the lid stayed up by suction.
+</p>
+<p>
+When the air stopped the lid fell down on his head; he roused enough
+to press a signal button and, as the air started viciously, to
+replace the lid. Then, off to the sleep of the just and the crafty
+again. And so on <i>ad infinitum</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+Of course the game was not over because it was discovered and the
+lid gone. There would be other lids. But the snap, the joy, was gone
+out of it. It would never again be the same, and the worst of all
+was the manner of the betrayal.
+</p>
+<p>
+He slept but little the remainder of the night; and, because unrest
+travels best from soul to soul at night, when the crowding emotions
+of the day give it place, the woman slept little also. She was
+thinking of the entrance to the stokehole, where one crouched under
+the bellies of furnaces, and where the engineer on duty stood on a
+pile of hot cinders. Toward morning her room grew very close: the
+air from the ventilator seemed to have ceased.
+</p>
+<p>
+Far down in the ship, in a breathless little cabin far aft, the Red
+Un kicked the Purser's boy and cried himself to sleep.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+V
+</p>
+<p>
+The old ship made a record the next night that lifted the day's run
+to four hundred and twenty. She was not a greyhound, you see.
+Generally speaking, she was a nine-day boat. She averaged well under
+four hundred miles. The fast boats went by her and slid over the
+edge of the sea, throwing her bits of news by wireless over a
+shoulder, so to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+The little girl's mother was not a good sailor. She sat almost all
+day in a steamer chair, reading or looking out over the rail. Each
+day she tore off the postal from the top of her menu and sent it to
+the girl's father. She missed him more than she had expected. He had
+become a habit; he was solid, dependable, loyal. He had never heard
+of the Chief.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Dear Daddy," she would write: "Having a splendid voyage so far, but
+wish you were here. The baby is having such a good time&mdash;so popular;
+and won two prizes to-day at the sports! With love, Lily."
+</p>
+<p>
+They were all rather like that. She would drop them in the mailbox,
+with a tug of tenderness for the man who worked at home. Then she
+would go back to her chair and watch the sea, and recall the heat of
+the engine room below, and wonder, wonder&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+It had turned warm again; the edges of the horizon were grey and at
+night a low mist lay over the water. Rooms were stifling, humid. The
+Red Un discarded pajamas and slept in his skin. The engine-room
+watch came up white round the lips and sprawled over the boat deck
+without speech. Things were going wrong in the Red Un's small world.
+The Chief hardly spoke to him&mdash;was grave and quiet, and ate almost
+nothing. The Red Un hated himself unspeakably and gave his share of
+the sovereign to the Purser's boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief was suffering from lack of exercise in the air as well as
+other things. The girl's mother was not sleeping&mdash;what with heat and
+the memories the sea had revived. On the fifth night out, while the
+ship slept, these two met on the deck in the darkness&mdash;two shadows
+out of the past. The deck was dark, but a ray from a window touched
+his face and she knew him. He had not needed light to know her;
+every line of her was written on his heart, and for him there was no
+one at home to hold in tenderness.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I think I knew you were here all the time," she said, and held out
+both hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief took one and dropped it. She belonged to the person at
+home. He had no thought of forgetting that!
+</p>
+<p>
+"I saw your name on the passenger list, but I have been very busy."
+He never lapsed into Scotch with her; she had not liked it. "Is
+your husband with you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"He could not come just now. I have my daughter."
+</p>
+<p>
+Her voice fell rather flat. The Chief could not think of anything to
+say. Her child, and not his! He was a one-woman man, you see&mdash;and
+this was the woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I have seen her," he said presently. "She's like you, Lily."
+</p>
+<p>
+That was a wrong move&mdash;the Lily; for it gave her courage to put her
+hand on his arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It is so long since we have met," she said wistfully. "Yesterday,
+after I saw the&mdash;the place where you lived and&mdash;and work&mdash;&mdash;" She
+choked; she was emotional, rather weak. Having made the situation
+she should have let it alone; but, after all, it is not what the
+woman is, but what the man thinks she is.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief stroked her fingers on his sleeve.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's not bad, Lily," he said. "It's a man's job. I like it."
+</p>
+<p>
+"I believe you had forgotten me entirely!"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief winced. "Isn't that the best thing you could wish me?" he
+said.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Are you happy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"'I ha' lived and I ha' worked!'" he quoted sturdily.
+</p>
+<p>
+Very shortly after that he left her; he made an excuse of being
+needed below and swung off, his head high.
+</p>
+<p class="sec">
+VI
+</p>
+<p>
+They struck the derelict when the mist was thickest, about two that
+morning. The Red Un was thrown out of his berth and landed, stark
+naked, on the floor. The Purser's boy was on the floor, too, in a
+tangle of bedding. There was a sickening silence for a moment,
+followed by the sound of opening doors and feet in the passage.
+There was very little speech. People ran for the decks. The Purser's
+boy ran with them.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un never thought of the deck. One of the axioms of the
+engine room is that of every man to his post in danger. The Red Un's
+post was with his Chief. His bare feet scorched on the steel ladders
+and the hot floor plates; he had on only his trousers, held up with
+a belt.
+</p>
+<p>
+The trouble was in the forward stokehole. Water was pouring in from
+the starboard side&mdash;was welling up through the floor plates. The
+wound was ghastly, fatal! The smouldering in the bunker had weakened
+resistance there and her necrosed ribs had given away. The Red Un,
+scurrying through the tunnel, was met by a maddened rush of trimmers
+and stokers. He went down under them and came up bruised, bleeding,
+battling for place.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You skunks!" he blubbered. "You crazy cowards! Come back and help!"
+</p>
+<p>
+A big stoker stopped and caught the boy's arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+"You come on!" he gasped. "The whole thing'll go in a minute. She'll
+go down by the head!"
+</p>
+<p>
+He tried to catch the boy up in his arms, but the Red Un struck him
+on the nose.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Let me go, you big stiff!" he cried, and kicked himself free.
+</p>
+<p>
+Not all the men had gone. They were working like fiends. It was up
+to the bulkhead now. If it held&mdash;if it only held long enough to get
+the passengers off!
+</p>
+<p>
+Not an engineer thought of leaving his place, though they knew,
+better even than the deck officers, how mortally the ship was hurt.
+They called to their aid every resource of a business that is
+nothing but emergencies. Engines plus wit, plus the grace of
+God&mdash;and the engines were useless. Wits, then, plus Providence. The
+pumps made no impression on the roaring flood; they lifted floor
+plates to strengthen the bulkheads and worked until it was death to
+work longer. Then, fighting for every foot, the little band
+retreated to the after stokehole. Lights were out forward. The Chief
+was the last to escape. He carried an oil lantern, and squeezed
+through the bulkhead door with a wall of water behind him.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Red Un cried out, but too late. The Chief, blinded by his
+lantern, had stumbled into the pit where a floor plate had been
+lifted. When he found his leg was broken he cried to them to go on
+and leave him, but they got him out somehow and carried him with
+them as they fought and retreated&mdash;fought and retreated. He was
+still the Chief; he lay on the floor propped up against something
+and directed the fight. The something he leaned against was the
+strained body of the Red Un, who held him up and sniffled shamefaced
+tears. She was down by the head already and rolling like a dying
+thing. When the water came into the after stokehole they carried the
+Chief into the engine room&mdash;the lights were going there.
+</p>
+<p>
+There had been no panic on deck. There were boats enough and the
+lights gave every one confidence. It was impossible to see the
+lights going and believe the ship doomed. Those who knew felt the
+list of the decks and hurried with the lowering of the boats; the
+ones who saw only the lights wished to go back to their cabins for
+clothing and money.
+</p>
+<p>
+The woman sat in the Quartermaster's boat, with her daughter in her
+arms, and stared at the ship. The Quartermaster said the engineers
+were still below and took off his cap. In her feeble way the woman
+tried to pray, and found only childish, futile things to say; but in
+her mind there was a great wonder&mdash;that they, who had once been life
+each to the other, should part thus, and that now, as ever, the good
+part was hers! The girl looked up into her mother's face.
+</p>
+<p>
+"The redhaired little boy, mother&mdash;do you think he is safe?"
+</p>
+<p>
+"First off, likely," mumbled the Quartermaster grimly.
+</p>
+<p>
+All the passengers were off. Under the mist the sea rose and fell
+quietly; the boats and rafts had drawn off to a safe distance. The
+Greek, who had humour as well as imagination, kept up the spirits of
+those about him while he held a child in his arms.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Shall we," he inquired gravely, "think you&mdash;shall we pay extra to
+the company for this excursion?"
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+The battle below had been fought and lost. It was of minutes now.
+The Chief had given the order: "Every one for himself!" Some of the
+men had gone, climbing to outer safety. The two Seconds had refused
+to leave the Chief. All lights were off by that time. The after
+stokehole was flooded and water rolled sickeningly in the
+engine-pits. Each second it seemed the ship must take its fearful
+dive into the quiet sea that so insistently reached up for her.
+With infinite labour the Seconds got the Chief up to the fiddley,
+twenty feet or less out of a hundred, and straight ladders instead
+of a steel staircase. Ten men could not have lifted him without
+gear, and there was not time!
+</p>
+<p>
+Then, because the rest was hopeless, they left him there, propped
+against the wall, with the lantern beside him. He shook hands with
+them; the Junior was crying; the Senior went last, and after he had
+gone up a little way he turned and came back.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I can't do it, Chief!" he said. "I'll stick it out with you." But
+the Chief drove him up, with the name of his wife and child. Far up
+the shaft he turned and looked down. The lantern glowed faintly
+below.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief sat alone on his grating. He was faint with pain. The
+blistering cylinders were growing cold; the steel floor beneath was
+awash. More ominous still, as the ship's head sank, came crackings
+and groanings from the engines below. They would fall through at the
+last, ripping out the bulkheads and carrying her down bow first.
+</p>
+<p>
+Pain had made the Chief rather dull. "'I ha' lived and I ha'
+worked!'" he said several times&mdash;and waited for the end. Into his
+stupor came the thought of the woman&mdash;and another thought of the
+Red Un. Both of them had sold him out, so to speak; but the woman
+had grown up with his heart and the boy was his by right of
+salvage&mdash;only he thought of the woman as he dreamed of her, not as
+he had seen her on the deck. He grew rather confused, after a time,
+and said: "I ha' loved and I ha' worked!"
+</p>
+<p>
+Just between life and death there comes a time when the fight seems
+a draw, or as if each side, exhausted, had called a truce. There is
+no more struggle, but it is not yet death. The ship lay so. The
+upreaching sea had not conquered. The result was inevitable, but not
+yet. And in the pause the Red Un came back, came crawling down the
+ladder, his indomitable spirit driving his craven little body.
+</p>
+<p>
+He had got as far as the boat and safety. The gripping devils of
+fear that had followed him up from the engine room still hung to his
+throat; but once on deck, with the silent men who were working
+against time and eternity, he found he could not do it. He was the
+Chief's boy&mdash;and the Chief was below and hurt!
+</p>
+<p>
+The truce still held. As the ship rolled, water washed about the
+foot of the ladder and lapped against the cylinders. The Chief tried
+desperately to drive him up to the deck and failed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"It's no place for you alone," said the Red Un. His voice had
+lost its occasional soprano note; the Red Un was a grown man.
+"I'm staying!" And after a hesitating moment he put his small,
+frightened paw on the Chief's arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was that, perhaps, that roused the Chief&mdash;not love of life, but
+love of the boy. To be drowned like a rat in a hole&mdash;that was not so
+bad when one had lived and worked. A man may not die better than
+where he has laboured; but this child, who would die with him rather
+than live alone! The Chief got up on his usable knee.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'm thinking, laddie," he said, "we'll go fighting anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+The boy went first, with the lantern. And, painful rung by painful
+rung, the Chief did the impossible, suffering hells as he moved. For
+each foot he gained the Red Un gained a foot&mdash;no more. What he would
+not have endured for himself, the Chief suffered for the boy.
+Halfway up, he clung, exhausted.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boy leaned down and held out his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I'll pull," he said. "Just hang on to me."
+</p>
+<p>
+Only once again did he speak during that endless climb in the
+silence of the dying ship, and what he said came in gasps. He was
+pulling indeed.
+</p>
+<p>
+"About&mdash;that airtrunk," he managed to say&mdash;"I'm&mdash;sorry, sir!"
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p>
+The dawn came up out of the sea, like resurrection. In the
+Quartermaster's boat the woman slept heavily, with tears on her
+cheeks. The Quartermaster looked infinitely old and very tired with
+living.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was the girl, after all, who spied them&mdash;two figures&mdash;one inert
+and almost lifeless; one very like a bobbing tomato, but revealing a
+blue face and two desperate eyes above a ship's lifebelt.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief came to an hour or so later and found the woman near, pale
+and tragic, and not so young as he had kept her in his heart. His
+eyes rested on hers a moment; the bitterness was gone, and the ache.
+He had died and lived again, and what was past was past.
+</p>
+<p>
+"I thought," said the woman tremulously&mdash;"all night I thought that
+you&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+The Chief, coming to full consciousness, gave a little cry. His
+eyes, travelling past hers, had happened on a small and languid
+youngster curled up at his feet, asleep. The woman drew back&mdash;as
+from an intrusion.
+</p>
+<p>
+As she watched, the Red Un yawned, stretched and sat up. His eyes
+met the Chief's, and between them passed such a look of
+understanding as made for the two one world, one victory!
+</p>
+
+<hr class="long" />
+
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Love Stories, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Love Stories, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Love Stories
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Release Date: March 26, 2005 [EBook #15473]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       THE WORKS OF
+   MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
+
+
+       LOVE STORIES
+
+
+
+THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY
+Publishers           NEW YORK
+
+
+PUBLISHED BY ARRANGEMENT
+WITH GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY.
+
+Copyright, 1919, By George H. Doran Company
+
+Copyright, 1912, 1913, 1916, by the Curtis Publishing Company
+Copyright, 1912, by The McClure Publications, Inc.
+Copyright, 1917, by The Metropolitan Magazine Co.
+
+
+
+
+   CONTENTS
+
+
+   I
+   TWENTY-TWO
+
+   II
+   JANE
+
+   III
+   IN THE PAVILION
+
+   IV
+   GOD'S FOOL
+
+   V
+   THE MIRACLE
+
+   VI
+   "ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!"
+
+   VII
+   THE GAME
+
+
+
+
+LOVE STORIES
+
+
+
+
+TWENTY-TWO
+
+
+I
+
+The Probationer's name was really Nella Jane Brown, but she was
+entered in the training school as N. Jane Brown. However, she meant
+when she was accepted to be plain Jane Brown. Not, of course, that
+she could ever be really plain.
+
+People on the outside of hospitals have a curious theory about
+nurses, especially if they are under twenty. They believe that they
+have been disappointed in love. They never think that they may
+intend to study medicine later on, or that they may think nursing is
+a good and honourable career, or that they may really like to care
+for the sick.
+
+The man in this story had the theory very hard.
+
+When he opened his eyes after the wall of the warehouse dropped, N.
+Jane Brown was sitting beside him. She had been practising counting
+pulses on him, and her eyes were slightly upturned and very earnest.
+
+There was a strong odour of burnt rags in the air, and the man
+sniffed. Then he put a hand to his upper lip--the right hand. She
+was holding his left.
+
+"Did I lose anything besides this?" he inquired. His little
+moustache was almost entirely gone. A gust of fire had accompanied
+the wall.
+
+"Your eyebrows," said Jane Brown.
+
+The man--he was as young for a man as Jane Brown was for a
+nurse--the man lay quite still for a moment. Then:
+
+"I'm sorry to undeceive you," he said. "But my right leg is off."
+
+He said it lightly, because that is the way he took things. But he
+had a strange singing in his ears.
+
+"I'm afraid it's broken. But you still have it." She smiled. She had
+a very friendly smile. "Have you any pain anywhere?"
+
+He was terribly afraid she would go away and leave him, so, although
+he was quite comfortable, owing to a hypodermic he had had, he
+groaned slightly. He was, at that time, not particularly interested
+in Jane Brown, but he did not want to be alone. He closed his eyes
+and said feebly:
+
+"Water!"
+
+She gave him a teaspoonful, bending over him and being careful not
+to spill it down his neck. Her uniform crackled when she moved. It
+had rather too much starch in it.
+
+The man, whose name was Middleton, closed his eyes. Owing to the
+morphia, he had at least a hundred things he wished to discuss. The
+trouble was to fix on one out of the lot.
+
+"I feel like a bit of conversation," he observed. "How about you?"
+
+Then he saw that she was busy again. She held an old-fashioned
+hunting-case watch in her hand, and her eyes were fixed on his
+chest. At each rise and fall of the coverlet her lips moved. Mr.
+Middleton, who was feeling wonderful, experimented. He drew four
+very rapid breaths, and four very slow ones. He was rewarded by
+seeing her rush to a table and write something on a sheet of yellow
+paper.
+
+"Resparation, very iregular," was what she wrote. She was not a
+particularly good speller.
+
+After that Mr. Middleton slept for what he felt was a day and a
+night. It was really ten minutes by the hunting-case watch. Just
+long enough for the Senior Surgical Interne, known in the school as
+the S.S.I., to wander in, feel his pulse, approve of Jane Brown, and
+go out.
+
+Jane Brown had risen nervously when he came in, and had proffered
+him the order book and a clean towel, as she had been instructed. He
+had, however, required neither. He glanced over the record, changed
+the spelling of "resparation," arranged his tie at the mirror, took
+another look at Jane Brown, and went out. He had not spoken.
+
+It was when his white-linen clad figure went out that Middleton
+wakened and found it was the same day. He felt at once like
+conversation, and he began immediately. But the morphia did a
+curious thing to him. He was never afterward able to explain it. It
+made him create. He lay there and invented for Jane Brown a
+fictitious person, who was himself. This person, he said, was a
+newspaper reporter, who had been sent to report the warehouse fire.
+He had got too close, and a wall had come down on him. He invented
+the newspaper, too, but, as Jane Brown had come from somewhere else,
+she did not notice this.
+
+In fact, after a time he felt that she was not as really interested
+as she might have been, so he introduced a love element. He was, as
+has been said, of those who believe that nurses go into hospitals
+because of being blighted. So he introduced a Mabel, suppressing her
+other name, and boasted, in a way he afterward remembered with
+horror, that Mabel was in love with him. She was, he related,
+something or other on his paper.
+
+At the end of two hours of babbling, a businesslike person in a
+cap--the Probationer wears no cap--relieved Jane Brown, and spilled
+some beef tea down his neck.
+
+Now, Mr. Middleton knew no one in that city. He had been motoring
+through, and he had, on seeing the warehouse burning, abandoned his
+machine for a closer view. He had left it with the engine running,
+and, as a matter of fact, it ran for four hours, when it died of
+starvation, and was subsequently interred in a city garage. However,
+he owned a number of cars, so he wasted no thought on that one. He
+was a great deal more worried about his eyebrows, and, naturally,
+about his leg.
+
+When he had been in the hospital ten hours it occurred to him to
+notify his family. But he put it off for two reasons: first, it
+would be a lot of trouble; second, he had no reason to think they
+particularly wanted to know. They all had such a lot of things to
+do, such as bridge and opening country houses and going to the
+Springs. They were really overwhelmed, without anything new, and
+they had never been awfully interested in him anyhow.
+
+He was not at all bitter about it.
+
+That night Mr. Middleton--but he was now officially "Twenty-two," by
+that system of metonymy which designates a hospital private patient
+by the number of his room--that night "Twenty-two" had rather a bad
+time, between his leg and his conscience. Both carried on
+disgracefully. His leg stabbed, and his conscience reminded him of
+Mabel, and that if one is going to lie, there should at least be a
+reason. To lie out of the whole cloth----!
+
+However, toward morning, with what he felt was the entire
+pharmacopoeia inside him, and his tongue feeling like a tar roof, he
+made up his mind to stick to his story, at least as far as the young
+lady with the old-fashioned watch was concerned. He had a sort of
+creed, which shows how young he was, that one should never explain
+to a girl.
+
+There was another reason still. There had been a faint sparkle in
+the eyes of the young lady with the watch while he was lying to her.
+He felt that she was seeing him in heroic guise, and the thought
+pleased him. It was novel.
+
+To tell the truth, he had been getting awfully bored with himself
+since he left college. Everything he tried to do, somebody else
+could do so much better. And he comforted himself with this, that he
+would have been a journalist if he could, or at least have published
+a newspaper. He knew what was wrong with about a hundred newspapers.
+
+He decided to confess about Mabel, but to hold fast to journalism.
+Then he lay in bed and watched for the Probationer to come back.
+
+However, here things began to go wrong. He did not see Jane Brown
+again. There were day nurses and night nurses and reliefs, and
+_internes_ and Staff and the Head Nurse and the First Assistant
+and--everything but Jane Brown. And at last he inquired for her.
+
+"The first day I was in here," he said to Miss Willoughby, "there
+was a little girl here without a cap. I don't know her name. But I
+haven't seen her since."
+
+Miss Willoughby, who, if she had been disappointed in love, had
+certainly had time to forget it, Miss Willoughby reflected.
+
+"Without a cap? Then it was only one of the probationers."
+
+"You don't remember which one?"
+
+But she only observed that probationers were always coming and
+going, and it wasn't worth while learning their names until they
+were accepted. And that, anyhow, probationers should never be sent
+to private patients, who are paying a lot and want the best.
+
+"Really," she added, "I don't know what the school is coming to.
+Since this war in Europe every girl wants to wear a uniform and be
+ready to go to the front if we have trouble. All sorts of silly
+children are applying. We have one now, on this very floor, not a
+day over nineteen."
+
+"Who is she?" asked Middleton. He felt that this was the one. She
+was so exactly the sort Miss Willoughby would object to.
+
+"Jane Brown," snapped Miss Willoughby. "A little, namby-pamby,
+mush-and-milk creature, afraid of her own shadow."
+
+Now, Jane Brown, at that particular moment, was sitting in her
+little room in the dormitory, with the old watch ticking on the
+stand so she would not over-stay her off duty. She was aching with
+fatigue from her head, with its smooth and shiny hair, to her feet,
+which were in a bowl of witch hazel and hot water. And she was
+crying over a letter she was writing.
+
+Jane Brown had just come from her first death. It had taken place in
+H ward, where she daily washed window-sills, and disinfected stands,
+and carried dishes in and out. And it had not been what she had
+expected. In the first place, the man had died for hours. She had
+never heard of this. She had thought of death as coming quickly--a
+glance of farewell, closing eyes, and--rest. But for hours and hours
+the struggle had gone on, a fight for breath that all the ward could
+hear. And he had not closed his eyes at all. They were turned up,
+and staring.
+
+The Probationer had suffered horribly, and at last she had gone
+behind the screen and folded her hands and closed her eyes, and said
+very low:
+
+"Dear God--please take him quickly."
+
+He had stopped breathing almost immediately. But that may have been
+a coincidence.
+
+However, she was not writing that home. Between gasps she was
+telling the humours of visiting day in the ward, and of how kind
+every one was to her, which, if not entirely true, was not entirely
+untrue. They were kind enough when they had time to be, or when they
+remembered her. Only they did not always remember her.
+
+She ended by saying that she was quite sure they meant to accept her
+when her three months was up. It was frightfully necessary that she
+be accepted.
+
+She sent messages to all the little town, which had seen her off
+almost _en masse_. And she added that the probationers received the
+regular first-year allowance of eight dollars a month, and she could
+make it do nicely--which was quite true, unless she kept on breaking
+thermometers when she shook them down.
+
+At the end she sent her love to everybody, including even worthless
+Johnny Fraser, who cut the grass and scrubbed the porches; and, of
+course, to Doctor Willie. He was called Doctor Willie because his
+father, who had taken him into partnership long ago, was Doctor
+Will. It never had seemed odd, although Doctor Willie was now
+sixty-five, and a saintly soul.
+
+Curiously enough, her letter was dated April first. Under that very
+date, and about that time of the day, a health officer in a near-by
+borough was making an entry regarding certain coloured gentlemen
+shipped north from Louisiana to work on a railroad. Opposite the
+name of one Augustus Baird he put a cross. This indicated that
+Augustus Baird had not been vaccinated.
+
+By the sixth of April "Twenty-two" had progressed from splints to a
+plaster cast, and was being most awfully bored. Jane Brown had not
+returned, and there was a sort of relentless maturity about the
+nurses who looked after him that annoyed him.
+
+Lying there, he had a good deal of time to study them, and somehow
+his recollection of the girl with the hunting-case watch did not
+seem to fit her in with these kindly and efficient women. He could
+not, for instance, imagine her patronising the Senior Surgical
+Interne in a deferential but unmistakable manner, or good-naturedly
+bullying the First Assistant, who was a nervous person in shoes too
+small for her, as to their days off duty.
+
+Twenty-two began to learn things about the hospital. For instance,
+the day nurse, while changing his pillow slips, would observe that
+Nineteen was going to be operated on that day, and close her lips
+over further information. But when the afternoon relief, while
+giving him his toothbrush after lunch, said there was a most
+interesting gall-stone case in nineteen, and the night nurse, in
+reply to a direct question, told Nineteen's name, but nothing else,
+Twenty-two had a fair working knowledge of the day's events.
+
+He seemed to learn about everything but Jane Brown. He knew when a
+new baby came, and was even given a glimpse of one, showing, he
+considered, about the colour and general contour of a maraschino
+cherry. And he learned soon that the god of the hospital is the
+Staff, although worship did not blind the nurses to their
+weaknesses. Thus the older men, who had been trained before the day
+of asepsis and modern methods, were revered but carefully watched.
+They would get out of scrubbing their hands whenever they could, and
+they hated their beards tied up with gauze. The nurses, keen,
+competent and kindly, but shrewd, too, looked after these elderly
+recalcitrants; loved a few, hated some, and presented to the world
+unbroken ranks for their defence.
+
+Twenty-two learned also the story of the First Assistant, who was in
+love with one of the Staff, who was married, and did not care for
+her anyhow. So she wore tight shoes, and was always beautifully
+waved, and read Browning.
+
+She had a way of coming in and saying brightly, as if to reassure
+herself:
+
+"Good morning, Twenty-two. Well, God is still in His heaven, and
+all's well with the world."
+
+Twenty-two got to feeling awfully uncomfortable about her. She used
+to bring him flowers and sit down a moment to rest her feet, which
+generally stung. And she would stop in the middle of a sentence and
+look into space, but always with a determined smile.
+
+He felt awfully uncomfortable. She was so neat and so efficient--and
+so tragic. He tried to imagine being hopelessly in love, and trying
+to live on husks of Browning. Not even Mrs. Browning.
+
+The mind is a curious thing. Suddenly, from thinking of Mrs.
+Browning, he thought of N. Jane Brown. Of course not by that
+ridiculous name. He had learned that she was stationed on that
+floor. And in the same flash he saw the Senior Surgical Interne
+swanking about in white ducks and just the object for a probationer
+to fall in love with. He lay there, and pulled the beginning of the
+new moustache, and reflected. The First Assistant was pinning a
+spray of hyacinth in her cap.
+
+"Look here," he said. "Why can't I be put in a wheeled chair and get
+about? One that I can manipulate myself," he added craftily.
+
+She demurred. Indeed, everybody demurred when he put it up to them.
+But he had gone through the world to the age of twenty-four, getting
+his own way about ninety-seven per cent. of the time. He got it this
+time, consisting of a new cast, which he named Elizabeth, and a
+roller-chair, and he spent a full day learning how to steer himself
+around.
+
+Then, on the afternoon of the third day, rolling back toward the
+elevator and the _terra incognita_ which lay beyond, he saw a sign.
+He stared at it blankly, because it interfered considerably with a
+plan he had in mind. The sign was of tin, and it said:
+
+"No private patients allowed beyond here."
+
+Twenty-two sat in his chair and stared at it. The plaster cast
+stretched out in front of him, and was covered by a grey blanket.
+With the exception of the trifling formality of trousers, he was
+well dressed in a sack coat, a shirt, waistcoat, and a sort of
+college-boy collar and tie, which one of the orderlies had purchased
+for him. His other things were in that extremely expensive English
+car which the city was storing.
+
+The plain truth is that Twenty-two was looking for Jane Brown. Since
+she had not come to him, he must go to her. He particularly wanted
+to set her right as to Mabel. And he felt, too, that that trick
+about respirations had not been entirely fair.
+
+He was, of course, not in the slightest degree in love with her. He
+had only seen her once, and then he had had a broken leg and a
+quarter grain of morphia and a burned moustache and no eyebrows left
+to speak of.
+
+But there was the sign. It was hung to a nail beside the elevator
+shaft. And far beyond, down the corridor, was somebody in a blue
+dress and no cap. It might be anybody, but again----
+
+Twenty-two looked around. The elevator had just gone down at its
+usual rate of a mile every two hours. In the convalescent parlour,
+where private patients _en negligee_ complained about the hospital
+food, the nurse in charge was making a new cap. Over all the
+hospital brooded an after-luncheon peace.
+
+Twenty-two wheeled up under the sign and considered his average of
+ninety-seven per cent. Followed in sequence these events: (a)
+Twenty-two wheeled back to the parlour, where old Mr. Simond's cane
+leaned against a table, and, while engaging that gentleman in
+conversation, possessed himself of the cane. (b) Wheeled back to the
+elevator. (c) Drew cane from beneath blanket. (d) Unhooked sign with
+cane and concealed both under blanket. (e) Worked his way back along
+the forbidden territory, past I and J until he came to H ward.
+
+Jane Brown was in H ward.
+
+She was alone, and looking very professional. There is nothing quite
+so professional as a new nurse. She had, indeed, reached a point
+where, if she took a pulse three times, she got somewhat similar
+results. There had been a time when they had run something like
+this: 56--80--120----
+
+Jane Brown was taking pulses. It was a visiting day, and all the
+beds had fresh white spreads, tucked in neatly at the foot. In the
+exact middle of the centre table with its red cloth, was a vase of
+yellow tulips. The sun came in and turned them to golden flame.
+
+Jane Brown was on duty alone and taking pulses with one eye while
+she watched the visitors with the other. She did the watching better
+than she did the pulses. For instance, she was distinctly aware that
+Stanislas Krzykolski's wife, in the bed next the end, had just slid
+a half-dozen greasy cakes, sprinkled with sugar, under his pillow.
+She knew, however, that not only grease but love was in those cakes,
+and she did not intend to confiscate them until after Mrs.
+Krzykolski had gone.
+
+More visitors came. Shuffling and self-conscious mill-workers,
+walking on their toes; draggled women; a Chinese boy; a girl with a
+rouged face and a too confident manner. A hum of conversation hung
+over the long room. The sunlight came in and turned to glory, not
+only the tulips and the red tablecloth, but also the brass basins,
+the fireplace fender, and the Probationer's hair.
+
+Twenty-two sat unnoticed in the doorway. A young girl, very lame,
+with a mandolin, had just entered the ward. In the little stir of
+her arrival, Twenty-two had time to see that Jane Brown was worth
+even all the trouble he had taken, and more. Really, to see Jane
+Brown properly, she should have always been seen in the sun. She was
+that sort.
+
+The lame girl sat down in the centre of the ward, and the buzz died
+away. She was not pretty, and she was very nervous. Twenty-two
+frowned a trifle.
+
+"Poor devils," he said to himself. But Jane Brown put away her
+hunting-case watch, and the lame girl swept the ward with soft eyes
+that had in them a pity that was almost a benediction.
+
+Then she sang. Her voice was like her eyes, very sweet and rather
+frightened, but tender. And suddenly something a little hard and
+selfish in Twenty-two began to be horribly ashamed of itself. And,
+for no earthly reason in the world, he began to feel like a cumberer
+of the earth. Before she had finished the first song, he was
+thinking that perhaps when he was getting about again, he might run
+over to France for a few months in the ambulance service. A fellow
+really ought to do his bit.
+
+At just about that point Jane Brown turned and saw him. And although
+he had run all these risks to get to her, and even then had an
+extremely cold tin sign lying on his knee under the blanket, at
+first she did not know him. The shock of this was almost too much
+for him. In all sorts of places people were glad to see him,
+especially women. He was astonished, but it was good for him.
+
+She recognised him almost immediately, however, and flushed a
+little, because she knew he had no business there. She was awfully
+bound up with rules.
+
+"I came back on purpose to see you," said Twenty-two, when at last
+the lame girl had limped away. "Because, that day I came in and you
+looked after me, you know, I--must have talked a lot of nonsense."
+
+"Morphia makes some people talk," she said. It was said in an exact
+copy of the ward nurse's voice, a frightfully professional and
+impersonal tone.
+
+"But," said Twenty-two, stirring uneasily, "I said a lot that wasn't
+true. You may have forgotten, but I haven't. Now that about a girl
+named Mabel, for instance----"
+
+He stirred again, because, after all, what did it matter what he had
+said? She was gazing over the ward. She was not interested in him.
+She had almost forgotten him. And as he stirred Mr. Simond's cane
+fell out. It was immediately followed by the tin sign, which only
+gradually subsided, face up, on the bare floor, in a slowly
+diminishing series of crashes.
+
+Jane Brown stooped and picked them both up and placed them on his
+lap. Then, very stern, she marched out of the ward into the
+corridor, and there subsided into quiet hysterics of mirth.
+Twenty-two, who hated to be laughed at, followed her in the chair,
+looking extremely annoyed.
+
+"What else was I to do?" he demanded, after a time. "Of course, if
+you report it, I'm gone."
+
+"What do you intend to do with it now?" she asked. All her
+professional manner had gone, and she looked alarmingly young.
+
+"If I put it back, I'll only have to steal it again. Because I am
+absolutely bored to death in that room of mine. I have played a
+thousand games of solitaire."
+
+The Probationer looked around. There was no one in sight.
+
+"I should think," she suggested, "that if you slipped it behind that
+radiator, no one would ever know about it."
+
+Fortunately, the ambulance gong set up a clamour below the window
+just then, and no one heard one of the hospital's most cherished
+rules going, as one may say, into the discard.
+
+The Probationer leaned her nose against the window and looked down.
+A coloured man was being carried in on a stretcher. Although she did
+not know it--indeed, never did know it--the coloured gentleman in
+question was one Augustus Baird.
+
+Soon afterward Twenty-two squeaked--his chair needed
+oiling--squeaked back to his lonely room and took stock. He found
+that he was rid of Mabel, but was still a reporter, hurt in doing
+his duty. He had let this go because he saw that duty was a sort of
+fetish with the Probationer. And since just now she liked him for
+what she thought he was, why not wait to tell her until she liked
+him for himself?
+
+He hoped she was going to like him, because she was going to see him
+a lot. Also, he liked her even better than he had remembered that he
+did. She had a sort of thoroughbred look that he liked. And he liked
+the way her hair was soft and straight and shiny. And he liked the
+way she was all business and no nonsense. And the way she counted
+pulses, with her lips moving and a little frown between her
+eyebrows. And he liked her for being herself--which is, after all,
+the reason why most men like the women they like, and extremely
+reasonable.
+
+The First Assistant loaned him Browning that afternoon, and he read
+"Pippa Passes." He thought Pippa must have looked like the
+Probationer.
+
+The Head was a bit querulous that evening. The Heads of Training
+Schools get that way now and then, although they generally reveal it
+only to the First Assistant. They have to do so many irreconcilable
+things, such as keeping down expenses while keeping up requisitions,
+and remembering the different sorts of sutures the Staff likes, and
+receiving the Ladies' Committee, and conducting prayers and
+lectures, and knowing by a swift survey of a ward that the stands
+have been carbolised and all the toe-nails cut. Because it is
+amazing the way toe-nails grow in bed.
+
+The Head would probably never have come out flatly, but she had a
+wretched cold, and the First Assistant was giving her a mustard
+footbath, which was very hot. The Head sat up with a blanket over
+her shoulders, and read lists while her feet took on the blush of
+ripe apples. And at last she said:
+
+"How is that Probationer with the ridiculous name getting along?"
+
+The First Assistant poured in more hot water.
+
+"N. Jane?" she asked. "Well, she's a nice little thing, and she
+seems willing. But, of course----"
+
+The Head groaned.
+
+"Nineteen!" she said. "And no character at all. I detest fluttery
+people. She flutters the moment I go into the ward."
+
+The First Assistant sat back and felt of her cap, which was of
+starched tulle and was softening a bit from the steam. She felt a
+thrill of pity for the Probationer. She, too, had once felt fluttery
+when the Head came in.
+
+"She is very anxious to stay," she observed. "She works hard, too.
+I----"
+
+"She has no personality, no decision," said the Head, and sneezed
+twice. She was really very wretched, and so she was unfair. "She is
+pretty and sweet. But I cannot run my training school on prettiness
+and sweetness. Has Doctor Harvard come in yet?"
+
+"I--I think not," said the First Assistant. She looked up quickly,
+but the Head was squeezing a lemon in a cup of hot water beside her.
+
+Now, while the Head was having a footbath, and Twenty-two was having
+a stock-taking, and Augustus Baird was having his symptoms recorded,
+Jane Brown was having a shock.
+
+She heard an unmistakable shuffling of feet in the corridor.
+
+Sounds take on much significance in a hospital, and probationers
+study them, especially footsteps. It gives them a moment sometimes
+to think what to do next.
+
+_Internes_, for instance, frequently wear rubber soles on their
+white shoes and have a way of slipping up on one. And the engineer
+goes on a half run, generally accompanied by the clanking of a tool
+or two. And the elevator man runs, too, because generally the bell
+is ringing. And ward patients shuffle about in carpet slippers, and
+the pharmacy clerk has a brisk young step, inclined to be jaunty.
+
+But it is the Staff which is always unmistakable. It comes along the
+corridor deliberately, inexorably. It plants its feet firmly and
+with authority. It moves with the inevitability of fate, with the
+pride of royalty, with the ease of the best made-to-order boots. The
+ring of a Staff member's heel on a hospital corridor is the most
+authoritative sound on earth. He may be the gentlest soul in the
+world, but he will tread like royalty.
+
+But this was not Staff. Jane Brown knew this sound, and it filled
+her with terror. It was the scuffling of four pairs of feet,
+carefully instructed not to keep step. It meant, in other words, a
+stretcher. But perhaps it was not coming to her. Ah, but it was!
+
+Panic seized Jane Brown. She knew there were certain things to do,
+but they went out of her mind like a cat out of a cellar window.
+However, the ward was watching. It had itself, generally speaking,
+come in feet first. It knew the procedure. So, instructed by low
+voices from the beds around, Jane Brown feverishly tore the spread
+off the emergency bed and drew it somewhat apart from its fellows.
+Then she stood back and waited.
+
+Came in four officers from the police patrol. Came in the Senior
+Surgical Interne. Came two convalescents from the next ward to stare
+in at the door. Came the stretcher, containing a quiet figure under
+a grey blanket.
+
+Twenty-two, at that exact moment, was putting a queen on a ten spot
+and pretending there is nothing wrong about cheating oneself.
+
+In a very short time the quiet figure was on the bed, and the Senior
+Surgical Interne was writing in the order book: "Prepare for
+operation."
+
+Jane Brown read it over his shoulder, which is not etiquette.
+
+"But--I can't," she quavered. "I don't know how. I won't touch him.
+He's--he's bloody!"
+
+Then she took another look at the bed and she saw--Johnny Fraser.
+
+Now Johnny had, in his small way, played a part in the Probationer's
+life, such as occasionally scrubbing porches or borrowing a half
+dollar or being suspected of stealing the eggs from the henhouse.
+But _that_ Johnny Fraser had been a wicked, smiling imp, much given
+to sitting in the sun.
+
+Here lay another Johnny Fraser, a quiet one, who might never again
+feel the warm earth through his worthless clothes on his worthless
+young body. A Johnny of closed eyes and slow, noisy breathing.
+
+"Why, Johnny!" said the Probationer, in a strangled voice.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne was interested.
+
+"Know him?" he said.
+
+"He is a boy from home." She was still staring at this quiet,
+un-impudent figure.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne eyed her with an eye that was only
+partially professional. Then he went to the medicine closet and
+poured a bit of aromatic ammonia into a glass.
+
+"Sit down and drink this," he said, in a very masculine voice. He
+liked to feel that he could do something for her. Indeed, there was
+something almost proprietary in the way he took her pulse.
+
+Some time after the early hospital supper that evening Twenty-two,
+having oiled his chair with some olive oil from his tray, made a
+clandestine trip through the twilight of the corridor back of the
+elevator shaft. To avoid scandal he pretended interest in other
+wards, but he gravitated, as a needle to the pole, to H. And there
+he found the Probationer, looking rather strained, and mothering a
+quiet figure on a bed.
+
+He was a trifle puzzled at her distress, for she made no secret of
+Johnny's status in the community. What he did not grasp was that
+Johnny Fraser was a link between this new and rather terrible world
+of the hospital and home. It was not Johnny alone, it was Johnny
+scrubbing a home porch and doing it badly, it was Johnny in her
+father's old clothes, it was Johnny fishing for catfish in the
+creek, or lending his pole to one of the little brothers whose
+pictures were on her table in the dormitory.
+
+Twenty-two felt a certain depression. He reflected rather grimly
+that he had been ten days missing and that no one had apparently
+given a hang whether he turned up or not.
+
+"Is he going to live?" he inquired. He could see that the ward nurse
+had an eye on him, and was preparing for retreat.
+
+"O yes," said Jane Brown. "I think so now. The _interne_ says they
+have had a message from Doctor Willie. He is coming." There was a
+beautiful confidence in her tone.
+
+Things moved very fast with the Probationer for the next twenty-four
+hours. Doctor Willie came, looking weary but smiling benevolently.
+Jane Brown met him in a corridor and kissed him, as, indeed, she had
+been in the habit of doing since her babyhood.
+
+"Where is the young rascal?" said Doctor Willie. "Up to his old
+tricks, Nellie, and struck by a train." He put a hand under her
+chin, which is never done to the members of the training school in a
+hospital, and searched her face with his kind old eyes. "Well, how
+does it go, Nellie?"
+
+Jane Brown swallowed hard.
+
+"All right," she managed. "They want to operate, Doctor Willie."
+
+"Tut!" he said. "Always in a hurry, these hospitals. We'll wait a
+while, I think."
+
+"Is everybody well at home?"
+
+It had come to her, you see, what comes to every nurse once in her
+training--the thinness of the veil, the terror of calamity, the fear
+of death.
+
+"All well. And----" he glanced around. Only the Senior Surgical
+Interne was in sight, and he was out of hearing. "Look here,
+Nellie," he said, "I've got a dozen fresh eggs for you in my
+satchel. Your mother sent them."
+
+She nearly lost her professional manner again then. But she only
+asked him to warn the boys about automobiles and riding on the backs
+of wagons.
+
+Had any one said Twenty-two to her, she would not have known what
+was meant. Not just then, anyhow.
+
+In the doctors' room that night the Senior Surgical Interne lighted
+a cigarette and telephoned to the operating room.
+
+"That trephining's off," he said, briefly.
+
+Then he fell to conversation with the Senior Medical, who was rather
+worried about a case listed on the books as Augustus Baird,
+coloured.
+
+Twenty-two did not sleep very well that night. He needed exercise,
+he felt. But there was something else. Miss Brown had been just a
+shade too ready to accept his explanation about Mabel, he felt, so
+ready that he feared she had been more polite than sincere. Probably
+she still believed there was a Mabel. Not that it mattered, except
+that he hated to make a fool of himself. He roused once in the night
+and was quite sure he heard her voice down the corridor. He knew
+this must be wrong, because they would not make her work all day and
+all night, too.
+
+But, as it happened, it _was_ Jane Brown. The hospital provided
+plenty of sleeping time, but now and then there was a slip-up and
+somebody paid. There had been a night operation, following on a busy
+day, and the operating-room nurses needed help. Out of a sound sleep
+the night Assistant had summoned Jane Brown to clean instruments.
+
+At five o'clock that morning she was still sitting on a stool beside
+a glass table, polishing instruments which made her shiver. All
+around were things that were spattered with blood. But she looked
+anything but fluttery. She was a very grim and determined young
+person just then, and professional beyond belief. The other things,
+like washing window-sills and cutting toe-nails, had had no
+significance. But here she was at last on the edge of mercy. Some
+one who might have died had lived that night because of this room,
+and these instruments, and willing hands.
+
+She hoped she would always have willing hands.
+
+She looked very pale at breakfast the next morning, and rather
+older. Also she had a new note of authority in her voice when she
+telephoned the kitchen and demanded H ward's soft-boiled eggs. She
+washed window-sills that morning again, but no longer was there
+rebellion in her soul. She was seeing suddenly how the hospital
+required all these menial services, which were not menial at all but
+only preparation; that there were little tasks and big ones, and one
+graduated from the one to the other.
+
+She took some flowers from the ward bouquet and put them beside
+Johnny's bed--Johnny, who was still lying quiet, with closed eyes.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne did a dressing in the ward that morning.
+He had been in to see Augustus Baird, and he felt uneasy. He vented
+it on Tony, the Italian, with a stiletto thrust in his neck, by
+jerking at the adhesive. Tony wailed, and Jane Brown, who was the
+"dirty" nurse--which does not mean what it appears to mean, but is
+the person who receives the soiled dressings--Jane Brown gritted her
+teeth.
+
+"Keep quiet," said the S.S.I., who was a good fellow, but had never
+been stabbed in the neck for running away with somebody else's wife.
+
+"Eet hurt," said Tony. "Ow."
+
+Jane Brown turned very pink.
+
+"Why don't you let me cut it off properly?" she said, in a strangled
+tone.
+
+The total result of this was that Jane Brown was reprimanded by the
+First Assistant, and learned some things about ethics.
+
+"But," she protested, "it was both stupid and cruel. And if I know I
+am right----"
+
+"How are you to know you are right?" demanded the First Assistant,
+crossly. Her feet were stinging. "'A little knowledge is a dangerous
+thing.'" This was a favorite quotation of hers, although not
+Browning. "Nurses in hospitals are there to carry out the doctor's
+orders. Not to think or to say what they think unless they are
+asked. To be intelligent, but----"
+
+"But not too intelligent!" said the Probationer. "I see."
+
+This was duly reported to the Head, who observed that it was merely
+what she had expected and extremely pert. Her cold was hardly any
+better.
+
+It was taking the Probationer quite a time to realise her own total
+lack of significance in all this. She had been accustomed to men who
+rose when a woman entered a room and remained standing as long as
+she stood. And now she was in a new world, where she had to rise and
+remain standing while a cocky youth in ducks, just out of medical
+college, sauntered in with his hands in his pockets and took a
+_boutonniere_ from the ward bouquet.
+
+It was probably extremely good for her.
+
+She was frightfully tired that day, and toward evening the little
+glow of service began to fade. There seemed to be nothing to do for
+Johnny but to wait. Doctor Willie had seemed to think that nature
+would clear matters up there, and had requested no operation. She
+smoothed beds and carried cups of water and broke another
+thermometer. And she put the eggs from home in the ward pantry and
+made egg-nogs of them for Stanislas Krzykolski, who was
+unaccountably upset as to stomach.
+
+She had entirely forgotten Twenty-two. He had stayed away all that
+day, in a sort of faint hope that she would miss him. But she had
+not. She was feeling rather worried, to tell the truth. For a Staff
+surgeon going through the ward, had stopped by Johnny's bed and
+examined the pupils of his eyes, and had then exchanged a glance
+with the Senior Surgical Interne that had perplexed her.
+
+In the chapel at prayers that evening all around her the nurses sat
+and rested, their tired hands folded in their laps. They talked a
+little among themselves, but it was only a buzzing that reached the
+Probationer faintly. Some one near was talking about something that
+was missing.
+
+"Gone?" she said. "Of course it is gone. The bath-room man reported
+it to me and I went and looked."
+
+"But who in the world would take it?"
+
+"My dear," said the first speaker, "who _does_ take things in a
+hospital, anyhow? Only--a tin sign!"
+
+It was then that the Head came in. She swept in; her grey gown, her
+grey hair gave her a majesty that filled the Probationer with awe.
+Behind her came the First Assistant with the prayer-book and hymnal.
+The Head believed in form.
+
+Jane Brown offered up a little prayer that night for Johnny Fraser,
+and another little one without words, that Doctor Willie was right.
+She sat and rested her weary young body, and remembered how Doctor
+Willie was loved and respected, and the years he had cared for the
+whole countryside. And the peace of the quiet room, with the Easter
+lilies on the tiny altar, brought rest to her.
+
+It was when prayers were over that the Head made her announcement.
+She rose and looked over the shadowy room, where among the rows of
+white caps only the Probationer's head was uncovered, and she said:
+
+"I have an announcement to make to the training school. One which I
+regret, and which will mean a certain amount of hardship and
+deprivation.
+
+"A case of contagion has been discovered in one of the wards, and it
+has been considered necessary to quarantine the hospital. The doors
+were closed at seven-thirty this evening."
+
+
+II
+
+Considering that he could not get out anyhow, Twenty-two took the
+news of the quarantine calmly. He reflected that, if he was shut in,
+Jane Brown was shut in also. He had a wicked hope, at the beginning,
+that the Senior Surgical Interne had been shut out, but at nine
+o'clock that evening that young gentleman showed up at the door of
+his room, said "Cheer-o," came in, helped himself to a cigarette,
+gave a professional glance at Twenty-two's toes, which were all that
+was un-plastered of the leg, and departing threw back over his
+shoulder his sole conversational effort:
+
+"Hell of a mess, isn't it?"
+
+Twenty-two took up again gloomily the book he was reading, which was
+on Diseases of the Horse, from the hospital library. He was in the
+midst of Glanders.
+
+He had, during most of that day, been making up his mind to let his
+family know where he was. He did not think they cared, particularly.
+He had no illusions about that. But there was something about Jane
+Brown which made him feel like doing the decent thing. It annoyed
+him frightfully, but there it was. She was so eminently the sort of
+person who believed in doing the decent thing.
+
+So, about seven o'clock, he had sent the orderly out for stamps and
+paper. He imagined that Jane Brown would not think writing home on
+hospital stationery a good way to break bad news. But the orderly
+had stopped for a chat at the engine house, and had ended by playing
+a game of dominoes. When, at ten o'clock, he had returned to the
+hospital entrance, the richer by a quarter and a glass of beer, he
+had found a strange policeman on the hospital steps, and the doors
+locked.
+
+The quarantine was on.
+
+Now there are different sorts of quarantines. There is the sort
+where a trained nurse and the patient are shut up in a room and
+bath, and the family only opens the door and peers in. And there is
+the sort where the front door has a placard on it, and the family
+goes in and out the back way, and takes a street-car to the office,
+the same as usual. And there is the hospital quarantine, which is
+the real thing, because hospitals are expected to do things
+thoroughly.
+
+So our hospital was closed up as tight as a jar of preserves. There
+were policemen at all the doors, quite suddenly. They locked the
+doors and put the keys in their pockets, and from that time on they
+opened them only to pass things in, such as newspapers or milk or
+groceries or the braver members of the Staff. But not to let
+anything out--except the Staff. Supposedly Staffs do not carry
+germs.
+
+And, indeed, even the Staff was not keen about entering. It thought
+of a lot of things it ought to do about visiting time, and
+prescribed considerably over the telephone.
+
+At first there was a great deal of confusion, because quite a number
+of people had been out on various errands when it happened. And they
+came back, and protested to the office that they had only their
+uniforms on under their coats, and three dollars; or their slippers
+and no hats. Or that they would sue the city. One or two of them got
+quite desperate and tried to crawl up the fire-escape, but failed.
+
+This is of interest chiefly because it profoundly affected Jane
+Brown. Miss McAdoo, her ward nurse, had debated whether to wash her
+hair that evening, or to take a walk. She had decided on the walk,
+and was therefore shut out, along with the Junior Medical, the
+kitchen cat, the Superintendent's mother-in-law and six other
+nurses.
+
+The next morning the First Assistant gave Jane Brown charge of H
+ward.
+
+"It's very irregular," she said. "I don't exactly know--you have
+only one bad case, haven't you?"
+
+"Only Johnny."
+
+The First Assistant absent-mindedly ran a finger over the top of a
+table, and examined it for dust.
+
+"Of course," she said, "it's a great chance for you. Show that you
+can handle this ward, and you are practically safe."
+
+Jane Brown drew a long breath and stood up very straight. Then she
+ran her eye over the ward. There was something vaguely reminiscent
+of Miss McAdoo in her glance.
+
+Twenty-two made three brief excursions back along the corridor
+that first day of the quarantine. But Jane Brown was extremely
+professional and very busy. There was an air of discipline over the
+ward. Let a man but so much as turn over in bed and show an inch of
+blanket, and she pounced on the bed and reduced it to the most
+horrible neatness. All the beds looked as if they had been made up
+with a carpenter's square.
+
+On the third trip, however, Jane Brown was writing at the table.
+Twenty-two wheeled himself into the doorway and eyed her with
+disapproval.
+
+"What do you mean by sitting down?" he demanded sarcastically.
+"Don't you know that now you are in charge you ought to keep
+moving?"
+
+To which she replied, absently:
+
+"Three buttered toasts, two dry toasts, six soft boiled eggs, and
+twelve soups." She was working on the diet slips.
+
+Then she smiled at him. They were quite old friends already. It is
+curious about love and friendship and all those kindred emotions.
+They do not grow nearly so fast when people are together as when
+they are apart. It is an actual fact that the growth of many an
+intimacy is checked by meetings. Because when people are apart it is
+what they _are_ that counts, and when they are together it is what
+they do and say and look like. Many a beautiful affair has been
+ruined because, just as it was going along well, the principals met
+again.
+
+However, all this merely means that Twenty-two and Jane Brown were
+infinitely closer friends than four or five meetings really
+indicates.
+
+The ward was very quiet on this late afternoon call of his save for
+Johnny's heavy breathing. There is a quiet hour in a hospital,
+between afternoon temperatures and the ringing of the bell which
+means that the suppers for the wards are on their way--a quiet hour
+when over the long rows of beds broods the peace of the ending day.
+
+It is a melancholy hour, too, because from the streets comes faintly
+the echo of feet hurrying home, the eager trot of a horse bound
+stableward. To those in the eddy that is the ward comes at this time
+a certain heaviness of spirit. Poor thing though home may have been,
+they long for it.
+
+In H ward that late afternoon there was a wave of homesickness in
+the air, and on the part of those men who were up and about, who
+shuffled up and down the ward in flapping carpet slippers, an
+inclination to mutiny.
+
+"How did they take it?" Twenty-two inquired. She puckered her
+eyebrows.
+
+"They don't like it," she confessed. "Some of them were about ready
+to go home and it--_Tony!_" she called sharply.
+
+For Tony, who had been cunningly standing by the window leading to a
+fire-escape, had flung the window up and was giving unmistakable
+signs of climbing out and returning to the other man's wife.
+
+"Tony!" she called, and ran. Tony scrambled up on the sill. A sort
+of titter ran over the ward and Tony, now on the platform outside,
+waved a derisive hand through the window.
+
+"Good-bye, mees!" he said, and--disappeared.
+
+It was not a very dramatic thing, after all. It is chiefly
+significant for its effect on Twenty-two, who was obliged to sit
+frozen with horror and cursing his broken leg, while Jane Brown
+raced a brown little Italian down the fire-escape and caught him at
+the foot of it. Tony took a look around. The courtyard gates were
+closed and a policeman sat outside on a camp-stool reading the
+newspaper. Tony smiled sheepishly and surrendered.
+
+Some seconds later Tony and Jane Brown appeared on the platform
+outside. Jane Brown had Tony by the ear, and she stopped long enough
+outside to exchange the ear for his shoulder, by which she shook
+him, vigorously.
+
+Twenty-two turned his chair around and wheeled himself back to his
+room. He was filled with a cold rage--because she might have fallen
+on the fire-escape and been killed; because he had not been able to
+help her; because she was there, looking after the derelicts of
+life, when the world was beautiful outside, and she was young;
+because to her he was just Twenty-two and nothing more.
+
+He had seen her exactly six times.
+
+Jane Brown gave the ward a little talk that night before the night
+nurse reported. She stood in the centre of the long room, beside the
+tulips, and said that she was going to be alone there, and that she
+would have to put the situation up to their sense of honour. If they
+tried to escape, they would hurt her. Also they would surely be
+caught and brought back. And, because she believed in a combination
+of faith and deeds, she took three nails and the linen-room
+flatiron, and nailed shut the window onto the fire-escape.
+
+After that, she brushed crumbs out of the beds with a whiskbroom and
+rubbed a few backs with alcohol, and smoothed the counterpanes, and
+hung over Johnny's unconscious figure for a little while, giving
+motherly pats to his flat pillow and worrying considerably because
+there was so little about him to remind her of the Johnny she knew
+at home.
+
+After that she sat down and made up her records for the night nurse.
+The ward understood, and was perfectly good, trying hard not to muss
+its pillows or wrinkle the covers. And struggling, too, with a new
+idea. They were prisoners. No more release cards would brighten the
+days. For an indefinite period the old Frenchman would moan at
+night, and Bader the German would snore, and the Chinaman would
+cough. Indefinitely they would eat soft-boiled eggs and rice and
+beef-tea and cornstarch.
+
+The ward felt extremely low in its mind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night the Senior Surgical Interne went in to play cribbage with
+Twenty-two, and received a lecture on leaving a young girl alone in
+H with a lot of desperate men. They both grew rather heated over the
+discussion and forgot to play cribbage at all. Twenty-two lay awake
+half the night, because he had seen clearly that the Senior Surgical
+Interne was interested in Jane Brown also, and would probably loaf
+around H most of the time since there would be no new cases now. It
+was a crowning humiliation to have the night nurse apply to the
+Senior Surgical Interne for a sleeping powder for him!
+
+Toward morning he remembered that he had promised to write out from
+memory one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese for the First
+Assistant, and he turned on the light and jotted down two lines of
+it. He wrote:
+
+          "_For we two look two ways, and cannot shine
+            With the same sunlight on our brow and hair._"--
+
+And then sat up in bed for half an hour looking at it because he was
+so awfully afraid it was true of Jane Brown and himself. Not, of
+course, that he wanted to shine at all. It was the looking two ways
+that hurt.
+
+The next evening the nurses took their airing on the roof, which was
+a sooty place with a parapet, and in the courtyard, which was an
+equally sooty place with a wispy fountain. And because the whole
+situation was new, they formed in little groups on the wooden
+benches and sang, hands folded on white aprons, heads lifted, eyes
+upturned to where, above the dimly lighted windows, the stars peered
+palely through the smoke.
+
+The S.S.I. sauntered out. He had thought he saw the Probationer from
+his window, and in the new relaxation of discipline he saw a chance
+to join her. But the figure he had thought he recognised proved to
+be some one else, and he fell to wandering alone up and down the
+courtyard.
+
+He was trying to work out this problem: would the advantage of
+marrying early and thus being considered eligible for certain
+cases, offset the disadvantage of the extra expense?
+
+He decided to marry early and hang the expense.
+
+The days went by, three, then four, and a little line of tension
+deepened around Jane Brown's mouth. Perhaps it has not been
+mentioned that she had a fighting nose, short and straight, and a
+wistful mouth. For Johnny Fraser was still lying in a stupor.
+
+Jane Brown felt that something was wrong. Doctor Willie came in once
+or twice, making the long trip without complaint and without hope of
+payment. All his busy life he had worked for the sake of work, and
+not for reward. He called her "Nellie," to the delight of the ward,
+which began to love him, and he spent a long hour each time by
+Johnny's bed. But the Probationer was quick to realise that the
+Senior Surgical Interne disapproved of him.
+
+That young man had developed a tendency to wander into H at odd
+hours, and sit on the edge of a table, leaving Jane Brown divided
+between proper respect for an _interne_ and fury over the wrinkling
+of her table covers. It was during one of these visits that she
+spoke of Doctor Willie.
+
+"Because he is a country practitioner," she said, "you--you
+patronise him."
+
+"Not at all," said the Senior Surgical Interne. "Personally I like
+him immensely."
+
+"Personally!"
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne waved a hand toward Johnny's bed.
+
+"Look there," he said. "You don't think that chap's getting any
+better, do you?"
+
+"If," said Jane Brown, with suspicious quiet, "if you think you know
+more than a man who has practised for forty years, and saved more
+people than you ever saw, why don't you tell him so?"
+
+There is really no defence for this conversation. Discourse between
+a probationer and an _interne_ is supposed to be limited to yea,
+yea, and nay, nay. But the circumstances were unusual.
+
+"Tell him!" exclaimed the Senior Surgical Interne, "and be called
+before the Executive Committee and fired! Dear girl, I am
+inexpressibly flattered, but the voice of an _interne_ in a hospital
+is the voice of one crying in the wilderness."
+
+Twenty-two, who was out on crutches that day for the first time, and
+was looking very big and extremely awkward, Twenty-two looked back
+from the elevator shaft and scowled. He seemed always to see a flash
+of white duck near the door of H ward.
+
+To add to his chagrin, the Senior Surgical Interne clapped him on
+the back in congratulation a moment later, and nearly upset him. He
+had intended to go back to the ward and discuss a plan he had, but
+he was very morose those days and really not a companionable person.
+He stumped back to his room and resolutely went to bed.
+
+There he lay for a long time looking at the ceiling, and saying, out
+of his misery, things not necessary to repeat.
+
+So Twenty-two went to bed and sulked, refusing supper, and having
+the word "Vicious" marked on his record by the nurse, who hoped he
+would see it some time. And Jane Brown went and sat beside a
+strangely silent Johnny, and worried. And the Senior Surgical
+Interne went down to the pharmacy and thereby altered a number of
+things.
+
+The pharmacy clerk had been shaving--his own bedroom was dark--and
+he saw the Senior Surgical Interne in the little mirror hung on the
+window frame.
+
+"Hello," he said, over the soap. "Shut the door."
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne shut the door, and then sniffed. "Smells
+like a bar-room," he commented.
+
+The pharmacy clerk shaved the left angle of his jaw, and then turned
+around.
+
+"Little experiment of mine," he explained. "Simple syrup, grain
+alcohol, a dash of cochineal for colouring, and some flavouring
+extract. It's an imitation cordial. Try it."
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne was not a drinker, but he was willing
+to try anything once. So he secured a two-ounce medicine glass, and
+filled it.
+
+"Looks nice," he commented, and tasted it. "It's not bad."
+
+"Not bad!" said the pharmacy clerk. "You'd pay four dollars a bottle
+for that stuff in a hotel. Actual cost here, about forty cents."
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne sat down and stretched out his legs. He
+had the glass in his hand.
+
+"It's rather sweet," he said. "But it looks pretty." He took another
+sip.
+
+After he had finished it, he got to thinking things over. He felt
+about seven feet tall and very important, and not at all like a
+voice crying in the wilderness. He had a strong inclination to go
+into the Superintendent's office and tell him where he went wrong in
+running the institution--which he restrained. And another to go up
+to H and tell Jane Brown the truth about Johnny Fraser--which he
+yielded to.
+
+On the way up he gave the elevator man a cigar.
+
+He was very explicit with Jane Brown.
+
+"Your man's wrong, that's all there is about it," he said. "I can't
+say anything and you can't. But he's wrong. That's an operative
+case. The Staff knows it."
+
+"Then, why doesn't the Staff do it?"
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne was still feeling very tall. He looked
+down at her from a great distance.
+
+"Because, dear child," he said, "it's your man's case. You ought to
+know enough about professional ethics for that."
+
+He went away, then, and had a violent headache, which he blamed on
+confinement and lack of exercise. But he had sowed something in the
+Probationer's mind.
+
+For she knew, suddenly, that he had been right. The Staff had meant
+that, then, when they looked at Johnny and shook their heads. The
+Staff knew, the hospital knew. Every one knew but Doctor Willie. But
+Doctor Willie had the case. Back in her little town Johnny's mother
+was looking to Doctor Willie, believing in him, hoping through him.
+
+That night Twenty-two slept, and Jane Brown lay awake. And down in H
+ward Johnny Fraser had a bad spell at that hour toward dawn when the
+vitality is low, and men die. He did not die, however. But the night
+nurse recorded, "Pulse very thin and iregular," at four o'clock.
+
+She, too, was not a famous speller.
+
+During the next morning, while the ward rolled bandages, having
+carefully scrubbed its hands first, Jane Brown wrote records--she
+did it rather well now--and then arranged the pins in the ward
+pincushion. She made concentric circles of safety-pins outside and
+common pins inside, with a large H in the centre. But her mind was
+not on this artistic bit of creation. It was on Johnny Fraser.
+
+She made up her mind to speak to Doctor Willie.
+
+Twenty-two had got over his sulking or his jealousy, or whatever it
+was, and during the early hours, those hours when Johnny was hardly
+breathing, he had planned something. He thought that he did it to
+interest the patients and make them contented, but somewhere in the
+back of his mind he knew it was to see more of Jane Brown. He
+planned a concert in the chapel.
+
+So that morning he took Elizabeth, the plaster cast, back to H ward,
+where Jane Brown was fixing the pincushion, and had a good minute of
+feasting his eyes on her while she was sucking a jabbed finger. She
+knew she should have dipped the finger in a solution, but habit is
+strong in most of us.
+
+Twenty-two had a wild desire to offer to kiss the finger and make it
+well. This, however, was not habit. It was insanity. He recognised
+this himself, and felt more than a trifle worried about it, because
+he had been in love quite a number of times before, but he had never
+had this sort of feeling.
+
+He put the concert up to her with a certain amount of anxiety. If
+she could sing, or play, or recite--although he hoped she would not
+recite--all would be well. But if she refused to take any part, he
+did not intend to have a concert. That was flat.
+
+"I can play," she said, making a neat period after the H on the
+pincushion.
+
+He was awfully relieved.
+
+"Good," he said. "You know, I like the way you say that. It's
+so--well, it's so competent." He got out a notebook and wrote "Miss
+Brown, piano selections."
+
+It was while he was writing that Jane Brown had a sort of mental
+picture--the shabby piano at home, kicked below by many childish
+feet, but mellow and sweet, like an old violin, and herself sitting
+practising, over and over, that part of Paderewski's Minuet where,
+as every one knows, the fingering is rather difficult, and outside
+the open window, leaning on his broom, worthless Johnny Fraser,
+staring in with friendly eyes and an extremely dirty face. To
+Twenty-two's unbounded amazement she flung down the cushion and made
+for the little ward linen room.
+
+He found her there a moment later, her arms outstretched on the
+table and her face buried in them. Some one had been boiling a
+rubber tube and had let the pan go dry. Ever afterward Twenty-two
+was to associate the smell of burning rubber with Jane Brown, and
+with his first real knowledge that he was in love with her.
+
+He stumped in after her and closed the door, and might have ruined
+everything then and there by taking her in his arms, crutch and
+all. But the smell of burning rubber is a singularly permeating one,
+and he was kept from one indiscretion by being discovered in
+another.
+
+It was somewhat later that Jane Brown was reprimanded for being
+found in the linen room with a private patient. She made no excuse,
+but something a little defiant began to grow in her eyes. It was not
+that she loved her work less. She was learning, day by day, the
+endless sacrifices of this profession she had chosen, its
+unselfishness, its grinding hard work, the payment that may lie in a
+smile of gratitude, the agony of pain that cannot be relieved. She
+went through her days with hands held out for service, and at night,
+in the chapel, she whispered soundless little prayers to be
+accepted, and to be always gentle and kind. She did not want to
+become a machine. She knew, although she had no words for it, the
+difference between duty and service.
+
+But--a little spirit of rebellion was growing in her breast. She did
+not understand about Johnny Fraser, for one thing. And the matter of
+the linen room hurt. There seemed to be too many rules.
+
+Then, too, she began to learn that hospitals had limitations. Jane
+Brown's hospital had no social worker. Much as she loved the work,
+the part that the hospital could not do began to hurt her. Before
+the quarantine women with new babies had gone out, without an idea
+of where to spend the night. Ailing children had gone home to such
+places as she could see from the dormitory windows, where the work
+the hospital had begun could not be finished.
+
+From the roof of the building at night she looked out over a city
+that terrified her. The call of a playing child in the street began
+to sound to her like the shriek of accident. The very grinding of
+the trolley cars, the smoke of the mills, began to mean the
+operating room. She thought a great deal, those days, about the
+little town she had come from, with its peace and quiet streets. The
+city seemed cruel. But now and then she learned that if cities are
+cruel, men are kind.
+
+Thus, on the very day of the concert, the quarantine was broken for
+a few minutes. It was broken forcibly, and by an officer of the law.
+A little newsie, standing by a fire at the next corner, for the
+spring day was cold, had caught fire. The big corner man had seen it
+all. He stripped off his overcoat, rolled the boy in it, and ran to
+the hospital. Here he was confronted by a brother officer, who was
+forbidden to admit him. The corner man did the thing that seemed
+quickest. He laid the newsie on the ground, knocked out the
+quarantine officer in two blows, broke the glass of the door with a
+third, slipped a bolt, and then, his burden in his arms, stalked in.
+
+It did not lessen the majesty of that entrance that he was crying
+all the time.
+
+The Probationer pondered that story when she heard it. After all,
+laws were right and good, but there were higher things than laws.
+She went and stood by Johnny's bed for a long time, thinking.
+
+In the meantime, unexpected talent for the concert had developed.
+The piano in the chapel proving out of order, the elevator man
+proved to have been a piano tuner. He tuned it with a bone forceps.
+Strange places, hospitals, into which drift men from every walk of
+life, to find a haven and peace within their quiet walls. Old Tony
+had sung, in his youth, in the opera at Milan. A pretty young nurse
+went around the corridors muttering bits of "Orphant Annie" to
+herself. The Senior Surgical Interne was to sing the "Rosary," and
+went about practising to himself. He came into H ward and sang it
+through for Jane Brown, with his heart in his clear young eyes. He
+sang about the hours he had spent with her being strings of pearls,
+and all that, but he was really asking her if she would be willing
+to begin life with him in a little house, where she would have to
+answer the door-bell and watch telephone calls while he was out.
+
+Jane Brown felt something of this, too. For she said: "You sing it
+beautifully," although he had flatted at least three times.
+
+He wrote his name on a medicine label and glued it to her hand. It
+looked alarmingly possessive.
+
+Twenty-two presided at the concert that night. He was extravagantly
+funny, and the sort of creaking solemnity with which things began
+turned to uproarious laughter very soon.
+
+Everything went off wonderfully. Tony started his selection too
+high, and was obliged to stop and begin over again. And the two
+Silversteins, from the children's ward, who were to dance a Highland
+fling together, had a violent quarrel at the last moment and had to
+be scratched. But everything else went well. The ambulance driver
+gave a bass solo, and kept a bar or two ahead of the accompaniment,
+dodging chords as he did wagons on the street, and fetching up with
+a sort of garrison finish much as he brought in the ambulance.
+
+But the real musical event of the evening was Jane Brown's playing.
+She played Schubert without any notes, because she had been taught
+to play Schubert that way.
+
+And when they called her back, she played little folk songs of the
+far places of Europe. Standing around the walls, in wheeled chairs,
+on crutches, pale with the hospital pallor, these aliens in their
+eddy listened and thrilled. Some of them wept, but they smiled also.
+
+At the end she played the Minuet, with a sort of flaming look in
+her eyes that puzzled Twenty-two. He could not know that she was
+playing it to Johnny Fraser, lying with closed eyes in the ward
+upstairs. He did not realise that there was a passion of sacrifice
+throbbing behind the dignity of the music.
+
+Doctor Willie had stayed over for the concert. He sat, beaming
+benevolently, in the front row, and toward the end he got up and
+told some stories. After all, it was Doctor Willie who was the real
+hit of the evening. The convalescents rocked with joy in their
+roller chairs. Crutches came down in loud applause. When he sat down
+he slipped a big hand over Jane Brown's and gave hers a hearty
+squeeze.
+
+"How d'you like me as a parlour entertainer, Nellie?" he whispered.
+
+She put her other hand over his. Somehow she could not speak.
+
+The First Assistant called to the Probationer that night as she went
+past her door. Lights were out, so the First Assistant had a candle,
+and she was rubbing her feet with witch hazel.
+
+"Come in," she called. "I have been looking for you. I have some
+news for you."
+
+The exaltation of the concert had died away. Jane Brown, in the
+candle light, looked small and tired and very, very young.
+
+"We have watched you carefully," said the First Assistant, who had
+her night garments on but had forgotten to take off her cap.
+"Although you are young, you have shown ability, and--you are to be
+accepted."
+
+"Thank you, very much," replied Jane Brown, in a strangled tone.
+
+"At first," said the First Assistant, "we were not sure. You were
+very young, and you had such odd ideas. You know that yourself now."
+
+She leaned down and pressed a sore little toe with her forefinger.
+Then she sighed. The mention of Jane Brown's youth had hurt her,
+because she was no longer very young. And there were times when she
+was tired, when it seemed to her that only youth counted. She felt
+that way to-night.
+
+When Jane Brown had gone on, she blew out her candle and went to
+bed, still in her cap.
+
+Hospitals do not really sleep at night. The elevator man dozes in
+his cage, and the night watchman may nap in the engineer's room in
+the basement. But the night nurses are always making their sleepless
+rounds, and in the wards, dark and quiet, restless figures turn and
+sigh.
+
+Before she went to bed that night, Jane Brown, by devious ways,
+slipped back to her ward. It looked strange to her, this cavernous
+place, filled with the unlovely noises of sleeping men. By the one
+low light near the doorway she went back to Johnny's bed, and sat
+down beside him. She felt that this was the place to think things
+out. In her room other things pressed in on her; the necessity of
+making good for the sake of those at home, her love of the work, and
+cowardice. But here she saw things right.
+
+The night nurse found her there some time later, asleep, her
+hunting-case watch open on Johnny's bed and her fingers still on his
+quiet wrist. She made no report of it.
+
+Twenty-two had another sleepless night written in on his record that
+night. He sat up and worried. He worried about the way the Senior
+Surgical Interne had sung to Jane Brown that night. And he worried
+about things he had done and shouldn't have, and things he should
+have done and hadn't. Mostly the first. At five in the morning he
+wrote a letter to his family telling them where he was, and that he
+had been vaccinated and that the letter would be fumigated. He also
+wrote a check for an artificial leg for the boy in the children's
+ward, and then went to bed and put himself to sleep by reciting the
+"Rosary" over and over. His last conscious thought was that the
+hours he had spent with a certain person would not make much of a
+string of pearls.
+
+The Probationer went to Doctor Willie the next day. Some of the
+exuberance of the concert still bubbled in him, although he shook
+his head over Johnny's record.
+
+"A little slow, Nellie," he said. "A little slow."
+
+Jane Brown took a long breath.
+
+"Doctor Willie," she said, "won't you have him operated on?"
+
+He looked up at her over his spectacles.
+
+"Operated on? What for?"
+
+"Well, he's not getting any better," she managed desperately.
+"I'm--sometimes I think he'll die while we're waiting for him to get
+better."
+
+He was surprised, but he was not angry.
+
+"There's no fracture, child," he said gently. "If there is a clot
+there, nature is probably better at removing it than we are. The
+trouble with you," he said indulgently, "is that you have come here,
+where they operate first and regret afterward. Nature is the best
+surgeon, child."
+
+She cast about her despairingly for some way to tell him the truth.
+But even when she spoke she knew she was foredoomed to failure.
+
+"But--suppose the Staff thinks that he should be?"
+
+Doctor Willie's kindly mouth set itself into grim lines.
+
+"The Staff!" he said, and looked at her searchingly. Then his jaws
+set at an obstinate angle.
+
+"Well, Nellie," he said, "I guess one opinion's as good as another
+in these cases. And I don't suppose they'll do any cutting and
+hacking without my consent." He looked at Johnny's unconscious
+figure. "He never amounted to much," he added, "but it's surprising
+the way money's been coming in to pay his board here. Your mother
+sent five dollars. A good lot of people are interested in him. I
+can't see myself going home and telling them he died on the
+operating table."
+
+He patted her on the arm as he went out.
+
+"Don't get an old head on those young shoulders yet, Nellie," he
+said as he was going. "Leave the worrying to me. I'm used to it."
+
+She saw then that to him she was still a little girl. She probably
+would always be just a little girl to him. He did not take her
+seriously, and no one else would speak to him. She was quite
+despairing.
+
+The ward loved Doctor Willie since the night before. It watched him
+out with affectionate eyes. Jane Brown watched him, too, his fine
+old head, the sturdy step that had brought healing and peace to a
+whole county. She had hurt him, she knew that. She ached at the
+thought of it. And she had done no good.
+
+That afternoon Jane Brown broke another rule. She went to Twenty-two
+on her off duty, and caused a mild furore there. He had been drawing
+a sketch of her from memory, an extremely poor sketch, with one eye
+larger than the other. He hid it immediately, although she could not
+possibly have recognised it, and talked very fast to cover his
+excitement.
+
+"Well, well!" he said. "I knew I was going to have some luck to-day.
+My right hand has been itching--or is that a sign of money?" Then he
+saw her face, and reduced his speech to normality, if not his heart.
+
+"Come and sit down," he said. "And tell me about it."
+
+But she would not sit down. She went to the window and looked out
+for a moment. It was from there she said:
+
+"I have been accepted."
+
+"Good." But he did not, apparently, think it such good news. He drew
+a long breath. "Well, I suppose your friends should be glad for
+you."
+
+"I didn't come to talk about being accepted," she announced.
+
+"I don't suppose, by any chance, you came to see how I am getting
+along?" he inquired humbly.
+
+"I can see that."
+
+"You can't see how lonely I am." When she offered nothing to this
+speech, he enlarged on it. "When it gets unbearable," he said, "I
+sit in front of the mirror and keep myself company. If that doesn't
+make your heart ache, nothing will."
+
+"I'm afraid I have a heart-ache, but it is not that." For a
+terrible moment he thought of that theory of his which referred to a
+disappointment in love. Was she going to have the unbelievable
+cruelty to tell him about it?
+
+"I have to talk to somebody," she said simply. "And I came to you,
+because you've worked on a newspaper, and you have had a lot of
+experience. It's--a matter of ethics. But really it's a matter of
+life and death."
+
+He felt most horribly humble before her, and he hated the lie,
+except that it had brought her to him. There was something so direct
+and childlike about her. The very way she drew a chair in front of
+him, and proceeded, talking rather fast, to lay the matter before
+him, touched him profoundly. He felt, somehow, incredibly old and
+experienced.
+
+And then, after all that, to fail her!
+
+"You see how it is," she finished. "I can't go to the Staff, and
+they wouldn't do anything if I did--except possibly put me out.
+Because a nurse really only follows orders. And--I've got to stay,
+if I can. And Doctor Willie doesn't believe in an operation and
+won't see that he's dying. And everybody at home thinks he is right,
+because--well," she added hastily, "he's been right a good many
+times."
+
+He listened attentively. His record, you remember, was his own way
+some ninety-seven per cent of the time, and at first he would not
+believe that this was going to be the three per cent, or a part of
+it.
+
+"Well," he said at last, "we'll just make the Staff turn in and do
+it. That's easy."
+
+"But they won't. They can't."
+
+"We can't let Johnny die, either, can we?"
+
+But when at last she was gone, and the room was incredibly empty
+without her,--when, to confess a fact that he was exceedingly
+shame-faced about, he had wheeled over to the chair she had sat in
+and put his cheek against the arm where her hand had rested, when he
+was somewhat his own man again and had got over the feeling that his
+arms were empty of something they had never held--then it was that
+Twenty-two found himself up against the three per cent.
+
+The hospital's attitude was firm. It could not interfere. It was an
+outside patient and an outside doctor. Its responsibility ended with
+providing for the care of the patient, under his physician's orders.
+It was regretful--but, of course, unless the case was turned over to
+the Staff----
+
+He went back to the ward to tell her, after it had all been
+explained to him. But she was not surprised. He saw that, after all,
+she had really known he was going to fail her.
+
+"It's hopeless," was all she said. "Everybody is right, and
+everybody is wrong."
+
+It was the next day that, going to the courtyard for a breath of
+air, she saw a woman outside the iron gate waving to her. It was
+Johnny's mother, a forlorn old soul in what Jane Brown recognised as
+an old suit of her mother's.
+
+"Doctor Willie bought my ticket, Miss Nellie," she said nervously.
+"It seems like I had to come, even if I couldn't get in. I've been
+waiting around most all afternoon. How is he?"
+
+"He is resting quietly," said Jane Brown, holding herself very
+tense, because she wanted to scream. "He isn't suffering at all."
+
+"Could you tell me which window he's near, Miss Nellie?"
+
+She pointed out the window, and Johnny Fraser's mother stood,
+holding to the bars, peering up at it. Her lips moved, and Jane
+Brown knew that she was praying. At last she turned her eyes away.
+
+"Folks have said a lot about him," she said, "but he was always a
+good son to me. If only he'd had a chance--I'd be right worried,
+Miss Nellie, if he didn't have Doctor Willie looking after him."
+
+Jane Brown went into the building. There was just one thing clear in
+her mind. Johnny Fraser must have his chance, somehow.
+
+In the meantime things were not doing any too well in the hospital.
+A second case, although mild, had extended the quarantine.
+Discontent grew, and threatened to develop into mutiny. Six men
+from one of the wards marched _en masse_ to the lower hall, and were
+preparing to rush the guards when they were discovered. The Senior
+Surgical Interne took two prisoners himself, and became an emergency
+case for two stitches and arnica compresses.
+
+Jane Brown helped to fix him up, and he took advantage of her
+holding a dressing basin near his cut lip to kiss her hand, very
+respectfully. She would have resented it under other circumstances,
+but the Senior Surgical Interne was, even if temporarily, a patient,
+and must be humoured. She forgot about the kiss immediately, anyhow,
+although he did not.
+
+Her three months of probation were drawing to a close now, and her
+cap was already made and put away in a box, ready for the day she
+should don it. But she did not look at it very often.
+
+And all the time, fighting his battle with youth and vigour, but
+with closed eyes, and losing it day by day, was Johnny Fraser.
+
+Then, one night on the roof, Jane Brown had to refuse the Senior
+Surgical Interne. He took it very hard.
+
+"We'd have been such pals," he said, rather wistfully, after he saw
+it was no use.
+
+"We can be, anyhow."
+
+"I suppose," he said with some bitterness, "that I'd have stood a
+better chance if I'd done as you wanted me to about that fellow in
+your ward, gone to the staff and raised hell."
+
+"I wouldn't have married you," said Jane Brown, "but I'd have
+thought you were pretty much of a man."
+
+The more he thought about that the less he liked it. It almost kept
+him awake that night.
+
+It was the next day that Twenty-two had his idea. He ran true to
+form, and carried it back to Jane Brown for her approval. But she
+was not enthusiastic.
+
+"It would help to amuse them, of course, but how can you publish a
+newspaper without any news?" she asked, rather listlessly, for her.
+
+"News! This building is full of news. I have some bits already.
+Listen!" He took a notebook out of his pocket. "The stork breaks
+quarantine. New baby in O ward. The chief engineer has developed a
+boil on his neck. Elevator Man arrested for breaking speed limit.
+Wanted, four square inches of cuticle for skin grafting in W. How's
+that? And I'm only beginning."
+
+Jane Brown listened. Somehow, behind Twenty-two's lightness of tone,
+she felt something more earnest. She did not put it into words, even
+to herself, but she divined something new, a desire to do his bit,
+there in the hospital. It was, if she had only known it, a
+milestone in a hitherto unmarked career. Twenty-two, who had always
+been a man, was by way of becoming a person.
+
+He explained about publishing it. He used to run a typewriter in
+college, and the convalescents could mimeograph it and sell it.
+There was a mimeographing machine in the office.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne came in just then. Refusing to marry him
+had had much the effect of smacking a puppy. He came back, a trifle
+timid, but friendly. So he came in just then, and elected himself to
+the advertising and circulation department, and gave the Probationer
+the society end, although it was not his paper or his idea, and sat
+down at once at the table and started a limerick, commencing:
+
+          "_We're here in the city, marooned_"
+
+However, he never got any further with it, because there are,
+apparently, no rhymes for "marooned." He refused "tuned" which
+several people offered him, with extreme scorn.
+
+Up to this point Jane Brown had been rather too worried to think
+about Twenty-two. She had grown accustomed to seeing him coming
+slowly back toward her ward, his eyes travelling much faster than he
+did. Not, of course, that she knew that. And to his being, in a way,
+underfoot a part of every day, after the Head had made rounds and
+was safely out of the road for a good two hours.
+
+But two things happened that day to turn her mind in onto her heart.
+One was when she heard about the artificial leg. The other was when
+she passed the door of his room, where a large card now announced
+"Office of the _Quarantine Sentinel_." She passed the door, and she
+distinctly heard most un-hospital-like chatter within. Judging from
+the shadows on the glass door, too, the room was full. It sounded
+joyous and carefree.
+
+Something in Jane Brown--her mind, probably--turned right around and
+looked into her heart, and made an odd discovery. This was that Jane
+Brown's heart had sunk about two inches, and was feeling very queer.
+
+She went straight on, however, and put on a fresh collar in her
+little bedroom, and listed her washing and changed her shoes,
+because her feet still ached a lot of the time. But she was a brave
+person and liked to look things in the face. So before she went back
+to the ward, she stood in front of her mirror and said:
+
+"You're a nice nurse, Nell Brown. To--to talk about duty and brag
+about service, and then to act like a fool."
+
+She went back to the ward and sat beside Johnny. But that night she
+went up on the roof again, and sat on the parapet. She could see,
+across the courtyard, the dim rectangles of her ward, and around a
+corner in plain view, "room Twenty-two." Its occupant was sitting at
+the typewriter, and working hard. Or he seemed to be. It was too far
+away to be sure. Jane Brown slid down onto the roof, which was not
+very clean, and putting her elbows on the parapet, watched him for a
+long time. When he got up, at last, and came to the open window, she
+hardly breathed. However, he only stood there, looking toward her
+but not seeing her.
+
+Jane Brown put her head on the parapet that night and cried. She
+thought she was crying about Johnny Fraser. She might have felt
+somewhat comforted had she known that Twenty-two, being tired with
+his day's work, had at last given way to most horrible jealousy of
+the Senior Surgical Interne, and that his misery was to hers as five
+is to one.
+
+The first number of the _Quarantine Sentinel_ was a great success.
+It served in the wards much the same purpose as the magazines
+published in the trenches. It relieved the monotony, brought the
+different wards together, furnished laughter and gossip. Twenty-two
+wrote the editorials, published the paper, with the aid of a couple
+of convalescents, and in his leisure drew cartoons. He drew very
+well, but all his girls looked like Jane Brown. It caused a ripple
+of talk.
+
+The children from the children's ward distributed them, and went
+back from the private rooms bearing tribute of flowers and fruit.
+Twenty-two himself developed a most reprehensible habit of
+concealing candy in the _Sentinel_ office and smuggling it to his
+carriers. Altogether a new and neighbourly feeling seemed to
+follow in the wake of the little paper. People who had sulked
+in side-by-side rooms began, in the relaxed discipline of
+convalescence, to pay little calls about. Crotchety dowagers knitted
+socks for new babies. A wave of friendliness swept over every one,
+and engulfed particularly Twenty-two.
+
+In the glow of it he changed perceptibly. This was the first
+popularity he had ever earned, and the first he had ever cared a
+fi-penny bit about. And, because he valued it, he felt more and more
+unworthy of it.
+
+But it kept him from seeing Jane Brown. He was too busy for many
+excursions to the ward, and when he went he was immediately the
+centre of an animated group. He hardly ever saw her alone, and when
+he did he began to suspect that she pretended duties that might have
+waited.
+
+One day he happened to go back while Doctor Willie was there, and
+after that he understood her problem better.
+
+Through it all Johnny lived. His thin, young body was now hardly an
+outline under the smooth, white covering of his bed. He swallowed,
+faintly, such bits of liquid as were placed between his lips, but
+there were times when Jane Brown's fingers, more expert now, could
+find no pulse at all. And still she had found no way to give him his
+chance.
+
+She made a last appeal to Doctor Willie that day, but he only shook
+his head gravely.
+
+"Even if there was an operation now, Nellie," said Doctor Willie
+that day, "he could not stand it."
+
+It was the first time that Twenty-two had known her name was Nellie.
+
+That was the last day of Jane Brown's probation. On the next day she
+was to don her cap. The _Sentinel_ came out with a congratulatory
+editorial, and at nine o'clock that night the First Assistant
+brought an announcement, in the Head's own writing, for the paper.
+
+"The Head of the Training School announces with much pleasure the
+acceptance of Miss N. Jane Brown as a pupil nurse."
+
+Twenty-two sat and stared at it for quite a long time.
+
+That night Jane Brown fought her battle and won. She went to her
+room immediately after chapel, and took the family pictures off her
+little stand and got out ink and paper. She put the photographs out
+of sight, because she knew that they were counting on her, and she
+could not bear her mother's eyes. And then she counted her money,
+because she had broken another thermometer, and the ticket home was
+rather expensive. She had enough, but very little more.
+
+After that she went to work.
+
+It took her rather a long time, because she had a great deal to
+explain. She had to put her case, in fact. And she was not strong on
+either ethics or logic. She said so, indeed, at the beginning. She
+said also that she had talked to a lot of people, but that no one
+understood how she felt--that there ought to be no professional
+ethics, or etiquette, or anything else, where it was life or death.
+That she felt hospitals were to save lives and not to save feelings.
+It seemed necessary, after that, to defend Doctor Willie--without
+naming him, of course. How much good he had done, and how he came to
+rely on himself and his own opinion because in the country there was
+no one to consult with.
+
+However, she was not so gentle with the Staff. She said that it was
+standing by and letting a patient die, because it was too polite to
+interfere, although they had all agreed among themselves that an
+operation was necessary. And that if they felt that way, would they
+refuse to pull a child from in front of a locomotive because it was
+its mother's business, and she didn't know how to do it?
+
+_Then she signed it._
+
+She turned it in at the _Sentinel_ office the next morning while
+the editor was shaving. She had to pass it through a crack in the
+door. Even that, however, was enough for the editor in question to
+see that she wore no cap.
+
+"But--see here," he said, in a rather lathery voice, "you're
+accepted, you know. Where's the--the visible sign?"
+
+Jane Brown was not quite sure she could speak. However, she managed.
+
+"After you read that," she said, "you'll understand."
+
+He read it immediately, of course, growing more and more grave, and
+the soap drying on his chin. Its sheer courage made him gasp.
+
+"Good girl," he said to himself. "Brave little girl. But it finishes
+her here, and she knows it."
+
+He was pretty well cut up about it, too, because while he was
+getting it ready he felt as if he was sharpening a knife to stab her
+with. Her own knife, too. But he had to be as brave as she was.
+
+The paper came out at two o'clock. At three the First Assistant,
+looking extremely white, relieved Jane Brown of the care of H ward
+and sent her to her room.
+
+Jane Brown eyed her wistfully.
+
+"I'm not to come back, I suppose?"
+
+The First Assistant avoided her eyes.
+
+"I'm afraid not," she said.
+
+Jane Brown went up the ward and looked down at Johnny Fraser. Then
+she gathered up her bandage scissors and her little dressing forceps
+and went out.
+
+The First Assistant took a step after her, but stopped. There were
+tears in her eyes.
+
+Things moved very rapidly in the hospital that day, while the guards
+sat outside on their camp-stools and ate apples or read the
+newspapers, and while Jane Brown sat alone in her room.
+
+First of all the Staff met and summoned Twenty-two. He went down in
+the elevator--he had lost Elizabeth a few days before, and was using
+a cane--ready for trouble. He had always met a fight more than
+halfway. It was the same instinct that had taken him to the fire.
+
+But no one wanted to fight. The Staff was waiting, grave and
+perplexed, but rather anxious to put its case than otherwise. It
+felt misunderstood, aggrieved, and horribly afraid it was going to
+get in the newspapers. But it was not angry. On the contrary, it was
+trying its extremely intelligent best to see things from a new
+angle.
+
+The Senior Surgical Interne was waiting outside. He had smoked
+eighteen cigarettes since he received his copy of the _Sentinel_,
+and was as unhappy as an _interne_ can be.
+
+"What the devil made you publish it?" he demanded.
+
+Twenty-two smiled.
+
+"Because," he said, "I have always had a sneaking desire to publish
+an honest paper, one where public questions can be discussed. If
+this isn't a public question, I don't know one when I see it."
+
+But he was not smiling when he went in.
+
+An hour later Doctor Willie came in. He had brought some flowers for
+the children's ward, and his arms were bulging. To his surprise,
+accustomed as he was to the somewhat cavalier treatment of the
+country practitioner in a big city hospital, he was invited to the
+Staff room.
+
+To the eternal credit of the Staff Jane Brown's part in that painful
+half hour was never known. The Staff was careful, too, of Doctor
+Willie. They knew they were being irregular, and were most
+wretchedly uncomfortable. Also, there being six of them against one,
+it looked rather like force, particularly since, after the first two
+minutes, every one of them liked Doctor Willie.
+
+He took it so awfully well. He sat there, with his elbows on a table
+beside a withering mass of spring flowers, and faced the
+white-coated Staff, and said that he hoped he was man enough to
+acknowledge a mistake, and six opinions against one left him nothing
+else to do. The Senior Surgical Interne, who had been hating him
+for weeks, offered him a cigar.
+
+He had only one request to make. There was a little girl in the
+training school who believed in him, and he would like to go to the
+ward and write the order for the operation himself.
+
+Which he did. But Jane Brown was not there.
+
+Late that evening the First Assistant, passing along the corridor in
+the dormitory, was accosted by a quiet figure in a blue uniform,
+without a cap.
+
+"How is he?"
+
+The First Assistant was feeling more cheerful than usual. The
+operating surgeon had congratulated her on the way things had moved
+that day, and she was feeling, as she often did, that, after all,
+work was a solace for many troubles.
+
+"Of course, it is very soon, but he stood it well." She looked up at
+Jane Brown, who was taller than she was, but who always, somehow,
+looked rather little. There are girls like that. "Look here," she
+said, "you must not sit in that room and worry. Run up to the
+operating-room and help to clear away."
+
+She was very wise, the First Assistant. For Jane Brown went, and
+washed away some of the ache with the stains of Johnny's operation.
+Here, all about her, were the tangible evidences of her triumph,
+which was also a defeat. A little glow of service revived in her.
+If Johnny lived, it was a small price to pay for a life. If he died,
+she had given him his chance. The operating-room nurses were very
+kind. They liked her courage, but they were frightened, too. She,
+like the others, had been right, but also she was wrong.
+
+They paid her tribute of little kindnesses, but they knew she must
+go.
+
+It was the night nurse who told Twenty-two that Jane Brown was in
+the operating-room. He was still up and dressed at midnight, but the
+sheets of to-morrow's editorial lay blank on his table.
+
+The night nurse glanced at her watch to see if it was time for the
+twelve o'clock medicines.
+
+"There's a rumour going about," she said, "that the quarantine's to
+be lifted to-morrow. I'll be rather sorry. It has been a change."
+
+"To-morrow," said Twenty-two, in a startled voice.
+
+"I suppose you'll be going out at once?"
+
+There was a wistful note in her voice. She liked him. He had been an
+oasis of cheer in the dreary rounds of the night. A very little
+more, and she might have forgotten her rule, which was never to be
+sentimentally interested in a patient.
+
+"I wonder," said Twenty-two, in a curious tone, "if you will give me
+my cane?"
+
+He was clad, at that time, in a hideous bathrobe, purchased by the
+orderly, over his night clothing, and he had the expression of a
+person who intends to take no chances.
+
+"Thanks," said Twenty-two. "And--will you send the night watchman
+here?"
+
+The night nurse went out. She had a distinct feeling that something
+was about to happen. At least she claimed it later. But she found
+the night watchman making coffee in a back pantry, and gave him her
+message.
+
+Some time later Jane Brown stood in the doorway of the
+operating-room and gave it a farewell look. Its white floor and
+walls were spotless. Shining rows of instruments on clean towels
+were ready to put away in the cabinets. The sterilisers glowed in
+warm rectangles of gleaming copper. Over all brooded the peace of
+order, the quiet of the night.
+
+Outside the operating-room door she drew a long breath, and faced
+the night watchman. She had left something in Twenty-two. Would she
+go and get it?
+
+"It's very late," said Jane Brown. "And it isn't allowed, I'm sure."
+
+However, what was one more rule to her who had defied them all? A
+spirit of recklessness seized her. After all, why not? She would
+never see him again. Like the operating-room, she would stand in the
+doorway and say a mute little farewell.
+
+Twenty-two's door was wide open, and he was standing in the centre
+of the room, looking out. He had heard her long before she came in
+sight, for he, too, had learned the hospital habit of classifying
+footsteps.
+
+He was horribly excited. He had never been so nervous before. He had
+made up a small speech, a sort of beginning, but he forgot it the
+moment he heard her, and she surprised him in the midst of trying,
+agonisingly, to remember it.
+
+There was a sort of dreadful calm, however, about Jane Brown.
+
+"The watchman says I have left something here."
+
+It was clear to him at once that he meant nothing to her. It was in
+her voice.
+
+"You did," he said. And tried to smile.
+
+"Then--if I may have it----"
+
+"I wish to heaven you could have it," he said, very rapidly. "I
+don't want it. It's darned miserable."
+
+"It's--what?"
+
+"It's an ache," he went on, still rather incoherent. "A pain. A
+misery." Then, seeing her beginning to put on a professional look:
+"No, not that. It's a feeling. Look here," he said, rather more
+slowly, "do you mind coming in and closing the door? There's a man
+across who's always listening."
+
+She went in, but she did not close the door. She went slowly,
+looking rather pale.
+
+"What I sent for you for is this," said Twenty-two, "are you going
+away? Because I've got to know."
+
+"I'm being sent away as soon as the quarantine is over. It's--it's
+perfectly right. I expected it. Things would soon go to pieces if
+the nurses took to--took to doing what I did."
+
+Suddenly Twenty-two limped across the room and slammed the door
+shut, a proceeding immediately followed by an irritated ringing of
+bells at the night nurse's desk. Then he turned, his back against
+the door.
+
+"Because I'm going when you do," he said, in a terrible voice. "I'm
+going when you go, and wherever you go. I've stood all the waiting
+around for a glimpse of you that I'm going to stand." He glared at
+her. "For weeks," he said, "I've sat here in this room and listened
+for you, and hated to go to sleep for fear you would pass and I
+wouldn't be looking through that damned door. And now I've reached
+the limit."
+
+A sort of band which had seemed to be fastened around Jane Brown's
+head for days suddenly removed itself to her heart, which became
+extremely irregular.
+
+"And I want to say this," went on Twenty-two, still in a savage
+tone. He was horribly frightened, so he blustered. "I don't care
+whether you want me or not, you've got to have me. I'm so much in
+love with you that it hurts."
+
+Suddenly Jane Brown's heart settled down into a soft rhythmic
+beating that was like a song. After all, life was made up of love
+and work, and love came first.
+
+She faced Twenty-two with brave eyes.
+
+"I love you, too--so much that it hurts."
+
+The gentleman across the hall, sitting up in bed, with an angry
+thumb on the bell, was electrified to see, on the glass door across,
+the silhouette of a young lady without a cap go into the arms of a
+very large, masculine silhouette in a dressing-gown. He heard, too,
+the thump of a falling cane.
+
+Late that night Jane Brown, by devious ways, made her way back to H
+ward. Johnny was there, a strange Johnny with a bandaged head, but
+with open eyes.
+
+At dawn, the dawn of the day when Jane Brown was to leave the little
+world of the hospital for a little world of two, consisting of a man
+and a woman, the night nurse found her there, asleep, her fingers
+still on Johnny's thin wrist.
+
+She did not report it.
+
+
+
+
+JANE
+
+
+I
+
+Having retired to a hospital to sulk, Jane remained there. The
+family came and sat by her bed uncomfortably and smoked, and finally
+retreated with defeat written large all over it, leaving Jane to the
+continued possession of Room 33, a pink kimono with slippers to
+match, a hand-embroidered face pillow with a rose-coloured bow on
+the corner, and a young nurse with a gift of giving Jane daily the
+appearance of a strawberry and vanilla ice rising from a meringue of
+bed linen.
+
+Jane's complaint was temper. The family knew this, and so did
+Jane, although she had an annoying way of looking hurt, a gentle
+heart-brokenness of speech that made the family, under the
+pretence of getting a match, go out into the hall and swear softly
+under its breath. But it was temper, and the family was not
+deceived. Also, knowing Jane, the family was quite ready to
+believe that while it was swearing in the hall, Jane was biting
+holes in the hand-embroidered face pillow in Room 33.
+
+It had finally come to be a test of endurance. Jane vowed to stay
+at the hospital until the family on bended knee begged her to emerge
+and to brighten the world again with her presence. The family, being
+her father, said it would be damned if it would, and that if Jane
+cared to live on anaemic chicken broth, oatmeal wafers and massage
+twice a day for the rest of her life, why, let her.
+
+The dispute, having begun about whether Jane should or should not
+marry a certain person, Jane representing the affirmative and her
+father the negative, had taken on new aspects, had grown and
+altered, and had, to be brief, become a contest between the
+masculine Johnson and the feminine Johnson as to which would take
+the count. Not that this appeared on the surface. The masculine
+Johnson, having closed the summer home on Jane's defection and gone
+back to the city, sent daily telegrams, novels and hothouse grapes,
+all three of which Jane devoured indiscriminately. Once, indeed,
+Father Johnson had motored the forty miles from town, to be told
+that Jane was too ill and unhappy to see him, and to have a glimpse,
+as he drove furiously away, of Jane sitting pensive at her window in
+the pink kimono, gazing over his head at the distant hills and
+clearly entirely indifferent to him and his wrath.
+
+So we find Jane, on a frosty morning in late October, in triumphant
+possession of the field--aunts and cousins routed, her father
+sulking in town, and the victor herself--or is victor feminine?--and
+if it isn't, shouldn't it be?--sitting up in bed staring blankly at
+her watch.
+
+Jane had just wakened--an hour later than usual; she had rung the
+bell three times and no one had responded. Jane's famous temper
+began to stretch and yawn. At this hour Jane was accustomed
+to be washed with tepid water, scented daintily with violet,
+alcohol-rubbed, talcum-powdered, and finally fresh-linened, coifed
+and manicured, to be supported with a heap of fresh pillows and fed
+creamed sweet-bread and golden-brown coffee and toast.
+
+Jane rang again, with a line between her eyebrows. The bell was not
+broken. She could hear it distinctly. This was an outrage! She would
+report it to the superintendent. She had been ringing for ten
+minutes. That little minx of a nurse was flirting somewhere with one
+of the internes.
+
+Jane angrily flung the covers back and got out on her small bare
+feet. Then she stretched her slim young arms above her head, her
+spoiled red mouth forming a scarlet O as she yawned. In her
+sleeveless and neckless nightgown, with her hair over her shoulders,
+minus the more elaborate coiffure which later in the day helped
+her to poise and firmness, she looked a pretty young girl,
+almost--although Jane herself never suspected this--almost an
+amiable young person.
+
+Jane saw herself in the glass and assumed immediately the two lines
+between her eyebrows which were the outward and visible token of
+what she had suffered. Then she found her slippers, a pair of
+stockings to match and two round bits of pink silk elastic of
+private and feminine use, and sat down on the floor to put them on.
+
+The floor was cold. To Jane's wrath was added indignation. She
+hitched herself along the boards to the radiator and put her hand on
+it. It was even colder than Jane.
+
+The family temper was fully awake by this time and ready for
+business. Jane, sitting on the icy floor, jerked on her stockings,
+snapped the pink bands into place, thrust her feet into her slippers
+and rose, shivering. She went to the bed, and by dint of careful
+manoeuvring so placed the bell between the head of the bed and the
+wall that during the remainder of her toilet it rang steadily.
+
+The remainder of Jane's toilet was rather casual. She flung on the
+silk kimono, twisted her hair on top of her head and stuck a pin or
+two in it, thus achieving a sort of effect a thousand times more
+bewildering than she had ever managed with a curling iron and
+twenty seven hair pins, and flinging her door wide stalked into the
+hall. At least she meant to stalk, but one does not really stamp
+about much in number-two, heelless, pink-satin mules.
+
+At the first stalk--or stamp--she stopped. Standing uncertainly just
+outside her door was a strange man, strangely attired. Jane clutched
+her kimono about her and stared.
+
+"Did--did you--are you ringing?" asked the apparition. It wore a
+pair of white-duck trousers, much soiled, a coat that bore the words
+"furnace room" down the front in red letters on a white tape, and a
+clean and spotless white apron. There was coal dust on its face and
+streaks of it in its hair, which appeared normally to be red.
+
+"There's something the matter with your bell," said the young man.
+"It keeps on ringing."
+
+"I intend it to," said Jane coldly.
+
+"You can't make a racket like that round here, you know," he
+asserted, looking past her into the room.
+
+"I intend to make all the racket I can until I get some attention."
+
+"What have you done--put a book on it?"
+
+"Look here"--Jane added another line to the two between her
+eyebrows. In the family this was generally a signal for a retreat,
+but of course the young man could not know this, and, besides, he
+was red-headed. "Look here," said Jane, "I don't know who you are
+and I don't care either, but that bell is going to ring until I get
+my bath and some breakfast. And it's going to ring then unless I
+stop it."
+
+The young man in the coal dust and the white apron looked at Jane
+and smiled. Then he walked past her into the room, jerked the bed
+from the wall and released the bell.
+
+"Now!" he said as the din outside ceased. "I'm too busy to talk just
+at present, but if you do that again I'll take the bell out of the
+room altogether. There are other people in the hospital besides
+yourself."
+
+At that he started out and along the hall, leaving Jane speechless.
+After he'd gone about a dozen feet he stopped and turned, looking at
+Jane reflectively.
+
+"Do you know anything about cooking?" he asked.
+
+"I know more about cooking than you do about politeness," she
+retorted, white with fury, and went into her room and slammed the
+door. She went directly to the bell and put it behind the bed and
+set it to ringing again. Then she sat down in a chair and picked up
+a book. Had the red-haired person opened the door she was perfectly
+prepared to fling the book at him. She would have thrown a hatchet
+had she had one.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, he did not come back. The bell rang
+with a soul-satisfying jangle for about two minutes and then died
+away, and no amount of poking with a hairpin did any good. It was
+clear that the bell had been cut off outside!
+
+For fifty-five minutes Jane sat in that chair breakfastless, very
+casually washed and with the aforesaid Billie Burkeness of hair.
+Then, hunger gaining over temper, she opened the door and peered
+out. From somewhere near at hand there came a pungent odor of
+burning toast. Jane sniffed; then, driven by hunger, she made a
+short sally down the hall to the parlour where the nurses on duty
+made their headquarters. It was empty. The dismantled bell register
+was on the wall, with the bell unscrewed and lying on the mantel
+beside it, and the odour of burning toast was stronger than ever.
+
+Jane padded softly to the odour, following her small nose. It led
+her to the pantry, where under ordinary circumstances the patients'
+trays were prepared by a pantrymaid, the food being shipped there
+from the kitchen on a lift. Clearly the circumstances were not
+ordinary. The pantrymaid was not in sight.
+
+Instead, the red-haired person was standing by the window scraping
+busily at a blackened piece of toast. There was a rank odour of
+boiling tea in the air.
+
+"Damnation!" said the red-haired person, and flung the toast into a
+corner where there already lay a small heap of charred breakfast
+hopes. Then he saw Jane.
+
+"I fixed the bell, didn't I?" he remarked. "I say, since you claim
+to know so much about cooking, I wish you'd make some toast."
+
+"I didn't say I knew much," snapped Jane, holding her kimono round
+her. "I said I knew more than you knew about politeness."
+
+The red-haired person smiled again, and then, making a deep bow,
+with a knife in one hand and a toaster in the other, he said:
+"Madam, I prithee forgive me for my untoward conduct of an hour
+since. Say but the word and I replace the bell."
+
+"I won't make any toast," said Jane, looking at the bread with
+famished eyes.
+
+"Oh, very well," said the red-haired person with a sigh. "On your
+head be it!"
+
+"But I'll tell you how to do it," conceded Jane, "if you'll explain
+who you are and what you are doing in that costume and where the
+nurses are."
+
+The red-haired person sat down on the edge of the table and looked
+at her.
+
+"I'll make a bargain with you," he said. "There's a convalescent
+typhoid in a room near yours who swears he'll go down to the village
+for something to eat in his--er--hospital attire unless he's fed
+soon. He's dangerous, empty. He's reached the cannibalistic stage.
+If he should see you in that ravishing pink thing, I--I wouldn't
+answer for the consequences. I'll tell you everything if you'll make
+him six large slices of toast and boil him four or five eggs, enough
+to hold him for a while. The tea's probably ready; it's been boiling
+for an hour."
+
+Hunger was making Jane human. She gathered up the tail of her
+kimono, and stepping daintily into the pantry proceeded to spread
+herself a slice of bread and butter.
+
+"Where is everybody?" she asked, licking some butter off her thumb
+with a small pink tongue.
+
+          _Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold,
+             And the mate of the Nancy brig,
+           And the bosun tight and the midshipmite,
+             And the crew of the captain's gig._
+
+recited the red-haired person.
+
+"You!" said Jane with the bread halfway to her mouth.
+
+"Even I," said the red-haired person. "I'm the superintendent, the
+staff, the training school, the cooks, the furnace man and the
+ambulance driver."
+
+Jane was pouring herself a cup of tea, and she put in milk and sugar
+and took a sip or two before she would give him the satisfaction of
+asking him what he meant. Anyhow, probably she had already guessed.
+Jane was no fool.
+
+"I hope you're getting the salary list," she said, sitting on the
+pantry girl's chair and, what with the tea inside and somebody to
+quarrel with, feeling more like herself. "My father's one of the
+directors, and somebody gets it."
+
+The red-haired person sat on the radiator and eyed Jane. He looked
+slightly stunned, as if the presence of beauty in a Billie Burke
+chignon and little else except a kimono was almost too much for him.
+From somewhere near by came a terrific thumping, as of some one
+pounding a hairbrush on a table. The red-haired person shifted along
+the radiator a little nearer Jane, and continued to gloat.
+
+"Don't let that noise bother you," he said; "that's only the
+convalescent typhoid banging for his breakfast. He's been shouting
+for food ever since I came at six last night."
+
+"Is it safe to feed him so much?"
+
+"I don't know. He hasn't had anything yet. Perhaps if you're ready
+you'd better fix him something."
+
+Jane had finished her bread and tea by this time and remembered her
+kimono.
+
+"I'll go back and dress," she said primly. But he wouldn't hear of
+it.
+
+"He's starving," he objected as a fresh volley of thumps came along
+the hall. "I've been trying at intervals since daylight to make him
+a piece of toast. The minute I put it on the fire I think of
+something I've forgotten, and when I come back it's in flames."
+
+So Jane cut some bread and put on eggs to boil, and the red-haired
+person told his story.
+
+"You see," he explained, "although I appear to be a furnace man from
+the waist up and an interne from the waist down, I am really the new
+superintendent."
+
+"I hope you'll do better than the last one," she said severely. "He
+was always flirting with the nurses."
+
+"I shall never flirt with the nurses," he promised, looking at her.
+"Anyhow I shan't have any immediate chance. The other fellow left
+last night and took with him everything portable except the
+ambulance--nurses, staff, cooks. I wish to Heaven he'd taken the
+patients! And he did more than that. He cut the telephone wires!"
+
+"Well!" said Jane. "Are you going to stand for it?"
+
+The red-haired man threw up his hands. "The village is with him," he
+declared. "It's a factional fight--the village against the
+fashionable summer colony on the hill. I cannot telephone from the
+village--the telegraph operator is deaf when I speak to him; the
+village milkman and grocer sent boys up this morning--look here."
+He fished a scrap of paper from his pocket and read:
+
+      I will not supply the Valley Hospital with any fresh
+      meats, canned oysters and sausages, or do any plumbing
+      for the hospital until the reinstatement of Dr. Sheets.
+                                T. CASHDOLLAR, Butcher.
+
+Jane took the paper and read it again. "Humph!" she commented.
+"Old Sheets wrote it himself. Mr. Cashdollar couldn't think
+'reinstatement,' let alone spell it."
+
+"The question is not who wrote it, but what we are to do," said the
+red-haired person. "Shall I let old Sheets come back?"
+
+"If you do," said Jane fiercely, "I shall hate you the rest of my
+life."
+
+And as it was clear by this time that the red-haired person could
+imagine nothing more horrible, it was settled then and there that he
+should stay.
+
+"There are only two wards," he said. "In the men's a man named
+Higgins is able to be up and is keeping things straight. And in the
+woman's ward Mary O'Shaughnessy is looking after them. The furnaces
+are the worst. I'd have forgiven almost anything else. I've sat up
+all night nursing the fires, but they breathed their last at six
+this morning and I guess there's nothing left but to call the
+coroner."
+
+Jane had achieved a tolerable plate of toast by that time and four
+eggs. Also she had a fine flush, a combination of heat from the gas
+stove and temper.
+
+"They ought to be ashamed," she cried angrily, "leaving a lot of
+sick people!"
+
+"Oh, as to that," said the red-headed person, "there aren't any
+very sick ones. Two or three neurasthenics like yourself and a
+convalescent typhoid and a D.T. in a private room. If it wasn't
+that Mary O'Shaughnessy----"
+
+But at the word "neurasthenics" Jane had put down the toaster, and
+by the time the unconscious young man had reached the O'Shaughnessy
+she was going out the door with her chin up. He called after her,
+and finding she did not turn he followed her, shouting apologies at
+her back until she went into her room. And as hospital doors don't
+lock from the inside she pushed the washstand against the knob and
+went to bed to keep warm.
+
+He stood outside and apologised again, and later he brought a tray
+of bread and butter and a pot of the tea, which had been boiling for
+two hours by that time, and put it outside the door on the floor.
+But Jane refused to get it, and finished her breakfast from a jar of
+candied ginger that some one had sent her, and read "Lorna Doone."
+
+Now and then a sound of terrific hammering would follow the
+steampipes and Jane would smile wickedly. By noon she had finished
+the ginger and was wondering what the person about whom she and the
+family had disagreed would think when he heard the way she was being
+treated. And by one o'clock she had cried her eyes entirely shut and
+had pushed the washstand back from the door.
+
+
+II
+
+Now a hospital full of nurses and doctors with a bell to summon food
+and attention is one thing. A hospital without nurses and doctors,
+and with only one person to do everything, and that person mostly in
+the cellar, is quite another. Jane was very sad and lonely, and to
+add to her troubles the delirium-tremens case down the hall began to
+sing "Oh Promise Me" in a falsetto voice and kept it up for hours.
+
+At three Jane got up and bathed her eyes. She also did her hair,
+and thus fortified she started out to find the red-haired person.
+She intended to say that she was paying sixty-five dollars a week
+and belonged to a leading family, and that she didn't mean to
+endure for a moment the treatment she was getting, and being
+called a neurasthenic and made to cook for the other patients.
+
+She went slowly along the hall. The convalescent typhoid heard her
+and called.
+
+"Hey, doc!" he cried. "Hey, doc! Great Scott, man, when do I get
+some dinner?"
+
+Jane quickened her steps and made for the pantry. From somewhere
+beyond, the delirium-tremens case was singing happily:
+
+          _I--love you o--own--ly,
+           I love--but--you._
+
+Jane shivered a little. The person in whom she had been interested
+and who had caused her precipitate retirement, if not to a nunnery,
+to what answered the same purpose, had been very fond of that song.
+He used to sing it, leaning over the piano and looking into her
+eyes.
+
+Jane's nose led her again to the pantry. There was a sort of soupy
+odour in the air, and sure enough the red-haired person was there,
+very immaculate in fresh ducks, pouring boiling water into three
+tea-cups out of a kettle and then dropping a beef capsule into each
+cup.
+
+Now Jane had intended, as I have said, to say that she was being
+outrageously treated, and belonged to one of the best families, and
+so on. What she really said was piteously:
+
+"How good it smells!"
+
+"Doesn't it!" said the red-haired person, sniffing. "Beef capsules.
+I've made thirty cups of it so far since one o'clock--the more they
+have the more they want. I say, be a good girl and run up to the
+kitchen for some more crackers while I carry food to the
+convalescent typhoid. He's murderous!"
+
+"Where are the crackers?" asked Jane stiffly, but not exactly caring
+to raise an issue until she was sure of getting something to eat.
+
+"Store closet in the kitchen, third drawer on the left," said the
+red-haired man, shaking some cayenne pepper into one of the cups.
+"You might stop that howling lunatic on your way if you will."
+
+"How?" asked Jane, pausing.
+
+"Ram a towel down his throat, or--but don't bother. I'll dose him
+with this beef tea and red pepper, and he'll be too busy putting out
+the fire to want to sing."
+
+"You wouldn't be so cruel!" said Jane, rather drawing back. The
+red-haired person smiled and to Jane it showed that he was actually
+ferocious. She ran all the way up for the crackers and down again,
+carrying the tin box. There is no doubt that Jane's family would
+have promptly swooned had it seen her.
+
+When she came down there was a sort of after-dinner peace reigning.
+The convalescent typhoid, having filled up on milk and beef soup,
+had floated off to sleep. "The Chocolate Soldier" had given way to
+deep-muttered imprecations from the singer's room. Jane made herself
+a cup of bouillon and drank it scalding. She was making the second
+when the red-haired person came back with an empty cup.
+
+"I forgot to explain," he said, "that beef tea and red pepper's the
+treatment for our young friend in there. After a man has been
+burning his stomach daily with a quart or so of raw booze----"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Jane coolly. Booze was not considered good
+form on the hill--the word, of course. There was plenty of the
+substance.
+
+"Raw booze," repeated the red-haired person. "Nothing short of red
+pepper or dynamite is going to act as a substitute. Why, I'll bet
+the inside of that chap's stomach is of the general sensitiveness
+and consistency of my shoe."
+
+"Indeed!" said Jane, coldly polite. In Jane's circle people did not
+discuss the interiors of other people's stomachs. The red-haired
+person sat on the table with a cup of bouillon in one hand and a
+cracker in the other.
+
+"You know," he said genially, "it's awfully bully of you to come out
+and keep me company like this. I never put in such a day. I've given
+up fussing with the furnace and got out extra blankets instead. And
+I think by night our troubles will be over." He held up the cup and
+glanced at Jane, who was looking entrancingly pretty. "To our
+troubles being over!" he said, draining the cup, and then found
+that he had used the red pepper again by mistake. It took five
+minutes and four cups of cold water to enable him to explain what he
+meant.
+
+"By our troubles being over," he said finally when he could speak,
+"I mean this: There's a train from town at eight to-night, and if
+all goes well it will deposit in the village half a dozen nurses, a
+cook or two, a furnace man--good Heavens, I wonder if I forgot a
+furnace man!"
+
+It seemed, as Jane discovered, that the telephone wires being cut,
+he had sent Higgins from the men's ward to the village to send some
+telegrams for him.
+
+"I couldn't leave, you see," he explained, "and having some small
+reason to believe that I am _persona non grata_ in this vicinity I
+sent Higgins."
+
+Jane had always hated the name Higgins. She said afterward that she
+felt uneasy from that moment. The red-haired person, who was not
+bad-looking, being tall and straight and having a very decent nose,
+looked at Jane, and Jane, having been shut away for weeks--Jane
+preened a little and was glad she had done her hair.
+
+"You looked better the other way," said the red-haired person,
+reading her mind in a most uncanny manner. "Why should a girl with
+as pretty hair as yours cover it up with a net, anyhow?"
+
+"You are very disagreeable and--and impertinent," said Jane,
+sliding off the table.
+
+"It isn't disagreeable to tell a girl she has pretty hair," the
+red-haired person protested--"or impertinent either."
+
+Jane was gathering up the remnants of her temper, scattered by the
+events of the day.
+
+"You said I was a neurasthenic," she accused him. "It--it isn't
+being a neurasthenic to be nervous and upset and hating the very
+sight of people, is it?"
+
+"Bless my soul!" said the red-haired man. "Then what is it?" Jane
+flushed, but he went on tactlessly: "I give you my word, I think you
+are the most perfectly"--he gave every appearance of being about to
+say "beautiful," but he evidently changed his mind--"the most
+perfectly healthy person I have ever looked at," he finished.
+
+It is difficult to say just what Jane would have done under other
+circumstances, but just as she was getting her temper really in hand
+and preparing to launch something, shuffling footsteps were heard in
+the hall and Higgins stood in the doorway.
+
+He was in a sad state. One of his eyes was entirely closed, and the
+corresponding ear stood out large and bulbous from his head. Also he
+was coated with mud, and he was carefully nursing one hand with the
+other.
+
+He said he had been met at the near end of the railroad bridge by
+the ex-furnace man and one of the ex-orderlies and sent back firmly,
+having in fact been kicked back part of the way. He'd been told to
+report at the hospital that the tradespeople had instituted a
+boycott, and that either the former superintendent went back or the
+entire place could starve to death.
+
+It was then that Jane discovered that her much-vaunted temper was
+not one-two-three to that of the red-haired person. He turned a sort
+of blue-white, shoved Jane out of his way as if she had been a
+chair, and she heard him clatter down the stairs and slam out of the
+front door.
+
+Jane went back to her room and looked down the drive. He was running
+toward the bridge, and the sunlight on his red hair and his flying
+legs made him look like a revengeful meteor. Jane was weak in the
+knees. She knelt on the cold radiator and watched him out of sight,
+and then got trembly all over and fell to snivelling. This was of
+course because, if anything happened to him, she would be left
+entirely alone. And anyhow the D.T. case was singing again and had
+rather got on her nerves.
+
+In ten minutes the red-haired person appeared. He had a
+wretched-looking creature by the back of the neck and he alternately
+pushed and kicked him up the drive. He--the red-haired person--was
+whistling and clearly immensely pleased with himself.
+
+Jane put a little powder on her nose and waited for him to come and
+tell her all about it. But he did not come near. This was quite the
+cleverest thing he could have done, had he known it. Jane was not
+accustomed to waiting in vain. He must have gone directly to the
+cellar, half pushing and half kicking the luckless furnace man, for
+about four o'clock the radiator began to get warm.
+
+At five he came and knocked at Jane's door, and on being invited in
+he sat down on the bed and looked at her.
+
+"Well, we've got the furnace going," he said.
+
+"Then that was the----"
+
+"Furnace man? Yes."
+
+"Aren't you afraid to leave him?" queried Jane. "Won't he run off?"
+
+"Got him locked in a padded cell," he said. "I can take him out to
+coal up. The rest of the time he can sit and think of his sins. The
+question is--what are we to do next?"
+
+"I should think," ventured Jane, "that we'd better be thinking about
+supper."
+
+"The beef capsules are gone."
+
+"But surely there must be something else about--potatoes or things
+like that?"
+
+He brightened perceptibly. "Oh, yes, carloads of potatoes, and
+there's canned stuff. Higgins can pare potatoes, and there's Mary
+O'Shaughnessy. We could have potatoes and canned tomatoes and eggs."
+
+"Fine!" said Jane with her eyes gleaming, although the day before
+she would have said they were her three abominations.
+
+And with that he called Higgins and Mary O'Shaughnessy and the four
+of them went to the kitchen.
+
+Jane positively shone. She had never realised before how much she
+knew about cooking. They built a fire and got kettles boiling and
+everybody pared potatoes, and although in excess of zeal the eggs
+were ready long before everything else and the tomatoes scorched
+slightly, still they made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in
+ability, and when Higgins had carried the trays to the lift and
+started them on their way, Jane and the red-haired person shook
+hands on it and then ate a boiled potato from the same plate,
+sitting side by side on a table.
+
+They were ravenous. They boiled one egg each and ate it, and then
+boiled another and another, and when they finished they found that
+Jane had eaten four potatoes, four eggs and unlimited bread and
+butter, while the red-haired person had eaten six saucers of stewed
+tomatoes and was starting on the seventh.
+
+"You know," he said over the seventh, "we've got to figure this
+thing out. The entire town is solid against us--no use trying to get
+to a telephone. And anyhow they've got us surrounded. We're in a
+state of siege."
+
+Jane was beating up an egg in milk for the D.T. patient, the
+capsules being exhausted, and the red-haired person was watching her
+closely. She had the two vertical lines between her eyes, but they
+looked really like lines of endeavour and not temper.
+
+She stopped beating and looked up.
+
+"Couldn't I go to the village?" she asked.
+
+"They would stop you."
+
+"Then--I think I know what we can do," she said, giving the eggnog a
+final whisk. "My people have a summer place on the hill. If you
+could get there you could telephone to the city."
+
+"Could I get in?"
+
+"I have a key."
+
+Jane did not explain that the said key had been left by her father,
+with the terse hope that if she came to her senses she could get
+into the house and get her clothes.
+
+"Good girl," said the red-headed person and patted her on the
+shoulder. "We'll euchre the old skate yet." Curiously, Jane did not
+resent either the speech or the pat.
+
+He took the glass and tied on a white apron. "If our friend doesn't
+drink this, I will," he continued. "If he'd seen it in the making,
+as I have, he'd be crazy about it."
+
+He opened the door and stood listening. From below floated up the
+refrain:
+
+          _I--love you o--own--ly,
+           I love--but--you._
+
+"Listen to that!" he said. "Stomach's gone, but still has a heart!"
+
+Higgins came up the stairs heavily and stopped close by the
+red-haired person, whispering something to him. There was a second's
+pause. Then the red-haired person gave the eggnog to Higgins and
+both disappeared.
+
+Jane was puzzled. She rather thought the furnace man had got out and
+listened for a scuffle, but none came. She did, however, hear the
+singing cease below, and then commence with renewed vigour, and she
+heard Higgins slowly remounting the stairs. He came in, with the
+empty glass and a sheepish expression. Part of the eggnog was
+distributed over his person.
+
+"He wants his nurse, ma'am," said Higgins. "Wouldn't let me near
+him. Flung a pillow at me."
+
+"Where is the doctor?" demanded Jane.
+
+"Busy," replied Higgins. "One of the women is sick."
+
+Jane was provoked. She had put some labour into the eggnog. But it
+shows the curious evolution going on in her that she got out the
+eggs and milk and made another one without protest. Then with her
+head up she carried it to the door.
+
+"You might clear things away, Higgins," she said, and went down the
+stairs. Her heart was going rather fast. Most of the men Jane knew
+drank more or less, but this was different. She would have turned
+back halfway there had it not been for Higgins and for owning
+herself conquered. That was Jane's real weakness--she never owned
+herself beaten.
+
+The singing had subsided to a low muttering. Jane stopped outside
+the door and took a fresh grip on her courage. Then she pushed the
+door open and went in.
+
+The light was shaded, and at first the tossing figure on the bed was
+only a misty outline of greys and whites. She walked over, expecting
+a pillow at any moment and shielding the glass from attack with her
+hand.
+
+"I have brought you another eggnog," she began severely, "and if you
+spill it----"
+
+Then she looked down and saw the face on the pillow.
+
+To her everlasting credit, Jane did not faint. But in that moment,
+while she stood staring down at the flushed young face with its
+tumbled dark hair and deep-cut lines of dissipation, the man who had
+sung to her over the piano, looking love into her eyes, died to her,
+and Jane, cold and steady, sat down on the side of the bed and fed
+the eggnog, spoonful by spoonful, to his corpse!
+
+When the blank-eyed young man on the bed had swallowed it all
+passively, looking at her with dull, incurious eyes, she went back
+to her room and closing the door put the washstand against it. She
+did nothing theatrical. She went over to the window and stood
+looking out where the trees along the drive were fading in the dusk
+from green to grey, from grey to black. And over the transom came
+again and again monotonously the refrain:
+
+          _I--love you o--own--ly,
+           I love--but--you._
+
+Jane fell on her knees beside the bed and buried her wilful head in
+the hand-embroidered pillow, and said a little prayer because she
+had found out in time.
+
+
+III
+
+The full realisation of their predicament came with the dusk. The
+electric lights were shut off! Jane, crawling into bed tearfully at
+half after eight, turned the reading light switch over her head, but
+no flood of rosy radiance poured down on the hand-embroidered pillow
+with the pink bow.
+
+Jane sat up and stared round her. Already the outline of her dresser
+was faint and shadowy. In half an hour black night would settle down
+and she had not even a candle or a box of matches. She crawled out,
+panicky, and began in the darkness to don her kimono and slippers.
+As she opened the door and stepped into the hall the convalescent
+typhoid heard her and set up his usual cry.
+
+"Hey," he called, "whoever that is come in and fix the lights.
+They're broken. And I want some bread and milk. I can't sleep on an
+empty stomach!"
+
+Jane padded on past the room where love lay cold and dead, down the
+corridor with its alarming echoes. The house seemed very quiet. At a
+corner unexpectedly she collided with some one going hastily. The
+result was a crash and a deluge of hot water. Jane got a drop on her
+bare ankle, and as soon as she could breathe she screamed.
+
+"Why don't you look where you're going?" demanded the red-haired
+person angrily. "I've been an hour boiling that water, and now it
+has to be done over again!"
+
+"It would do a lot of good to look!" retorted Jane. "But if you
+wish I'll carry a bell!"
+
+"The thing for you to do," said the red-haired person severely, "is
+to go back to bed like a good girl and stay there until morning. The
+light is cut off."
+
+"Really!" said Jane. "I thought it had just gone out for a walk. I
+daresay I may have a box of matches at least?"
+
+He fumbled in his pockets without success.
+
+"Not a match, of course!" he said disgustedly. "Was any one ever in
+such an infernal mess? Can't you get back to your room without
+matches?"
+
+"I shan't go back at all unless I have some sort of light,"
+maintained Jane. "I'm--horribly frightened!"
+
+The break in her voice caught his attention and he put his hand out
+gently and took her arm.
+
+"Now listen," he said. "You've been brave and fine all day, and
+don't stop it now. I--I've got all I can manage. Mary O'Shaughnessy
+is----" He stopped. "I'm going to be very busy," he said with half a
+groan. "I surely do wish you were forty for the next few hours. But
+you'll go back and stay in your room, won't you?"
+
+He patted her arm, which Jane particularly hated generally. But Jane
+had altered considerably since morning.
+
+"Then you cannot go to the telephone?"
+
+"Not to-night."
+
+"And Higgins?"
+
+"Higgins has gone," he said. "He slipped off an hour ago. We'll have
+to manage to-night somehow. Now will you be a good child?"
+
+"I'll go back," she promised meekly. "I'm sorry I'm not forty."
+
+He turned her round and started her in the right direction with a
+little push. But she had gone only a step or two when she heard him
+coming after her quickly.
+
+"Where are you?"
+
+"Here," quavered Jane, not quite sure of him or of herself perhaps.
+
+But when he stopped beside her he didn't try to touch her arm again.
+He only said:
+
+"I wouldn't have you forty for anything in the world. I want you to
+be just as you are, very beautiful and young."
+
+Then, as if he was afraid he would say too much, he turned on his
+heel, and a moment after he kicked against the fallen pitcher in the
+darkness and awoke a thousand echoes. As for Jane, she put her
+fingers to her ears and ran to her room, where she slammed the door
+and crawled into bed with burning cheeks.
+
+Jane was never sure whether it was five minutes later or five
+seconds when somebody in the room spoke--from a chair by the window.
+
+"Do you think," said a mild voice--"do you think you could find me
+some bread and butter? Or a glass of milk?"
+
+Jane sat up in bed suddenly. She knew at once that she had made a
+mistake, but she was quite dignified about it. She looked over at
+the chair, and the convalescent typhoid was sitting in it, wrapped
+in a blanket and looking wan and ghostly in the dusk.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm in the wrong room," Jane said very stiffly, trying
+to get out of the bed with dignity, which is difficult. "The hall is
+dark and all the doors look so alike----"
+
+She made for the door at that and got out into the hall with her
+heart going a thousand a minute again.
+
+"You've forgotten your slippers," called the convalescent typhoid
+after her. But nothing would have taken Jane back.
+
+The convalescent typhoid took the slippers home later and locked
+them away in an inner drawer, where he kept one or two things like
+faded roses, and old gloves, and a silk necktie that a girl had made
+him at college--things that are all the secrets a man keeps from his
+wife and that belong in that small corner of his heart which also
+he keeps from his wife. But that has nothing to do with Jane.
+
+Jane went back to her own bed thoroughly demoralised. And sleep
+being pretty well banished by that time, she sat up in bed and
+thought things over. Before this she had not thought much, only
+raged and sulked alternately. But now she thought. She thought about
+the man in the room down the hall with the lines of dissipation on
+his face. And she thought a great deal about what a silly she had
+been, and that it was not too late yet, she being not forty and
+"beautiful." It must be confessed that she thought a great deal
+about that. Also she reflected that what she deserved was to marry
+some person with even a worse temper than hers, who would bully her
+at times and generally keep her straight. And from that, of course,
+it was only a step to the fact that red-haired people are
+proverbially bad-tempered!
+
+She thought, too, about Mary O'Shaughnessy without another woman
+near, and not even a light, except perhaps a candle. Things were
+always so much worse in the darkness. And perhaps she might be going
+to be very ill and ought to have another doctor!
+
+Jane seemed to have been reflecting for a long time, when the church
+clock far down in the village struck nine. And with the chiming of
+the clock was born, full grown, an idea which before it was sixty
+seconds of age was a determination.
+
+In pursuance of the idea Jane once more crawled out of bed and began
+to dress; she put on heavy shoes and a short skirt, a coat, and a
+motor veil over her hair. The indignation at the defection of the
+hospital staff, held in subjection during the day by the necessity
+for doing something, now rose and lent speed and fury to her
+movements. In an incredibly short time Jane was feeling her way
+along the hall and down the staircase, now a well of unfathomable
+blackness and incredible rustlings and creakings.
+
+The front doors were unlocked. Outside there was faint starlight,
+the chirp of a sleepy bird, and far off across the valley the
+gasping and wheezing of a freight climbing the heavy grade to the
+village.
+
+Jane paused at the drive and took a breath. Then at her best
+gymnasium pace, arms close to sides, head up, feet well planted, she
+started to run. At the sundial she left the drive and took to the
+lawn gleaming with the frost of late October. She stopped running
+then and began to pick her way more cautiously. Even at that she
+collided heavily with a wire fence marking the boundary, and sat on
+the ground for some time after, whimpering over the outrage and
+feeling her nose. It was distinctly scratched and swollen. No one
+would think her beautiful with a nose like that!
+
+She had not expected the wire fence. It was impossible to climb and
+more difficult to get under. However, she found one place where the
+ground dipped, and wormed her way under the fence in most
+undignified fashion. It is perfectly certain that had Jane's family
+seen her then and been told that she was doing this remarkable thing
+for a woman she had never seen before that day, named Mary
+O'Shaughnessy, and also for a certain red-haired person of whom it
+had never heard, it would have considered Jane quite irrational. But
+it is entirely probable that Jane became really rational that night
+for the first time in her spoiled young life.
+
+Jane never told the details of that excursion. Those that came out
+in the paper were only guess-work, of course, but it is quite true
+that a reporter found scraps of her motor veil on three wire fences,
+and there seems to be no reason to doubt, also, that two false curls
+were discovered a week later in a cow pasture on her own estate. But
+as Jane never wore curls afterward anyhow----
+
+Well, Jane got to her own house about eleven and crept in like a
+thief to the telephone. There were more rustlings and creakings and
+rumblings in the empty house than she had ever imagined, and she
+went backward through the hall for fear of something coming after
+her. But, which is to the point, she got to the telephone and called
+up her father in the city.
+
+The first message that astonished gentleman got was that a
+red-haired person at the hospital was very ill, having run into a
+wire fence and bruised a nose, and that he was to bring out at once
+from town two doctors, six nurses, a cook and a furnace man!
+
+After a time, however, as Jane grew calmer, he got it straightened
+out, and said a number of things over the telephone anent the
+deserting staff that are quite forbidden by the rules both of the
+club and of the telephone company. He gave Jane full instructions
+about sending to the village and having somebody come up and stay
+with her, and about taking a hot footbath and going to bed between
+blankets, and when Jane replied meekly to everything "Yes, father,"
+and "All right, father," he was so stunned by her mildness that he
+was certain she must be really ill.
+
+Not that Jane had any idea of doing all these things. She hung up
+the telephone and gathered all the candles from all the candlesticks
+on the lower floor, and started back for the hospital. The moon had
+come up and she had no more trouble with fencing, but she was
+desperately tired. She climbed the drive slowly, coming to frequent
+pauses. The hospital, long and low and sleeping, lay before her,
+and in one upper window there was a small yellow light.
+
+Jane climbed the steps and sat down on the top one. She felt very
+tired and sad and dejected, and she sat down on the upper step to
+think of how useless she was, and how much a man must know to be a
+doctor, and that perhaps she would take up nursing in earnest and
+amount to something, and----
+
+It was about three o'clock in the morning when the red-haired
+person, coming down belatedly to close the front doors, saw a
+shapeless heap on the porch surrounded by a radius of white-wax
+candles, and going up shoved at it with his foot. Whereat the heap
+moved slightly and muttered "Lemme shleep."
+
+The red-haired person said "Good Heavens!" and bending down held a
+lighted match to the sleeper's face and stared, petrified. Jane
+opened her eyes, sat up and put her hand over her mutilated nose
+with one gesture.
+
+"You!" said the red-haired person. And then mercifully the match
+went out.
+
+"Don't light another," said Jane. "I'm an alarming sight.
+Would--would you mind feeling if my nose is broken?"
+
+He didn't move to examine it. He just kept on kneeling and staring.
+
+"Where have you been?" he demanded.
+
+"Over to telephone," said Jane, and yawned. "They're bringing
+everybody in automobiles--doctors, nurses, furnace man--oh, dear me,
+I hope I mentioned a cook!"
+
+"Do you mean to say," said the red-haired person wonderingly, "that
+you went by yourself across the fields and telephoned to get me out
+of this mess?"
+
+"Not at all," Jane corrected him coolly. "I'm in the mess myself."
+
+"You'll be ill again."
+
+"I never was ill," said Jane. "I was here for a mean disposition."
+
+Jane sat in the moonlight with her hands in her lap and looked at
+him calmly. The red-haired person reached over and took both her
+hands.
+
+"You're a heroine," he said, and bending down he kissed first one
+and then the other. "Isn't it bad enough that you are beautiful
+without your also being brave?"
+
+Jane eyed him, but he was in deadly earnest. In the moonlight his
+hair was really not red at all, and he looked pale and very, very
+tired. Something inside of Jane gave a curious thrill that was half
+pain. Perhaps it was the dying of her temper, perhaps----
+
+"Am I still beautiful with this nose?" she asked.
+
+"You are everything that a woman should be," he said, and dropping
+her hands he got up. He stood there in the moonlight, straight and
+young and crowned with despair, and Jane looked up from under her
+long lashes.
+
+"Then why don't you stay where you were?" she asked.
+
+At that he reached down and took her hands again and pulled her to
+her feet. He was very strong.
+
+"Because if I do I'll never leave you again," he said. "And I must
+go."
+
+He dropped her hands, or tried to, but Jane wasn't ready to be
+dropped.
+
+"You know," she said, "I've told you I'm a sulky, bad-tempered----"
+
+But at that he laughed suddenly, triumphantly, and put both his arms
+round her and held her close.
+
+"I love you," he said, "and if you are bad-tempered, so am I, only I
+think I'm worse. It's a shame to spoil two houses with us, isn't
+it?"
+
+To her eternal shame be it told, Jane never struggled. She simply
+held up her mouth to be kissed.
+
+That is really all the story. Jane's father came with three
+automobiles that morning at dawn, bringing with him all that goes to
+make up a hospital, from a pharmacy clerk to absorbent cotton, and
+having left the new supplies in the office he stamped upstairs to
+Jane's room and flung open the door.
+
+He expected to find Jane in hysterics and the pink silk kimono.
+
+What he really saw was this: A coal fire was lighted in Jane's
+grate, and in a low chair before it, with her nose swollen level
+with her forehead, sat Jane, holding on her lap Mary O'Shaughnessy's
+baby, very new and magenta-coloured and yelling like a trooper.
+Kneeling beside the chair was a tall, red-headed person holding a
+bottle of olive oil.
+
+"Now, sweetest," the red-haired person was saying, "turn him on his
+tummy and we'll rub his back. Gee, isn't that a fat back!"
+
+And as Jane's father stared and Jane anxiously turned the baby, the
+red-haired person leaned over and kissed the back of Jane's neck.
+
+"Jane!" he whispered.
+
+"Jane!!" said her father.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE PAVILION
+
+
+I
+
+Now, had Billy Grant really died there would be no story. The story
+is to relate how he nearly died; and how, approaching that bourne to
+which no traveller may take with him anything but his sins--and this
+with Billy Grant meant considerable luggage--he cast about for some
+way to prevent the Lindley Grants from getting possession of his
+worldly goods.
+
+Probably it would never have happened at all had not young Grant,
+having hit on a scheme, clung to it with a tenacity that might
+better have been devoted to saving his soul, and had he not said to
+the Nurse, who was at that moment shaking a thermometer: "Come
+on--be a sport! It's only a matter of hours." Not that he said it
+aloud--he whispered it, and fought for the breath to do even that.
+The Nurse, having shaken down the thermometer, walked to the table
+and recorded a temperature of one hundred and six degrees through a
+most unprofessional mist of tears. Then in the symptom column she
+wrote: "Delirious."
+
+But Billy Grant was not delirious. A fever of a hundred and four or
+thereabout may fuse one's mind in a sort of fiery crucible, but when
+it gets to a hundred and six all the foreign thoughts, like seeing
+green monkeys on the footboard and wondering why the doctor is
+walking on his hands--all these things melt away, and one sees one's
+past, as when drowning, and remembers to hate one's relations, and
+is curious about what is coming when one goes over.
+
+So Billy Grant lay on his bed in the contagious pavilion of the
+hospital, and remembered to hate the Lindley Grants and to try to
+devise a way to keep them out of his property. And, having studied
+law, he knew no will that he might make now would hold against the
+Lindley Grants for a minute, unless he survived its making some
+thirty days. The Staff Doctor had given him about thirty hours or
+less.
+
+Perhaps he would have given up in despair and been forced to rest
+content with a threat to haunt the Lindley Grants and otherwise mar
+the enjoyment of their good fortune, had not the Nurse at that
+moment put the thermometer under his arm.
+
+Now, as every one knows, an axillary temperature takes five minutes,
+during which it is customary for a nurse to kneel beside the bed, or
+even to sit very lightly on the edge, holding the patient's arm
+close to his side and counting his respirations while pretending to
+be thinking of something else. It was during these five minutes that
+the idea came into Billy Grant's mind and, having come, remained.
+The Nurse got up, rustling starchily, and Billy caught her eye.
+
+"Every engine," he said with difficulty, "labours--in a low--gear.
+No wonder I'm--heated up!"
+
+The Nurse, who was young, put her hand on his forehead.
+
+"Try to sleep," she said.
+
+"Time for--that--later," said Billy Grant. "I'll--I'll be a--long
+time--dead. I--I wonder whether you'd--do me a--favour."
+
+"I'll do anything in the world you want."
+
+She tried to smile down at him, but only succeeded in making her
+chin quiver, which would never do--being unprofessional and likely
+to get to the head nurse; so, being obliged to do something, she
+took his pulse by the throbbing in his neck.
+
+"One, two, three, four, five, six----"
+
+"Then--marry me," gasped Billy Grant. "Only for an--hour or--two,
+you know. You--promised. Come on--be a sport!"
+
+It was then that the Nurse walked to the table and recorded
+"Delirious" in the symptom column. And, though she was a Smith
+College girl and had taken a something or other in mathematics, she
+spelled it just then with two r's.
+
+Billy Grant was not in love with the Nurse. She was a part of his
+illness, like the narrow brass bed and the yellow painted walls,
+and the thermometer under his arm, and the medicines. There were
+even times--when his fever subsided for a degree or two, after a
+cold sponge, and the muddled condition of mind returned--when she
+seemed to have more heads than even a nurse requires. So sentiment
+did not enter into the matter at all; it was revenge.
+
+"You--promised," he said again; but the Nurse only smiled
+indulgently and rearranged the bottles on the stand in neat rows.
+
+Jenks, the orderly, carried her supper to the isolation pavilion at
+six o'clock--cold ham, potato salad, egg custard and tea. Also, he
+brought her an evening paper. But the Nurse was not hungry. She went
+into the bathroom, washed her eyes with cold water, put on a clean
+collar, against the impending visit of the Staff Doctor, and then
+stood at the window, looking across at the hospital and feeling very
+lonely and responsible. It was not a great hospital, but it loomed
+large and terrible that night. The ambulance came out into the
+courtyard, and an interne, in white ducks, came out to it, carrying
+a surgical bag. He looked over at her and waved his hand. "Big
+railroad wreck!" he called cheerfully. "Got 'em coming in bunches."
+He crawled into the ambulance, where the driver, trained to many
+internes, gave him time to light a cigarette; then out into the
+dusk, with the gong beating madly. Billy Grant, who had lapsed into
+a doze, opened his eyes.
+
+"What--about it?" he asked. "You're not--married already--are you?"
+
+"Please try to rest. Perhaps if I get your beef juice----"
+
+"Oh, damn--the beef juice!" whispered Billy Grant, and shut his eyes
+again--but not to sleep. He was planning how to get his way, and
+finally, out of a curious and fantastic medley of thoughts, he
+evolved something. The doctor, of course! These women had to do what
+the doctor ordered. He would see the doctor!--upon which, with a
+precision quite amazing, all the green monkeys on the footboard of
+the bed put their thumbs to their noses at him.
+
+The situation was unusual; for here was young Grant, far enough from
+any one who knew he was one of the Van Kleek Grants--and, as such,
+entitled to all the nurses and doctors that money could
+procure--shut away in the isolation pavilion of a hospital, and not
+even putting up a good fight! Even the Nurse felt this, and when the
+Staff Man came across the courtyard that night she met him on the
+doorstep and told him.
+
+"He doesn't care whether he gets well or not," she said
+dispiritedly. "All he seems to think about is to die and to leave
+everything he owns so his relatives won't get it. It's horrible!"
+
+The Staff Man, who had finished up a hard day with a hospital supper
+of steak and fried potatoes, sat down on the doorstep and fished out
+a digestive tablet from his surgical bag.
+
+"It's pretty sad, little girl," he said, over the pill. He had known
+the Nurse for some time, having, in fact, brought her--according to
+report at the time--in a predecessor of the very bag at his feet,
+and he had the fatherly manner that belongs by right to the man who
+has first thumped one between the shoulder-blades to make one
+breathe, and who had remarked on this occasion to some one beyond
+the door: "A girl, and fat as butter!"
+
+The Nurse tiptoed in and found Billy Grant apparently asleep.
+Actually he had only closed his eyes, hoping to lure one of the
+monkeys within clutching distance. So the Nurse came out again, with
+the symptom record.
+
+"Delirious, with two r's," said the Staff Doctor, glancing over his
+spectacles. "He must have been pretty bad."
+
+"Not wild; he--he wanted me to marry him!"
+
+She smiled, showing a most alluring dimple in one cheek.
+
+"I see! Well, that's not necessarily delirium. H'm--pulse,
+respiration--look at that temperature! Yes, it's pretty sad--away
+from home, too, poor lad!"
+
+"You---- Isn't there any hope, doctor?"
+
+"None at all--at least, I've never had 'em get well."
+
+Now the Nurse should, by all the ethics of hospital practice, have
+walked behind the Staff Doctor, listening reverentially to what he
+said, not speaking until she was spoken to, and carrying in one hand
+an order blank on which said august personage would presently
+inscribe certain cabalistic characters, to be deciphered later by
+the pharmacy clerk with a strong light and much blasphemy, and in
+the other hand a clean towel. The clean towel does not enter into
+the story, but for the curious be it said that were said personage
+to desire to listen to the patient's heart, the towel would be
+unfolded and spread, without creases, over the patient's
+chest--which reminds me of the Irishman and the weary practitioner;
+but every one knows that story.
+
+Now that is what the Nurse should have done; instead of which, in
+the darkened passageway, being very tired and exhausted and under a
+hideous strain, she suddenly slipped her arm through the Staff
+Doctor's and, putting her head on his shoulder, began to cry softly.
+
+"What's this?" demanded the Staff Doctor sternly and, putting his
+arm round her: "Don't you know that Junior Nurses are not supposed
+to weep over the Staff?" And, getting no answer but a choke: "We
+can't have you used up like this; I'll make them relieve you. When
+did you sleep?"
+
+"I don't want to be relieved," said the Nurse, very muffled.
+"No-nobody else would know wh-what he wanted. I just--I just can't
+bear to see him--to see him----"
+
+The Staff Doctor picked up the clean towel, which belonged on the
+Nurse's left arm, and dried her eyes for her; then he sighed.
+
+"None of us likes to see it, girl," he said. "I'm an old man, and
+I've never got used to it. What do they send you to eat?"
+
+"The food's all right," she said rather drearily. "I'm not
+hungry--that's all. How long do you think----"
+
+The Staff Doctor, who was putting an antiseptic gauze cap over his
+white hair, ran a safety pin into his scalp at that moment and did
+not reply at once. Then, "Perhaps--until morning," he said.
+
+He held out his arms for the long, white, sterilised coat, and a
+moment later, with his face clean-washed of emotion, and looking
+like a benevolent Turk, he entered the sick room. The Nurse was just
+behind him, with an order book in one hand and a clean towel over
+her arm.
+
+Billy Grant, from his bed, gave the turban a high sign of greeting.
+
+"Allah--is--great!" he gasped cheerfully. "Well, doctor--I guess
+it's all--over but--the shouting."
+
+
+II
+
+Some time after midnight Billy Grant roused out of a stupor. He was
+quite rational; in fact, he thought he would get out of bed. But his
+feet would not move. This was absurd! One's feet must move if one
+wills them to! However, he could not stir either of them. Otherwise
+he was beautifully comfortable.
+
+Faint as was the stir he made the Nurse heard him. She was sitting
+in the dark by the window.
+
+"Water?" she asked softly, coming to him.
+
+"Please." His voice was stronger than it had been.
+
+Some of the water went down his neck, but it did not matter. Nothing
+mattered except the Lindley Grants. The Nurse took his temperature
+and went out into the hall to read the thermometer, so he might not
+watch her face. Then, having recorded it under the nightlight, she
+came back into the room.
+
+"Why don't you put on something comfortable?" demanded Billy Grant
+querulously. He was so comfortable himself and she was so stiffly
+starched, so relentless of collar and cap.
+
+"I am comfortable."
+
+"Where's that wrapper thing you've been wearing at night?" The Nurse
+rather flushed at this. "Why don't you lie down on the cot and take
+a nap? I don't need anything."
+
+"Not--not to-night."
+
+He understood, of course, but he refused to be depressed. He was too
+comfortable. He was breathing easily, and his voice, though weak,
+was clear.
+
+"Would you mind sitting beside me? Or are you tired? But of course
+you are. Perhaps in a night or so you'll be over there again,
+sleeping in a nice white gown in a nice fresh bed, with no querulous
+devil----"
+
+"Please!"
+
+"You'll have to be sterilised or formaldehyded?"
+
+"Yes." This very low.
+
+"Will you put your hand over mine? Thanks. It's--company, you know."
+He was apologetic; under her hand his own burned fire. "I--I spoke
+to the Staff about that while you were out of the room."
+
+"About what?"
+
+"About your marrying me."
+
+"What did he say?" She humoured him.
+
+"He said he was willing if you were. You're not going to move--are
+you?"
+
+"No. But you must not talk."
+
+"It's like this. I've got a little property--not much; a little." He
+was nervously eager about this. If she knew it amounted to anything
+she would refuse, and the Lindley Grants---- "And when I--you
+know---- I want to leave it where it will do some good. That little
+brother of yours--it would send him through college, or help to."
+
+Once, weeks ago, before he became so ill, she had told him of the
+brother. This in itself was wrong and against the ethics of the
+profession. One does not speak of oneself or one's family.
+
+"If you won't try to sleep, shall I read to you?"
+
+"Read what?"
+
+"I thought--the Bible, if you wouldn't mind."
+
+"Certainly," he agreed. "I suppose that's the conventional thing;
+and if it makes you feel any better---- Will you think over what
+I've been saying?"
+
+"I'll think about it," she said, soothing him like a fretful child,
+and brought her Bible.
+
+The clock on the near-by town hall struck two as she drew up her
+chair beside him and commenced to read by the shaded light. Across
+the courtyard the windows were dim yellowish rectangles, with here
+and there one brighter than the others that told its own story of
+sleepless hours. A taxicab rolled along the street outside, carrying
+a boisterous night party.
+
+The Nurse had taken off her cap and put it on a stand. The autumn
+night was warm, and the light touch of the tulle had pressed her
+hair in damp, fine curves over her forehead. There were purple
+hollows of anxiety and sleeplessness under her eyes.
+
+"The perfect nurse," the head of the training school was fond of
+saying, "is more or less of a machine. Too much sympathy is a
+handicap to her work and an embarrassment to her patient. A perfect,
+silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine!"
+
+Poor Junior Nurse!
+
+Now Billy Grant, lying there listening to something out of Isaiah,
+should have been repenting his hard-living, hard-drinking young
+life; should have been forgiving the Lindley Grants--which story
+does not belong here; should have been asking for the consolation of
+the church, and trying to summon from the depths of his
+consciousness faint memories of early teachings as to the life
+beyond, and what he might or might not expect there.
+
+What he actually did while the Nurse read was to try to move his
+legs, and, failing this, to plan a way to achieve the final revenge
+of a not particularly forgiving life.
+
+At a little before three o'clock the Nurse telephoned across for an
+interne, who came over in a bathrobe over his pajamas and shot a
+hypodermic into Billy Grant's left arm. Billy Grant hardly noticed.
+He was seeing Mrs. Lindley Grant when his surprise was sprung on
+her. The interne summoned the Nurse into the hall with a jerk of his
+head.
+
+"About all in!" he said. "Heart's gone--too much booze probably. I'd
+stay, but there's nothing to do."
+
+"Would oxygen----"
+
+"Oh, you can try it if you like. It's like blowing up a leaking
+tire; but if you'll feel better, do it." He yawned and tied the cord
+of his bathrobe round him more securely. "I guess you'll be glad to
+get back," he observed, looking round the dingy hall. "This place
+always gives me a chill. Well, let me know if you want me. Good
+night."
+
+The Nurse stood in the hallway until the echo of his slippers on the
+asphalt had died away. Then she turned to Billy Grant.
+
+"Well?" demanded Billy Grant. "How long have I? Until morning?"
+
+"If you would only not talk and excite yourself----"
+
+"Hell!" said Billy Grant, we regret to record. "I've got to do all
+the talking I'm going to do right now. I beg your pardon--I didn't
+intend to swear."
+
+"Oh, that's all right!" said the Nurse vaguely. This was like no
+deathbed she had ever seen, and it was disconcerting.
+
+"Shall I read again?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+The Nurse looked at her watch, which had been graduation present
+from her mother and which said, inside the case: "To my little
+girl!" There is no question but that, when the Nurse's mother gave
+that inscription to the jeweller, she was thinking of the day when
+the Staff Doctor had brought the Nurse in his leather bag, and had
+slapped her between the shoulders to make her breathe. "To my little
+girl!" said the watch; and across from that--"Three o'clock."
+
+At half-past three Billy Grant, having matured his plans, remarked
+that if it would ease the Nurse any he'd see a preacher. His voice
+was weaker again and broken.
+
+"Not"--he said, struggling--"not that I think--he'll pass me.
+But--if you say so--I'll--take a chance."
+
+All of which was diabolical cunning; for when, as the result of a
+telephone conversation, the minister came, an unworldly man who
+counted the world, an automobile, a vested choir and a silver
+communion service well lost for the sake of a dozen derelicts in a
+slum mission house, Billy Grant sent the Nurse out to prepare a
+broth he could no longer swallow, and proceeded to cajole the man of
+God. This he did by urging the need of the Nurse's small brother for
+an education and by forgetting to mention either the Lindley Grants
+or the extent of his property.
+
+From four o'clock until five Billy Grant coaxed the Nurse with what
+voice he had. The idea had become an obsession; and minute by
+minute, panting breath by panting breath, her resolution wore away.
+He was not delirious; he was as sane as she was and terribly set.
+And this thing he wanted was so easy to grant; meant so little to
+her and, for some strange reason, so much to him. Perhaps, if she
+did it, he would think a little of what the preacher was saying.
+
+At five o'clock, utterly worn out with the struggle and finding his
+pulse a negligible quantity, in response to his pleading eyes the
+Nurse, kneeling and holding a thermometer under her patient's arm
+with one hand, reached the other one over the bed and was married in
+a dozen words and a soiled white apron.
+
+Dawn was creeping in at the windows--a grey city dawn, filled with
+soot and the rumbling of early wagons. A smell of damp asphalt from
+the courtyard floated in and a dirty sparrow chirped on the sill
+where the Nurse had been in the habit of leaving crumbs. Billy
+Grant, very sleepy and contented now that he had got his way,
+dictated a line or two on a blank symptom record, and signed his
+will in a sprawling hand.
+
+"If only," he muttered, "I could see Lin's face when that's--sprung
+on him!"
+
+The minister picked up the Bible from the tumbled bed and opened it.
+
+"Perhaps," he suggested very softly, "if I read from the Word of
+God----"
+
+Satisfied now that he had fooled the Lindley Grants out of their
+very shoebuttons, Billy Grant was asleep--asleep with the
+thermometer under his arm and with his chest rising and falling
+peacefully.
+
+The minister looked across at the Nurse, who was still holding the
+thermometer in place. She had buried her face in the white
+counterpane.
+
+"You are a good woman, sister," he said softly. "The boy is happier,
+and you are none the worse. Shall I keep the paper for you?"
+
+But the Nurse, worn out with the long night, slept where she knelt.
+The minister, who had come across the street in a ragged
+smoking-coat and no collar, creaked round the bed and threw the edge
+of the blanket over her shoulders.
+
+Then, turning his coat collar up over his unshaved neck, he departed
+for the mission across the street, where one of his derelicts, in
+his shirtsleeves, was sweeping the pavement. There, mindful of the
+fact that he had come from the contagious pavilion, the minister
+brushed his shabby smoking-coat with a whiskbroom to remove the
+germs!
+
+
+III
+
+Billy Grant, of course, did not die. This was perhaps because only
+the good die young. And Billy Grant's creed had been the honour of a
+gentleman rather than the Mosaic Law. There was, therefore, no
+particular violence done to his code when his last thoughts--or what
+appeared to be his last thoughts--were revenge instead of salvation.
+
+The fact was, Billy Grant had a real reason for hating the Lindley
+Grants. When a fellow like that has all the Van Kleek money and a
+hereditary thirst, he is bound to drink. The Lindley Grants did not
+understand this and made themselves obnoxious by calling him "Poor
+Billy!" and not having wine when he came to dinner. That, however,
+was not his reason for hating them.
+
+Billy Grant fell in love. To give the devil his due, he promptly set
+about reforming himself. He took about half as many whisky-and-sodas
+as he had been in the habit of doing, and cut out champagne
+altogether. He took up golf to fill in the time, too, but gave it up
+when he found it made him thirstier than ever. And then, with
+things so shaping up that he could rise in the morning without
+having a drink to get up on, the Lindley Grants thought it best to
+warn the girl's family before it was too late.
+
+"He is a nice boy in some ways," Mrs. Lindley Grant had said on the
+occasion of the warning; "but, like all drinking men, he is a broken
+reed, eccentric and irresponsible. No daughter of mine could marry
+him. I'd rather bury her. And if you want facts Lindley will give
+them to you."
+
+So the girl had sent back her ring and a cold little letter, and
+Billy Grant had got roaring full at a club that night and presented
+the ring to a cabman--all of which is exceedingly sordid, but rather
+human after all.
+
+The Nurse, having had no sleep for forty-eight hours, slept for
+quite thirty minutes. She wakened at the end of that time and
+started up with a horrible fear that the thing she was waiting for
+had come. But Billy Grant was still alive, sleeping naturally, and
+the thermometer, having been in place forty minutes, registered a
+hundred and three.
+
+At eight o'clock the interne, hurrying over in fresh ducks, with a
+laudable desire to make the rounds before the Staff began to drop
+in, found Billy Grant very still and with his eyes closed, and the
+Nurse standing beside the bed, pale and tremulous.
+
+"Why didn't you let me know?" he demanded, aggrieved. "I ought to
+have been called. I told you----"
+
+"He isn't dead," said the Nurse breathlessly. "He--I think he is
+better."
+
+Whereon she stumbled out of the room into her own little room across
+the hall, locking the door behind her, and leaving the interne to
+hunt the symptom record for himself--a thing not to be lightly
+overlooked; though of course internes are not the Staff.
+
+The interne looked over the record and whistled.
+
+"Wouldn't that paralyse you!" he said under his breath. "'Pulse very
+weak.' 'Pulse almost obliterated.' 'Very talkative.' 'Breathing hard
+at four A.M. Cannot swallow.' And then: 'Sleeping calmly from five
+o'clock.' 'Pulse stronger.' Temperature one hundred and three.' By
+gad, that last prescription of mine was a hit!"
+
+So now began a curious drama of convalescence in the little
+isolation pavilion across the courtyard. Not for a minute did the
+two people most concerned forget their strange relationship; not for
+worlds would either have allowed the other to know that he or she
+remembered. Now and then the Nurse caught Billy Grant's eyes fixed
+on her as she moved about the room, with a curious wistful
+expression in them. And sometimes, waking from a doze, he would find
+her in her chair by the window, with her book dropped into her lap
+and a frightened look in her eyes, staring at him.
+
+He gained strength rapidly and the day came when, with the orderly's
+assistance, he was lifted to a chair. There was one brief moment in
+which he stood tottering on his feet. In that instant he had
+realised what a little thing she was, after all, and what a cruel
+advantage he had used for his own purpose.
+
+When he was settled in the chair and the orderly had gone she
+brought an extra pillow to put behind him, and he dared the first
+personality of their new relationship.
+
+"What a little girl you are, after all!" he said. "Lying there in
+the bed shaking at your frown, you were so formidable."
+
+"I am not small," she said, straightening herself. She had always
+hoped that her cap gave her height. "It is you who are so tall.
+You--you are a giant!"
+
+"A wicked giant, seeking whom I may devour and carrying off lovely
+girls for dinner under pretence of marriage----" He stopped his
+nonsense abruptly, having got so far, and both of them coloured.
+Thrashing about desperately for something to break the wretched
+silence, he seized on the one thing that in those days of his
+convalescence was always pertinent--food. "Speaking of dinner," he
+said hastily, "isn't it time for some buttermilk?"
+
+She was quite calm when she came back--cool, even smiling; but
+Billy Grant had not had the safety valve of action. As she placed
+the glass on the table at his elbow he reached out and took her
+hand.
+
+"Can you ever forgive me?" he asked. Not an original speech; the
+usual question of the marauding male, a query after the fact and too
+late for anything but forgiveness.
+
+"Forgive you? For not dying?"
+
+She was pale; but no more subterfuge now, no more turning aside from
+dangerous subjects. The matter was up before the house.
+
+"For marrying you!" said Billy Grant, and upset the buttermilk. It
+took a little time to wipe up the floor and to put a clean cover on
+the stand, and after that to bring a fresh glass and place it on the
+table. But these were merely parliamentary preliminaries while each
+side got its forces in line.
+
+"Do you hate me very much?" opened Billy Grant. This was, to change
+the figure, a blow below the belt.
+
+"Why should I hate you?" countered the other side.
+
+"I should think you would. I forced the thing on you."
+
+"I need not have done it."
+
+"But being you, and always thinking about making some one else happy
+and comfortable----"
+
+"Oh, if only they don't find it out over there!" she burst out. "If
+they do and I have to leave, with Jim----"
+
+Here, realising that she was going to cry and not caring to screw up
+her face before any one, she put her arms on the stand and buried
+her face in them. Her stiff tulle cap almost touched Billy Grant's
+arm.
+
+Billy Grant had a shocked second.
+
+"Jim?"
+
+"My little brother," from the table.
+
+Billy Grant drew a long breath of relief. For a moment he had
+thought----
+
+"I wonder--whether I dare to say something to you." Silence from the
+table and presumably consent. "Isn't he--don't you think that--I
+might be allowed to--to help Jim? It would help me to like myself
+again. Just now I'm not standing very high with myself."
+
+"Won't you tell me why you did it?" she said, suddenly sitting up,
+her arms still out before her on the table. "Why did you coax so?
+You said it was because of a little property you had, but--that
+wasn't it--was it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Or because you cared a snap for me." This was affirmation, not
+question.
+
+"No, not that, though I----"
+
+She gave a hopeless little gesture of despair.
+
+"Then--why? Why?"
+
+"For one of the meanest reasons I know--to be even with some people
+who had treated me badly."
+
+The thing was easier now. His flat denial of any sentimental reason
+had helped to make it so.
+
+"A girl that you cared about?"
+
+"Partly that. The girl was a poor thing. She didn't care enough to
+be hurt by anything I did. But the people who made the trouble----"
+
+Now a curious thing happened. Billy Grant found at this moment that
+he no longer hated the Lindley Grants. The discovery left him
+speechless--that he who had taken his hate into the very valley of
+death with him should now find himself thinking of both Lindley and
+his wife with nothing more bitter than contempt shocked him. A state
+of affairs existed for which his hatred of the Lindley Grants was
+alone responsible; now the hate was gone and the state of affairs
+persisted.
+
+"I should like," said Billy Grant presently, "to tell you a
+little--if it will not bore you--about myself and the things I have
+done that I shouldn't, and about the girl. And of course, you know,
+I'm--I'm not going to hold you to--to the thing I forced you into.
+There are ways to fix that."
+
+Before she would listen, however, she must take his temperature and
+give him his medicine, and see that he drank his buttermilk--the
+buttermilk last, so as not to chill his mouth for the thermometer.
+The tired lines had gone from under her eyes and she was very lovely
+that day. She had always been lovely, even when the Staff Doctor
+had slapped her between the shoulders long ago--you know about
+that--only Billy Grant had never noticed it; but to-day, sitting
+there with the thermometer in his mouth while she counted his
+respirations, pretending to be looking out the window while she did
+it, Billy Grant saw how sweet and lovely and in every way adorable
+she was, in spite of the sad droop of her lips--and found it hard to
+say the thing he felt he must.
+
+"After all," he remarked round the thermometer, "the thing is not
+irrevocable. I can fix it up so that----"
+
+"Keep your lips closed about the thermometer!" she said sternly, and
+snapped her watch shut.
+
+The pulse and so on having been recorded, and "Very hungry" put down
+under Symptoms, she came back to her chair by the window, facing
+him. She sat down primly and smoothed her white apron in her lap.
+
+"Now!" she said.
+
+"I am to go on?"
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+"If you are going to change the pillows or the screen, or give me
+any other diabolical truck to swallow," he said somewhat peevishly,
+"will you get it over now, so we can have five unprofessional
+minutes?"
+
+"Certainly," she said; and bringing an extra blanket she spread it,
+to his disgust, over his knees.
+
+This time, when she sat down, one of her hands lay on the table near
+him and he reached over and covered it with his.
+
+"Please!" he begged. "For company! And it will help me to tell you
+some of the things I have to tell."
+
+She left it there, after an uneasy stirring. So, sitting there,
+looking out into the dusty courtyard with its bandaged figures in
+wheeled chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench--their crutches
+beside them--its waterless fountain and its dingy birds, he told her
+about the girl and the Lindley Grants, and even about the cabman and
+the ring. And feeling, perhaps in some current from the small hand
+under his, that she was knowing and understanding and not turning
+away, he told her a great deal he had not meant to tell--ugly
+things, many of them--for that was his creed.
+
+And, because in a hospital one lives many lives vicariously with
+many people, what the girl back home would never have understood
+this girl did and faced unabashed. Life, as she knew it, was not all
+good and not all bad; passion and tenderness, violence and peace,
+joy and wretchedness, birth and death--these she had looked on, all
+of them, with clear eyes and hands ready to help.
+
+So Billy Grant laid the good and the bad of his life before her,
+knowing that he was burying it with her. When he finished, her hand
+on the table had turned and was clasping his. He bent over and
+kissed her fingers softly.
+
+After that she read to him, and their talk, if any, was impersonal.
+When the orderly had put him back to bed he lay watching her moving
+about, rejoicing in her quiet strength, her repose. How well she was
+taking it all! If only--but there was no hope of that. She could go
+to Reno, and in a few months she would be free again and the thing
+would be as if it had never been.
+
+At nine o'clock that night the isolation pavilion was ready for the
+night. The lights in the sickroom were out. In the hall a nightlight
+burned low, Billy Grant was not asleep. He tried counting the
+lighted windows of the hospital and grew only more wakeful.
+
+The Nurse was sleeping now in her own room across, with the doors
+open between. The slightest movement and she was up, tiptoeing in,
+with her hair in a long braid down her back and her wrapper sleeves
+falling away loosely from her white, young arms. So, aching with
+inaction, Billy Grant lay still until the silence across indicated
+that she was sleeping.
+
+Then he got up. This is a matter of difficulty when one is still
+very weak, and is achieved by rising first into a sitting posture by
+pulling oneself up by the bars of the bed, and then by slipping
+first one leg, then the other, over the side. Properly done, even
+the weakest thus find themselves in a position that by the aid of a
+chairback may become, however shaky, a standing one.
+
+He got to his feet better than he expected, but not well enough to
+relinquish the chair. He had made no sound. That was good. He would
+tell her in the morning and rally her on her powers as a sleeper. He
+took a step--if only his knees----
+
+He had advanced into line with the doorway and stood looking through
+the open door of the room across.
+
+The Nurse was on her knees beside the bed, in her nightgown, crying.
+Her whole young body was shaken with silent sobs; her arms, in their
+short white sleeves, stretched across the bed, her fingers clutching
+the counterpane.
+
+Billy Grant stumbled back to his bed and fell in with a sort of
+groan. Almost instantly she was at the door, her flannel wrapper
+held about her, peering into the darkness.
+
+"I thought I heard--are you worse?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"I'm all right," he said, hating himself; "just not sleepy. How
+about you?"
+
+"Not asleep yet, but--resting," she replied.
+
+She stood in the doorway, dimly outlined, with her long braid over
+her shoulder and her voice still a little strained from crying. In
+the darkness Billy Grant half stretched out his arms, then dropped
+them, ashamed.
+
+"Would you like another blanket?"
+
+"If there is one near."
+
+She came in a moment later with the blanket and spread it over the
+bed. He lay very still while she patted and smoothed it into place.
+He was mustering up his courage to ask for something--a curious
+state of mind for Billy Grant, who had always taken what he wanted
+without asking.
+
+"I wish you would kiss me--just once!" he said wistfully. And then,
+seeing her draw back, he took an unfair advantage: "I think that's
+the reason I'm not sleeping."
+
+"Don't be absurd!"
+
+"Is it so absurd--under the circumstances?"
+
+"You can sleep quite well if you only try."
+
+She went out into the hall again, her chin well up. Then she
+hesitated, turned and came swiftly back into the room.
+
+"If I do," she said rather breathlessly, "will you go to sleep? And
+will you promise to hold your arms up over your head?"
+
+"But my arms----"
+
+"Over your head!"
+
+He obeyed at that, and the next moment she had bent over him in the
+darkness; and quickly, lightly, deliciously, she kissed--the tip of
+his nose!
+
+
+IV
+
+She was quite cheerful the next day and entirely composed. Neither
+of them referred to the episode of the night before, but Billy Grant
+thought of little else. Early in the morning he asked her to bring
+him a hand mirror and, surveying his face, tortured and disfigured
+by the orderly's shaving, suffered an acute wound in his vanity. He
+was glad it had been dark or she probably would not have---- He
+borrowed a razor from the interne and proceeded to enjoy himself.
+
+Propped up in his chair, he rioted in lather, sliced a piece out of
+his right ear, and shaved the back of his neck by touch, in lieu of
+better treatment. This done, and the ragged and unkempt hair over
+his ears having been trimmed in scallops, due to the work being done
+with curved surgical scissors, he was his own man again.
+
+That afternoon, however, he was nervous and restless. The Nurse was
+troubled. He avoided the subject that had so obsessed him the day
+before, was absent and irritable, could not eat, and sat in his
+chair by the window, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands.
+
+The Nurse was puzzled, but the Staff Doctor, making rounds that day,
+enlightened her.
+
+"He has pulled through--God and you alone know how," he said. "But
+as soon as he begins to get his strength he's going to yell for
+liquor again. When a man has been soaking up alcohol for years----
+Drat this hospital cooking anyhow! Have you got any essence of
+pepsin?"
+
+The Nurse brought the pepsin and a medicine glass and the Staff
+Doctor swallowed and grimaced.
+
+"You were saying," said the Nurse timidly--for, the stress being
+over, he was Staff again and she was a Junior and not even entitled
+to a Senior's privileges, such as returning occasional badinage.
+
+"Every atom of him is going to crave it. He's wanting it now. He has
+been used to it for years." The Nurse was white to the lips, but
+steady. "He is not to have it?"
+
+"Not a drop while he is here. When he gets out it is his own affair
+again, but while he's here--by-the-way, you'll have to watch the
+orderly. He'll bribe him."
+
+"I don't think so, doctor. He is a gentleman."
+
+"Pooh! Of course he is. I dare say he's a gentleman when he's drunk
+too; but he's a drinker--a habitual drinker."
+
+The Nurse went back into the room and found Billy Grant sitting in a
+chair, with the book he had been reading on the floor and his face
+buried in his hands.
+
+"I'm awfuly sorry!" he said, not looking up. "I heard what he said.
+He's right, you know."
+
+"I'm sorry. And I'm afraid this is a place where I cannot help."
+
+She put her hand on his head, and he brought it down and held it
+between his.
+
+"Two or three times," he said, "when things were very bad with me,
+you let me hold your hand, and we got past somehow--didn't we?"
+
+She closed her eyes, remembering the dawn when, to soothe a dying
+man, in the presence of the mission preacher, she had put her hand
+in his. Billy Grant thought of it too.
+
+"Now you know what you've married," he said bitterly. The bitterness
+was at himself of course. "If--if you'll sit tight I have a fighting
+chance to make a man of myself; and after it's over we'll fix this
+thing for you so you will forget it ever happened. And I---- Don't
+take your hand away. Please!"
+
+"I was feeling for my handkerchief," she explained.
+
+"Have I made you cry again?"
+
+"Again?'
+
+"I saw you last night in your room. I didn't intend to; but I was
+trying to stand, and----"
+
+She was very dignified at this, with her eyes still wet, and tried
+unsuccessfully to take her hand away.
+
+"If you are going to get up when it is forbidden I shall ask to be
+relieved."
+
+"You wouldn't do that!"
+
+"Let go of my hand."
+
+"You wouldn't do that!!"
+
+"Please! The head nurse is coming."
+
+He freed her hand then and she wiped her eyes, remembering the
+"perfect, silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine."
+
+The head of the training school came to the door of the pavilion,
+but did not enter. The reason for this was twofold: first, she had
+confidence in the Nurse; second, she was afraid of contagion--this
+latter, of course, quite _sub rosa_, in view of the above quotation.
+
+The Head Nurse was a tall woman in white, and was so starchy that
+she rattled like a newspaper when she walked.
+
+"Good morning," she said briskly. "Have you sent over the soiled
+clothes?" Head nurses are always bothering about soiled clothes;
+and what becomes of all the nailbrushes, and how can they use so
+many bandages.
+
+"Yes, Miss Smith."
+
+"Meals come over promptly?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Smith."
+
+"Getting any sleep?"
+
+"Oh, yes, plenty--now."
+
+Miss Smith peered into the hallway, which seemed tidy, looked at the
+Nurse with approval, and then from the doorstep into the patient's
+room, where Billy Grant sat. At the sight of him her eyebrows rose.
+
+"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "I thought he was older than that!"
+
+"Twenty-nine," said the Nurse; "twenty-nine last Fourth of July."
+
+"H'm!" commented the Head Nurse. "You evidently know! I had no idea
+you were taking care of a boy. It won't do. I'll send over Miss
+Hart."
+
+The Nurse tried to visualise Billy Grant in his times of stress
+clutching at Miss Hart's hand, and failed.
+
+"Jenks is here, of course," she said, Jenks being the orderly.
+
+The idea of Jenks as a chaperon, however, did not appeal to the head
+nurse. She took another glance through the window at Billy Grant,
+looking uncommonly handsome and quite ten years younger since the
+shave, and she set her lips.
+
+"I am astonished beyond measure," she said. "Miss Hart will relieve
+you at two o'clock. Take your antiseptic bath and you may have the
+afternoon to yourself. Report in L Ward in the morning."
+
+Miss Smith rattled back across the courtyard and the Nurse stood
+watching her; then turned slowly and went into the house to tell
+Billy Grant.
+
+Now the stories about what followed differ. They agree on one point:
+that Billy Grant had a heart-to-heart talk with the substitute at
+two o'clock that afternoon and told her politely but firmly that he
+would none of her. Here the divergence begins. Some say he got the
+superintendent over the house telephone and said he had intended to
+make a large gift to the hospital, but if his comfort was so little
+considered as to change nurses just when he had got used to one, he
+would have to alter his plans. Another and more likely story,
+because it sounds more like Billy Grant, is that at five o'clock a
+florist's boy delivered to Miss Smith a box of orchids such as never
+had been seen before in the house, and a card inside which said:
+"Please, dear Miss Smith, take back the Hart that thou gavest."
+
+Whatever really happened--and only Billy Grant and the lady in
+question ever really knew--that night at eight o'clock, with Billy
+Grant sitting glumly in his room and Miss Hart studying typhoid
+fever in the hall, the Nurse came back again to the pavilion with
+her soft hair flying from its afternoon washing and her eyes
+shining. And things went on as before--not quite as before; for with
+the nurse question settled the craving got in its work again, and
+the next week was a bad one. There were good days, when he taught
+her double-dummy auction bridge, followed by terrible nights, when
+he walked the floor for hours and she sat by, unable to help. Then
+at dawn he would send her to bed remorsefully and take up the fight
+alone. And there were quiet nights when both slept and when he would
+waken to the craving again and fight all day.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm about killing her," he said to the Staff Doctor one
+day; "but it's my chance to make a man of myself--now or never."
+
+The Staff Doctor was no fool and he had heard about the orchids.
+
+"Fight it out, boy!" he said. "Pretty soon you'll quit peeling and
+cease being a menace to the public health, and you'd better get it
+over before you are free again."
+
+So, after a time, it grew a little easier. Grant was pretty much
+himself again--had put on a little flesh and could feel his biceps
+rise under his fingers. He took to cold plunges when he felt the
+craving coming on, and there were days when the little pavilion was
+full of the sound of running water. He shaved himself daily, too,
+and sent out for some collars.
+
+Between the two of them, since her return, there had been much of
+good fellowship, nothing of sentiment. He wanted her near, but he
+did not put a hand on her. In the strain of those few days the
+strange, grey dawn seemed to have faded into its own mists. Only
+once, when she had brought his breakfast tray and was arranging the
+dishes for him--against his protest, for he disliked being waited
+on--he reached over and touched a plain band ring she wore. She
+coloured.
+
+"My mother's," she said; "her wedding ring."
+
+Their eyes met across the tray, but he only said, after a moment:
+"Eggs like a rock, of course! Couldn't we get 'em raw and boil them
+over here?"
+
+It was that morning, also, that he suggested a thing which had been
+in his mind for some time.
+
+"Wouldn't it be possible," he asked, "to bring your tray in here and
+to eat together? It would be more sociable."
+
+She smiled.
+
+"It isn't permitted."
+
+"Do you think--would another box of orchids----"
+
+She shook her head as she poured out his coffee. "I should probably
+be expelled."
+
+He was greatly aggrieved.
+
+"That's all foolishness," he said. "How is that any worse--any more
+unconventional--than your bringing me your extra blanket on a cold
+night? Oh, I heard you last night!"
+
+"Then why didn't you leave it on?"
+
+"And let you freeze?"
+
+"I was quite warm. As it was, it lay in the hallway all night and
+did no one any good."
+
+Having got thus far from wedding rings, he did not try to get back.
+He ate alone, and after breakfast, while she took her half-hour of
+exercise outside the window, he sat inside reading--only apparently
+reading, however.
+
+Once she went quite as far as the gate and stood looking out.
+
+"Jenks!" called Billy Grant.
+
+Jenks has not entered into the story much. He was a little man,
+rather fat, who occupied a tiny room in the pavilion, carried meals
+and soiled clothes, had sat on Billy Grant's chest once or twice
+during a delirium, and kept a bottle locked in the dish closet.
+
+"Yes, sir," said Jenks, coming behind a strong odour of _spiritus
+frumenti_.
+
+"Jenks," said Billy Grant with an eye on the figure at the gate, "is
+that bottle of yours empty?"
+
+"What bottle?"
+
+"The one in the closet."
+
+Jenks eyed Billy Grant, and Billy eyed Jenks--a look of man to man,
+brother to brother.
+
+"Not quite, sir--a nip or two."
+
+"At," suggested Billy Grant, "say--five dollars a nip?"
+
+Jenks smiled.
+
+"About that," he said. "Filled?"
+
+Billy Grant debated. The Nurse was turning at the gate.
+
+"No," he said. "As it is, Jenks. Bring it here."
+
+Jenks brought the bottle and a glass, but the glass was motioned
+away. Billy Grant took the bottle in his hand and looked at it with
+a curious expression. Then he went over and put it in the upper
+bureau drawer, under a pile of handkerchiefs. Jenks watched him,
+bewildered.
+
+"Just a little experiment, Jenks," said Billy Grant.
+
+Jenks understood then and stopped smiling.
+
+"I wouldn't, Mr. Grant," he said; "it will only make you lose
+confidence in yourself when it doesn't work out."
+
+"But it's going to work out," said Billy Grant. "Would you mind
+turning on the cold water?"
+
+Now the next twenty-four hours puzzled the Nurse. When Billy Grant's
+eyes were not on her with an unfathomable expression in them, they
+were fixed on something in the neighbourhood of the dresser, and at
+these times they had a curious, fixed look not unmixed with triumph.
+She tried a new arrangement of combs and brushes and tilted the
+mirror at a different angle, without effect.
+
+That day Billy Grant took only one cold plunge. As the hours wore on
+he grew more cheerful; the look of triumph was unmistakable. He
+stared less at the dresser and more at the Nurse. At last it grew
+unendurable. She stopped in front of him and looked down at him
+severely. She could only be severe when he was sitting--when he was
+standing she had to look so far up at him, even when she stood on
+her tiptoes.
+
+"What is wrong with me?" she demanded. "You look so queer! Is my cap
+crooked?"
+
+"It is a wonderful cap."
+
+"Is my face dirty?"
+
+"It is a won---- No, certainly not."
+
+"Then would you mind not staring so? You--upset me."
+
+"I shall have to shut my eyes," he replied meekly, and worried her
+into a state of frenzy by sitting for fifty minutes with his head
+back and his eyes shut.
+
+So--the evening and the morning were another day, and the bottle lay
+undisturbed under the handkerchiefs, and the cold shower ceased
+running, and Billy Grant assumed the air of triumph permanently.
+That morning when the breakfast trays came he walked over into the
+Nurse's room and picked hers up, table and all, carrying it across
+the hall. In his own room he arranged the two trays side by side,
+and two chairs opposite each other. When the Nurse, who had been
+putting breadcrumbs on the window-sill, turned round Billy Grant was
+waiting to draw out one of the chairs, and there was something in
+his face she had not seen there before.
+
+"Shall we breakfast?" he said.
+
+"I told you yesterday----"
+
+"Think a minute," he said softly. "Is there any reason why we should
+not breakfast together?" She pressed her hands close together, but
+she did not speak. "Unless--you do not wish to."
+
+"You remember you promised, as soon as you got away, to--fix
+that----"
+
+"So I will if you say the word."
+
+"And--to forget all about it."
+
+"That," said Billy Grant solemnly, "I shall never do so long as I
+live. Do you say the word?"
+
+"What else can I do?"
+
+"Then there is somebody else?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+He took a step toward her, but still he did not touch her.
+
+"If there is no one else," he said, "and if I tell you that you have
+made me a man again----"
+
+"Gracious! Your eggs will be cold." She made a motion toward the
+egg-cup, but Billy Grant caught her hand.
+
+"Damn the eggs!" he said. "Why don't you look at me?"
+
+Something sweet and luminous and most unprofessional shone in the
+little Nurse's eyes, and the line of her pulse on a chart would have
+looked like a seismic disturbance.
+
+"I--I have to look up so far!" she said, but really she was looking
+down when she said it.
+
+"Oh, my dear--my dear!" exulted Billy Grant. "It is I who must look
+up at you!" And with that he dropped on his knees and kissed the
+starched hem of her apron.
+
+The Nurse felt very absurd and a little frightened.
+
+"If only," she said, backing off--"if only you wouldn't be such a
+silly! Jenks is coming!"
+
+But Jenks was not coming. Billy Grant rose to his full height and
+looked down at her--a new Billy Grant, the one who had got drunk at
+a club and given a ring to a cabman having died that grey morning
+some weeks before.
+
+"I love you--love you--love you!" he said, and took her in his arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now the Head Nurse was interviewing an applicant; and, as the H.N.
+took a constitutional each morning in the courtyard and believed in
+losing no time, she was holding the interview as she walked.
+
+"I think I would make a good nurse," said the applicant, a trifle
+breathless, the h.n. being a brisk walker. "I am so sympathetic."
+
+The H.N. stopped and raised a reproving forefinger.
+
+"Too much sympathy is a handicap," she orated. "The perfect nurse is
+a silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine--this little
+building here is the isolation pavilion."
+
+"An emotionless machine," repeated the applicant. "I see--an e----"
+
+The words died on her lips. She was looking past a crowd of birds on
+the windowsill to where, just inside, Billy Grant and the Nurse in a
+very mussed cap were breakfasting together. And as she looked Billy
+Grant bent over across the tray.
+
+"I adore you!" he said distinctly and, lifting the Nurse's hands,
+kissed first one and then the other.
+
+"It is hard work," said Miss Smith--having made a note that the boys
+in the children's ward must be restrained from lowering a pasteboard
+box on a string from a window--"hard work without sentiment. It is
+not a romantic occupation."
+
+She waved an admonitory hand toward the window, and the box went up
+swiftly. The applicant looked again toward the pavilion, where
+Billy Grant, having kissed the Nurse's hands, had buried his face in
+her two palms.
+
+The mild October sun shone down on the courtyard, with its bandaged
+figures in wheel-chairs, its cripples sunning on a bench, their
+crutches beside them, its waterless fountain and dingy birds.
+
+The applicant thrilled to it all--joy and suffering, birth and
+death, misery and hope, life and love. Love!
+
+The H.N. turned to her grimly, but her eyes were soft.
+
+"All this," she said, waving her hand vaguely, "for eight dollars a
+month!"
+
+"I think," said the applicant shyly, "I should like to come."
+
+
+
+
+GOD'S FOOL
+
+
+I
+
+The great God endows His children variously. To some He gives
+intellect--and they move the earth. To some He allots heart--and the
+beating pulse of humanity is theirs. But to some He gives only a
+soul, without intelligence--and these, who never grow up, but remain
+always His children, are God's fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as
+if from His palette the Artist of all had taken one colour instead
+of many.
+
+The Dummy was God's fool. Having only a soul and no intelligence, he
+lived the life of the soul. Through his faded, childish old blue
+eyes he looked out on a world that hurried past him with, at
+best, a friendly touch on his shoulder. No man shook his hand in
+comradeship. No woman save the little old mother had ever caressed
+him. He lived alone in a world of his own fashioning, peopled by
+moving, noiseless figures and filled with dreams--noiseless because
+the Dummy had ears that heard not and lips that smiled at a
+kindness, but that did not speak.
+
+In this world of his there was no uncharitableness--no sin. There
+was a God--why should he not know his Father?--there were brasses to
+clean and three meals a day; and there was chapel on Sunday, where
+one held a book--the Dummy held his upside down--and felt the
+vibration of the organ, and proudly watched the afternoon sunlight
+smiling on the polished metal of the chandelier and choir rail.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Probationer sat turning the bandage machine and watching the
+Dummy, who was polishing the brass plates on the beds. The plates
+said: "Endowed in perpetuity"--by various leading citizens, to whom
+God had given His best gifts, both heart and brain.
+
+"How old do you suppose he is?" she asked, dropping her voice.
+
+The Senior Nurse was writing fresh labels for the medicine closet,
+and for "tincture of myrrh" she wrote absently "tincture of mirth,"
+and had to tear it up.
+
+"He can't hear you," she said rather shortly. "How old? Oh, I don't
+know. About a hundred, I should think."
+
+This was, of course, because of his soul, which was all he had, and
+which, having existed from the beginning, was incredibly old. The
+little dead mother could have told them that he was less than
+thirty.
+
+The Probationer sat winding bandages. Now and then they went
+crooked and had to be done again. She was very tired. The creaking
+of the bandage machine made her nervous--that and a sort of
+disillusionment; for was this her great mission, this sitting in a
+silent, sunny ward, where the double row of beds held only querulous
+convalescent women? How close was she to life who had come to soothe
+the suffering and close the eyes of the dying; who had imagined that
+her instruments of healing were a thermometer and a prayer-book; and
+who found herself fighting the good fight with a bandage machine
+and, even worse, a scrubbing brush and a finetooth comb?
+
+The Senior Nurse, having finished the M's, glanced up and surprised
+a tear on the Probationer's round young cheek. She was wise, having
+trained many probationers.
+
+"Go to first supper, please," she said. First supper is the Senior's
+prerogative; but it is given occasionally to juniors and
+probationers as a mark of approval, or when the Senior is not
+hungry, or when a probationer reaches the breaking point, which is
+just before she gets her uniform.
+
+The Probationer smiled and brightened. After all, she must be doing
+fairly well; and if she were not in the battle she was of it.
+Glimpses she had of the battle--stretchers going up and down in the
+slow elevator; sheeted figures on their way to the operating room;
+the clang of the ambulance bell in the courtyard; the occasional cry
+of a new life ushered in; the impressive silence of an old life
+going out. She surveyed the bandages on the bed.
+
+"I'll put away the bandages first," she said. "That's what you said,
+I think--never to leave the emergency bed with anything on it?"
+
+"Right-oh!" said the Senior.
+
+"Though nothing ever happens back here--does it?'
+
+"It's about our turn; I'm looking for a burned case." The
+Probationer, putting the bandages into a basket, turned and stared.
+
+"We have had two in to-day in the house," the Senior went on,
+starting on the N's and making the capital carefully. "There will be
+a third, of course; and we may get it. Cases always seem to run in
+threes. While you're straightening the bed I suppose I might as well
+go to supper after all."
+
+So it was the Probationer and the Dummy who received the new case,
+while the Senior ate cold salmon and fried potatoes with other
+seniors, and inveighed against lectures on Saturday evening and
+other things that seniors object to, such as things lost in the
+wash, and milk in the coffee instead of cream, and women from the
+Avenue who drank carbolic acid and kept the ambulance busy.
+
+The Probationer was from the country and she had never heard of
+the Avenue. And the Dummy, who walked there daily with the
+superintendent's dog, knew nothing of its wickedness. In his soul,
+where there was nothing but kindness, there was even a feeling of
+tenderness for the Avenue. Once the dog had been bitten by a terrier
+from one of the houses, and a girl had carried him in and washed the
+wounds and bound them up. Thereafter the Dummy had watched for her
+and bowed when he saw her. When he did not see her he bowed to the
+house.
+
+The Dummy finished the brass plates and, gathering up his rags and
+polish, shuffled to the door. His walk was a patient shamble, but he
+covered incredible distances. When he reached the emergency bed he
+stopped and pointed to it. The Probationer looked startled.
+
+"He's tellin' you to get it ready," shrilled Irish Delia, sitting up
+in the next bed. "He did that before you was brought in," she called
+to Old Maggie across the ward. "Goodness knows how he finds out--but
+he knows. Get the spread off the bed, miss. There's something
+coming."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Probationer had come from the country and naturally knew nothing
+of the Avenue. Sometimes on her off duty she took short walks there,
+wondering if the passers-by who stared at her knew that she was a
+part of the great building that loomed over the district, happily
+ignorant of the real significance of their glances. Once a girl,
+sitting behind bowed shutters, had leaned out and smiled at her.
+
+"Hot to-day, isn't it?" she said.
+
+The Probationer stopped politely.
+
+"It's fearful! Is there any place near where I can get some soda
+water?"
+
+The girl in the window stared.
+
+"There's a drug store two squares down," she said. "And say, if I
+were you----"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Oh, nothing!" said the girl in the window, and quite unexpectedly
+slammed the shutters.
+
+The Probationer had puzzled over it quite a lot. More than once she
+walked by the house, but she did not see the smiling girl--only,
+curiously enough, one day she saw the Dummy passing the house and
+watched him bow and take off his old cap, though there was no one in
+sight.
+
+Sooner or later the Avenue girls get to the hospital. Sometimes it
+is because they cannot sleep, and lie and think things over--and
+there is no way out; and God hates them--though, of course, there is
+that story about Jesus and the Avenue woman. And what is the use of
+going home and being asked questions that cannot be answered? So
+they try to put an end to things generally--and end up in the
+emergency bed, terribly frightened, because it has occurred to them
+that if they do not dare to meet the home folks how are they going
+to meet the Almighty?
+
+Or sometimes it is jealousy. Even an Avenue woman must love some
+one; and, because she's an elemental creature, if the object of her
+affections turns elsewhere she's rather apt to use a knife or a
+razor. In that case it is the rival who ends up on the emergency
+bed.
+
+Or the life gets her, as it does sooner or later, and she comes in
+with typhoid or a cough, or other things, and lies alone, day after
+day, without visitors or inquiries, making no effort to get better,
+because--well, why should she?
+
+And so the Dummy's Avenue Girl met her turn and rode down the street
+in a clanging ambulance, and was taken up in the elevator and along
+a grey hall to where the emergency bed was waiting; and the
+Probationer, very cold as to hands and feet, was sending mental
+appeals to the Senior to come--and come quickly. The ward got up on
+elbows and watched. Also it told the Probationer what to do.
+
+"Hot-water bottles and screens," it said variously. "Take her
+temperature. Don't be frightened! There'll be a doctor in a minute."
+
+The girl lay on the bed with her eyes shut. It was Irish Delia who
+saw the Dummy and raised a cry.
+
+"Look at the Dummy!" she said. "He's crying."
+
+The Dummy's world had always been a small one. There was the
+superintendent, who gave him his old clothes; and there was the
+engineer, who brought him tobacco; and there were the ambulance
+horses, who talked to him now and then without speech. And, of
+course, there was his Father.
+
+Fringing this small inner circle of his heart was a kaleidoscope of
+changing faces, nurses, _internes_, patients, visitors--a wall of
+life that kept inviolate his inner shrine. And in the holiest place,
+where had dwelt only his Father, and not even the superintendent,
+the Dummy had recently placed the Avenue Girl. She was his saint,
+though he knew nothing of saints. Who can know why he chose her? A
+queer trick of the soul perhaps--or was it super-wisdom?--to choose
+her from among many saintly women and so enshrine her.
+
+Or perhaps---- Down in the chapel, in a great glass window, the
+young John knelt among lilies and prayed. When, at service on
+Sundays, the sunlight came through on to the Dummy's polished choir
+rail and candles, the young John had the face of a girl, with short
+curling hair, very yellow for the colour scheme. The Avenue Girl had
+hair like that and was rather like him in other ways.
+
+And here she was where all the others had come, and where countless
+others would come sooner or later. She was not unconscious and at
+Delia's cry she opened her eyes. The Probationer was off filling
+water bottles, and only the Dummy, stricken, round-shouldered,
+unlovely, stood beside her.
+
+"Rotten luck, old top!" she said faintly.
+
+To the Dummy it was a benediction. She could open her eyes. The
+miracle of speech was still hers.
+
+"Cigarette!" explained the Avenue Girl, seeing his eyes still on
+her. "Must have gone to sleep with it and dropped it. I'm--all in!"
+
+"Don't you talk like that," said Irish Delia, bending over from the
+next bed. "You'll get well a' right--unless you inhaled. Y'ought to
+'a' kept your mouth shut."
+
+Across the ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue
+calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old
+Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where
+squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and scorned it.
+
+"Humph!" she said, without troubling to lower her voice. "I've seen
+her often. I done her washing once. She's as bad as they make 'em."
+
+"You shut your mouth!" Irish Delia rose to the defence. "She's in
+trouble now and what she was don't matter. You go back to bed or
+I'll tell the Head Nurse on you. Look out! The Dummy----"
+
+The Dummy was advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the
+woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands
+and jerked her away from the bed. Old Maggie reeled--almost fell.
+
+"You all seen that!" she appealed to the ward. "I haven't even spoke
+to him and he attacked me! I'll go to the superintendent about it.
+I'll----"
+
+The Probationer hurried in. Her young cheeks were flushed with
+excitement and anxiety; her arms were full of jugs, towels,
+bandages--anything she could imagine as essential. She found the
+Dummy on his knees polishing a bed plate, and the ward in
+order--only Old Maggie was grumbling and making her way back to bed;
+and Irish Delia was sitting up, with her eyes shining--for had not
+the Dummy, who could not hear, known what Old Maggie had said about
+the new girl? Had she not said that he knew many things that were
+hidden, though God knows how he knew them?
+
+The next hour saw the Avenue Girl through a great deal. Her burns
+were dressed by an _interne_ and she was moved back to a bed at the
+end of the ward. The Probationer sat beside her, having refused
+supper. The Dummy was gone--the Senior Nurse had shooed him off as
+one shoos a chicken.
+
+"Get out of here! You're always under my feet," she had said--not
+unkindly--and pointed to the door.
+
+The Dummy had stood, with his faded old-young eyes on her, and had
+not moved. The Senior, who had the ward supper to serve and beds to
+brush out and backs to rub, not to mention having to make up the
+emergency bed and clear away the dressings--the Senior tried
+diplomacy and offered him an orange from her own corner of the
+medicine closet. He shook his head.
+
+"I guess he wants to know whether that girl from the Avenue's going
+to get well," said Irish Delia. "He seems to know her."
+
+There was a titter through the ward at this. Old Maggie's gossiping
+tongue had been busy during the hour. From pity the ward had veered
+to contempt.
+
+"Humph!" said the Senior, and put the orange back. "Why, yes; I
+guess she'll get well. But how in Heaven's name am I to let him
+know?"
+
+She was a resourceful person, however, and by pointing to the Avenue
+Girl and then nodding reassuringly she got her message of cheer over
+the gulf of his understanding. In return the Dummy told her by
+gestures how he knew the girl and how she had bound up the leg of
+the superintendent's dog. The Senior was a literal person and not
+occult; and she was very busy. When the Dummy stooped to indicate
+the dog, a foot or so from the ground, she seized that as the key of
+the situation.
+
+"He's trying to let me know that he knew her when she was a baby,"
+she observed generally. "All right, if that's the case. Come in and
+see her when you want to. And now get out, for goodness' sake!"
+
+The Dummy, with his patient shamble, made his way out of the ward
+and stored his polishes for the night in the corner of a
+scrub-closet. Then, ignoring supper, he went down the stairs, flight
+after flight, to the chapel. The late autumn sun had set behind the
+buildings across the courtyard and the lower part of the silent room
+was in shadow; but the afterglow came palely through the
+stained-glass window, with the young John and tall stalks of white
+lilies, and "To the Memory of My Daughter Elizabeth" beneath.
+
+It was only a coincidence--and not even that to the Dummy--but
+Elizabeth had been the Avenue Girl's name not so long ago.
+
+The Dummy sat down near the door very humbly and gazed at the
+memorial window.
+
+
+II
+
+Time may be measured in different ways--by joys; by throbs of pain;
+by instants; by centuries. In a hospital it is marked by night
+nurses and day nurses; by rounds of the Staff; by visiting days; by
+medicines and temperatures and milk diets and fever baths; by the
+distant singing in the chapel on Sundays; by the shift of the
+morning sun on the east beds to the evening sun on the beds along
+the west windows.
+
+The Avenue Girl lay alone most of the time. The friendly offices of
+the ward were not for her. Private curiosity and possible kindliness
+were over-shadowed by a general arrogance of goodness. The ward
+flung its virtue at her like a weapon and she raised no defence. In
+the first days things were not so bad. She lay in shock for a time,
+and there were not wanting hands during the bad hours to lift a cup
+of water to her lips; but after that came the tedious time when
+death no longer hovered overhead and life was there for the asking.
+
+The curious thing was that the Avenue Girl did not ask. She lay for
+hours without moving, with eyes that seemed tired with looking into
+the dregs of life. The Probationer was in despair.
+
+"She could get better if she would," she said to the _interne_ one
+day. The Senior was off duty and they had done the dressing
+together. "She just won't try."
+
+"Perhaps she thinks it isn't worth while," replied the _interne_,
+who was drying his hands carefully while the Probationer waited for
+the towel.
+
+She was a very pretty Probationer.
+
+"She hasn't much to look forward to, you know."
+
+The Probationer was not accustomed to discussing certain things with
+young men, but she had the Avenue Girl on her mind.
+
+"She has a home--she admits it." She coloured bravely. "Why--why
+cannot she go back to it, even now?"
+
+The _interne_ poured a little rosewater and glycerine into the palm
+of one hand and gave the Probationer the bottle. If his fingers
+touched hers, she never knew it.
+
+"Perhaps they'd not want her after--well, they'd never feel the
+same, likely. They'd probably prefer to think of her as dead and let
+it go at that. There--there doesn't seem to be any way back, you
+know."
+
+He was exceedingly self-conscious.
+
+"Then life is very cruel," said the Probationer with rather shaky
+lips.
+
+And going back to the Avenue Girl's bed she filled her cup with ice
+and straightened her pillows. It was her only way of showing
+defiance to a world that mutilated its children and turned them out
+to die. The _interne_ watched her as she worked. It rather galled
+him to see her touching this patient. He had no particular sympathy
+for the Avenue Girl. He was a man, and ruthless, as men are apt to
+be in such things.
+
+The Avenue Girl had no visitors. She had had one or two at
+first--pretty girls with tired eyes and apologetic glances; a
+negress who got by the hall porter with a box of cigarettes, which
+the Senior promptly confiscated; and--the Dummy. Morning and evening
+came the Dummy and stood by her bed and worshipped. Morning and
+evening he brought tribute--a flower from the masses that came in
+daily; an orange, got by no one knows what trickery from the
+kitchen; a leadpencil; a box of cheap candies. At first the girl had
+been embarrassed by his visits. Later, as the unfriendliness of the
+ward grew more pronounced, she greeted him with a faint smile. The
+first time she smiled he grew quite pale and shuffled out. Late that
+night they found him sitting in the chapel looking at the window,
+which was only a blur.
+
+For certain small services in the ward the Senior depended on the
+convalescents--filling drinking cups; passing milk at eleven and
+three; keeping the white bedspreads in geometrical order. But the
+Avenue Girl was taboo. The boycott had been instituted by Old
+Maggie. The rampant respectability of the ward even went so far as
+to refuse to wash her in those early morning hours when the night
+nurse, flying about with her cap on one ear, was carrying tin basins
+about like a blue-and-white cyclone. The Dummy knew nothing of the
+washing; the early morning was the time when he polished the brass
+doorplate which said: Hospital and Free Dispensary. But he knew
+about the drinking cup and after a time that became his
+self-appointed task.
+
+On Sundays he put on his one white shirt and a frayed collar two
+sizes too large and went to chapel. At those times he sat with his
+prayer book upside down and watched the Probationer who cared for
+his lady and who had no cap to hide her shining hair, and the
+_interne_, who was glad there was no cap because of the hair. God's
+fool he was, indeed, for he liked to look in the _interne's_ eyes,
+and did not know an _interne_ cannot marry for years and years, and
+that a probationer must not upset discipline by being engaged. God's
+fool, indeed, who could see into the hearts of men, but not into
+their thoughts or their lives; and who, seeing only thus, on two
+dimensions of life and not the third, found the Avenue Girl holy and
+worthy of all worship!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Probationer worried a great deal.
+
+"It must hurt her so!" she said to the Senior. "Did you see them
+call that baby away on visiting day for fear she would touch it?"
+
+"None are so good as the untempted," explained the Senior, who had
+been beautiful and was now placid and full of good works. "You
+cannot remake the world, child. Bodies are our business here--not
+souls." But the next moment she called Old Maggie to her.
+
+"I've been pretty patient, Maggie," she said. "You know what I mean.
+You're the ringleader. Now things are going to change, or--you'll go
+back on codliver oil to-night."
+
+"Yes'm," said Old Maggie meekly, with hate in her heart. She loathed
+the codliver oil.
+
+"Go back and straighten her bed!" commanded the Senior sternly.
+
+"Now?"
+
+"Now!"
+
+"It hurts my back to stoop over," whined Old Maggie, with the ward
+watching. "The doctor said that I----"
+
+The Senior made a move for the medicine closet and the bottles
+labelled C.
+
+"I'm going," whimpered Old Maggie. "Can't you give a body time?"
+
+And she went down to defeat, with the laughter of the ward in her
+ears--down to defeat, for the Avenue Girl would have none of her.
+
+"You get out of here!" she said fiercely as Old Maggie set to work
+at the draw sheet. "Get out quick--or I'll throw this cup in your
+face!"
+
+The Senior was watching. Old Maggie put on an air of benevolence and
+called the Avenue Girl an unlovely name under her breath while she
+smoothed her pillow. She did not get the cup, but the water out of
+it, in her hard old face, and matters were as they had been.
+
+The Girl did not improve as she should. The _interne_ did the
+dressing day after day, while the Probationer helped him--the Senior
+disliked burned cases--and talked of skin grafting if a new powder
+he had discovered did no good. _Internes_ are always trying out new
+things, looking for the great discovery.
+
+The powder did no good. The day came when, the dressing over and the
+white coverings drawn up smoothly again over her slender body, the
+Avenue Girl voiced the question that her eyes had asked each time.
+
+"Am I going to lie in this hole all my life?" she demanded.
+
+The _interne_ considered.
+
+"It isn't healing--not very fast anyhow," he said. "If we could get
+a little skin to graft on you'd be all right in a jiffy. Can't you
+get some friends to come in? It isn't painful and it's over in a
+minute."
+
+"Friends? Where would I get friends of that sort?"
+
+"Well, relatives then--some of your own people?"
+
+The Avenue Girl shut her eyes as she did when the dressing hurt her.
+
+"None that I'd care to see," she said. And the Probationer knew she
+lied. The _interne_ shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"If you think of any let me know. We'll get them here," he said
+briskly, and turned to see the Probationer rolling up her sleeve.
+
+"Please!" she said, and held out a bare white arm. The _interne_
+stared at it stupefied. It was very lovely.
+
+"I am not at all afraid," urged the Probationer, "and my blood is
+good. It would grow--I know it would."
+
+The _interne_ had hard work not to stoop and kiss the blue veins
+that rose to the surface in the inner curve of her elbow. The
+dressing screens were up and the three were quite alone. To keep his
+voice steady he became stern.
+
+"Put your sleeve down and don't be a foolish girl!" he, commanded.
+"Put your sleeve down!" His eyes said: "You wonder! You beauty! You
+brave little girl!"
+
+Because the Probationer seemed to take her responsibilities rather
+to heart, however, and because, when he should have been thinking of
+other things, such as calling up the staff and making reports, he
+kept seeing that white arm and the resolute face above it, the
+_interne_ worked out a plan.
+
+"I've fixed it, I think," he said, meeting her in a hallway where
+he had no business to be, and trying to look as if he had not known
+she was coming. "Father Feeny was in this morning and I tackled him.
+He's got a lot of students--fellows studying for the priesthood--and
+he says any daughter of the church shall have skin if he has to flay
+'em alive."
+
+"But--is she a daughter of the church?" asked the Probationer. "And
+even if she were, under the circumstances----"
+
+"What circumstances?" demanded the _interne_. "Here's a poor girl
+burned and suffering. The father is not going to ask whether she's
+of the anointed."
+
+The Probationer was not sure. She liked doing things in the open and
+with nothing to happen later to make one uncomfortable; but she
+spoke to the Senior and the Senior was willing. Her chief trouble,
+after all, was with the Avenue Girl herself.
+
+"I don't want to get well," she said wearily when the thing was put
+up to her. "What's the use? I'd just go back to the same old thing;
+and when it got too strong for me I'd end up here again or in the
+morgue."
+
+"Tell me where your people live, then, and let me send for them."
+
+"Why? To have them read in my face what I've been, and go back home
+to die of shame?"
+
+The Probationer looked at the Avenue Girl's face.
+
+"There--there is nothing in your face to hurt them," she said,
+flushing--because there were some things the Probationer had never
+discussed, even with herself. "You--look sad. Honestly, that's all."
+
+The Avenue Girl held up her thin right hand. The forefinger was
+still yellow from cigarettes.
+
+"What about that?" she sneered.
+
+"If I bleach it will you let me send for your people?"
+
+"I'll--perhaps," was the most the Probationer could get.
+
+Many people would have been discouraged. Even the Senior was a bit
+cynical. It took a Probationer still heartsick for home to read in
+the Avenue Girl's eyes the terrible longing for the things she had
+given up--for home and home folks; for a clean slate again. The
+Probationer bleached and scrubbed the finger, and gradually a little
+of her hopeful spirit touched the other girl.
+
+"What day is it?" the Avenue Girl asked once.
+
+"Friday."
+
+"That's baking day at home. We bake in an out-oven. Did you ever
+smell bread as it comes from an out-oven?" Or: "That's a pretty
+shade of blue you nurses wear. It would be nice for working in the
+dairy, wouldn't it?"
+
+"Fine!" said the Probationer, and scrubbed away to hide the triumph
+in her eyes.
+
+
+III
+
+That was the day the Dummy stole the parrot. The parrot belonged to
+the Girl; but how did he know it? So many things he should have
+known the Dummy never learned; so many things he knew that he seemed
+never to have learned! He did not know, for instance, of Father
+Feeny and the Holy Name students; but he knew of the Avenue Girl's
+loneliness and heartache, and of the cabal against her. It is one of
+the black marks on record against him that he refused to polish the
+plate on Old Maggie's bed, and that he shook his fist at her more
+than once when the Senior was out of the ward.
+
+And he knew of the parrot. That day, then, a short, stout woman with
+a hard face appeared in the superintendent's office and demanded a
+parrot.
+
+"Parrot?" said the superintendent blandly.
+
+"Parrot! That crazy man you keep here walked into my house to-day
+and stole a parrot--and I want it."
+
+"The Dummy! But what on earth----"
+
+"It was my parrot," said the woman. "It belonged to one of my
+boarders. She's a burned case up in one of the wards--and she owed
+me money. I took it for a debt. You call that man and let him look
+me in the eye while I say parrot to him."
+
+"He cannot speak or hear."
+
+"You call him. He'll understand me!"
+
+They found the Dummy coming stealthily down from the top of the
+stable and haled him into the office. He was very calm--quite
+impassive. Apparently he had never seen the woman before; as she
+raged he smiled cheerfully and shook his head.
+
+"As a matter of fact," said the superintendent, "I don't believe he
+ever saw the bird; but if he has it we shall find it out and you'll
+get it again."
+
+They let him go then; and he went to the chapel and looked at a dove
+above the young John's head. Then he went up to the kitchen and
+filled his pockets with lettuce leaves. He knew nothing at all of
+parrots or how to care for them.
+
+Things, you see, were moving right for the Avenue Girl. The stain
+was coming off--she had been fond of the parrot and now it was close
+at hand; and Father Feeny's lusty crowd stood ready to come into a
+hospital ward and shed skin that they generally sacrificed on the
+football field. But the Avenue Girl had two years to account
+for--and there was the matter of an alibi.
+
+"I might tell the folks at home anything and they'd believe it
+because they'd want to believe it," said the Avenue Girl. "But
+there's the neighbours. I was pretty wild at home. And--there's a
+fellow who wanted to marry me--he knew how sick I was of the old
+place and how I wanted my fling. His name was Jerry. We'd have to
+show Jerry."
+
+The Probationer worried a great deal about this matter of the alibi.
+It had to be a clean slate for the folks back home, and especially
+for Jerry. She took her anxieties out walking several times on her
+off-duty, but nothing seemed to come of it. She walked on the Avenue
+mostly, because it was near and she could throw a long coat over her
+blue dress. And so she happened to think of the woman the girl had
+lived with.
+
+"She got her into all this," thought the Probationer. "She's just
+got to see her out."
+
+It took three days' off-duty to get her courage up to ringing the
+doorbell of the house with the bowed shutters, and after she had
+rung it she wanted very much to run and hide; but she thought of the
+girl and everything going for nothing for the want of an alibi, and
+she stuck. The negress opened the door and stared at her.
+
+"She's dead, is she?" she asked.
+
+"No. May I come in? I want to see your mistress."
+
+The negress did not admit her, however. She let her stand in the
+vestibule and went back to the foot of a staircase.
+
+"One of these heah nurses from the hospital!" she said. "She wants
+to come in and speak to you."
+
+"Let her in, you fool!" replied a voice from above stairs.
+
+The rest was rather confused. Afterward the Probationer remembered
+putting the case to the stout woman who had claimed the parrot and
+finding it difficult to make her understand.
+
+"Don't you see?" she finished desperately. "I want her to go
+home--to her own folks. She wants it too. But what are we going to
+say about these last two years?"
+
+The stout woman sat turning over her rings. She was most
+uncomfortable. After all, what had she done? Had she not warned them
+again and again about having lighted cigarettes lying round.
+
+"She's in bad shape, is she?"
+
+"She may recover, but she'll be badly scarred--not her face, but her
+chest and shoulders."
+
+That was another way of looking at it. If the girl was scarred----
+
+"Just what do you want me to do?" she asked. Now that it was down
+to brass tacks and no talk about home and mother, she was more
+comfortable.
+
+"If you could just come over to the hospital while her people are
+there and--and say she'd lived with you all the time----"
+
+"That's the truth all right!"
+
+"And--that she worked for you, sewing--she sews very well, she
+says. And--oh, you'll know what to say; that she's been--all right,
+you know; anything to make them comfortable and happy."
+
+Now the stout woman was softening--not that she was really hard, but
+she had developed a sort of artificial veneer of hardness, and good
+impulses had a hard time crawling through.
+
+"I guess I could do that much," she conceded. "She nursed me when I
+was down and out with the grippe and that worthless nigger was drunk
+in the kitchen. But you folks over there have got a parrot that
+belongs to me. What about that?"
+
+The Probationer knew about the parrot. The Dummy had slipped it
+into the ward more than once and its profanity had delighted the
+patients. The Avenue Girl had been glad to see it too; and as it sat
+on the bedside table and shrieked defiance and oaths the Dummy had
+smiled benignly. John and the dove--the girl and the parrot!
+
+"I am sorry about the parrot. I--perhaps I could buy him from you."
+
+She got out her shabby little purse, in which she carried her
+munificent monthly allowance of eight dollars and a little money she
+had brought from home.
+
+"Twenty dollars takes him. That's what she owed me."
+
+The Probationer had seventeen dollars and eleven cents. She spread
+it out in her lap and counted it twice.
+
+"I'm afraid that's all," she said. She had hoped the second count
+would show up better. "I could bring the rest next month."
+
+The Probationer folded the money together and held it out. The stout
+woman took it eagerly.
+
+"He's yours," she said largely. "Don't bother about the balance.
+When do you want me?"
+
+"I'll send you word," said the Probationer, and got up. She was
+almost dizzy with excitement and the feeling of having no money at
+all in the world and a parrot she did not want. She got out into the
+air somehow and back to the hospital. She took a bath immediately
+and put on everything fresh, and felt much better--but very
+poor. Before she went on duty she said a little prayer about
+thermometers--that she should not break hers until she had money for
+a new one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Father Feeny came and lined up six budding priests outside the door
+of the ward. He was a fine specimen of manhood and he had asked no
+questions at all. The Senior thought she had better tell him
+something, but he put up a white hand.
+
+"What does it matter, sister?" he said cheerfully. "Yesterday is
+gone and to-day is a new day. Also there is to-morrow"--his Irish
+eyes twinkled--"and a fine day it will be by the sunset."
+
+Then he turned to his small army.
+
+"Boys," he said, "it's a poor leader who is afraid to take chances
+with his men. I'm going first"--he said fir-rst. "It's a small
+thing, as I've told you--a bit of skin and it's over. Go in smiling
+and come out smiling! Are you ready, sir?" This to the _interne_.
+
+That was a great day in the ward. The inmates watched Father Feeny
+and the _interne_ go behind the screens, both smiling, and they
+watched the father come out very soon after, still smiling but a
+little bleached. And they watched the line patiently waiting outside
+the door, shortening one by one. After a time the smiles were rather
+forced, as if waiting was telling on them; but there was no
+deserter--only one six-foot youth, walking with a swagger to
+contribute his little half inch or so of cuticle, added a sensation
+to the general excitement by fainting halfway up the ward; and he
+remained in blissful unconsciousness until it was all over.
+
+Though the _interne_ had said there was no way back, the first step
+had really been taken; and he was greatly pleased with himself and
+with everybody because it had been his idea. The Probationer tried
+to find a chance to thank him; and, failing that, she sent a
+grateful little note to his room:
+
+      Is Mimi the Austrian to have a baked apple?
+                              [Signed]   WARD A.
+
+      P.S.--It went through wonderfully! She is so cheerful
+      since it is over. How can I ever thank you?
+
+The reply came back very quickly:
+
+      Baked apple, without milk, for Mimi. WARD A.
+                              [Signed]    D.L.S.
+
+      P.S.--Can you come up on the roof for a little air?
+
+She hesitated over that for some time. A really honest-to-goodness
+nurse may break a rule now and then and nothing happen; but
+a probationer is only on trial and has to be exceedingly
+careful--though any one might go to the roof and watch the sunset.
+She decided not to go. Then she pulled her soft hair down over her
+forehead, where it was most becoming, and fastened it with tiny
+hairpins, and went up after all--not because she intended to, but
+because as she came out of her room the elevator was going up--not
+down. She was on the roof almost before she knew it.
+
+The _interne_ was there in fresh white ducks, smoking. At first they
+talked of skin grafting and the powder that had not done what was
+expected of it. After a time, when the autumn twilight had fallen on
+them like a benediction, she took her courage in her hands and told
+of her visit to the house on the Avenue, and about the parrot and
+the plot.
+
+The _interne_ stood very still. He was young and intolerant. Some
+day he would mellow and accept life as it is--not as he would have
+it. When she had finished he seemed to have drawn himself into a
+shell, turtle fashion, and huddled himself together. The shell was
+pride and old prejudice and the intolerance of youth. "She had to
+have an alibi!" said the Probationer.
+
+"Oh, of course," very stiffly.
+
+"I cannot see why you disapprove. Something had to be done."
+
+"I cannot see that you had to do it; but it's your own affair, of
+course. Only----"
+
+"Please go on."
+
+"Well, one cannot touch dirt without being soiled."
+
+"I think you will be sorry you said that," said the Probationer
+stiffly. And she went down the staircase, leaving him alone. He was
+sorry, of course; but he would not say so even to himself. He
+thought of the Probationer, with her eager eyes and shining hair and
+her warm little heart, ringing the bell of the Avenue house and
+making her plea--and his blood ran hot in him. It was just then
+that the parrot spoke on the other side of the chimney.
+
+"Gimme a bottle of beer!" it said. "Nice cold beer! Cold beer!"
+
+The _interne_ walked furiously toward the sound. Must this girl of
+the streets and her wretched associates follow him everywhere? She
+had ruined his life already. He felt that it was ruined. Probably
+the Probationer would never speak to him again.
+
+The Dummy was sitting on a bench, with the parrot on his knee
+looking rather queer from being smuggled about under a coat and fed
+the curious things that the Dummy thought a bird should eat. It had
+a piece of apple pie in its claw now.
+
+"Cold beer!" said the parrot, and eyed the _interne_ crookedly.
+
+The Dummy had not heard him, of course. He sat looking over the
+parapet toward the river, with one knotted hand smoothing the bird's
+ruffled plumage and such a look of wretchedness in his eyes that it
+hurt to see it. God's fools, who cannot reason, can feel. Some
+instinct of despair had seized him for its own--some conception,
+perhaps, of what life would never mean to him. Before it, the
+_interne's_ wrath gave way to impotency.
+
+"Cold beer!" said the parrot wickedly.
+
+
+IV
+
+The Avenue Girl improved slowly. Morning and evening came the Dummy
+and smiled down at her, with reverence in his eyes. She could smile
+back now and sometimes she spoke to him. There was a change in the
+Avenue Girl. She was less sullen. In the back of her eyes each
+morning found a glow of hope--that died, it is true, by noontime;
+but it came again with the new day.
+
+"How's Polly this morning, Montmorency?" she would say, and give him
+a bit of toast from her breakfast for the bird. Or: "I wish you
+could talk, Reginald. I'd like to hear what Rose said when you took
+the parrot. It must have been a scream!"
+
+He brought her the first chrysanthemums of the fall and laid them on
+her pillow. It was after he had gone, while the Probationer was
+combing out the soft short curls of her hair, that she mentioned the
+Dummy. She strove to make her voice steady, but there were tears in
+her eyes.
+
+"The old goat's been pretty good to me, hasn't he?" she said.
+
+"I believe it is very unusual. I wonder"--the Probationer poised the
+comb--"perhaps you remind him of some one he used to know."
+
+They knew nothing, of course, of the boy John and the window.
+
+"He's about the first decent man I ever knew," said the Avenue
+Girl--"and he's a fool!"
+
+"Either a fool or very, very wise," replied the Probationer.
+
+The _interne_ and the Probationer were good friends again, but they
+had never quite got back to the place they had lost on the roof.
+Over the Avenue Girl's dressing their eyes met sometimes, and there
+was an appeal in the man's and tenderness; but there was pride too.
+He would not say he had not meant it. Any man will tell you that he
+was entirely right, and that she had been most unwise and needed a
+good scolding--only, of course, it is never the wise people who make
+life worth the living.
+
+And an important thing had happened--the Probationer had been
+accepted and had got her cap. She looked very stately in it, though
+it generally had a dent somewhere from her forgetting she had it on
+and putting her hat on over it. The first day she wore it she knelt
+at prayers with the others, and said a little Thank You! for getting
+through when she was so unworthy. She asked to be made clean and
+pure, and delivered from vanity, and of some use in the world. And,
+trying to think of the things she had been remiss in, she went out
+that night in a rain and bought some seed and things for the parrot.
+
+Prodigal as had been Father Feeny and his battalion, there was more
+grafting needed before the Avenue Girl could take her scarred body
+and soul out into the world again. The Probationer offered, but was
+refused politely.
+
+"You are a part of the institution now," said the _interne_, with
+his eyes on her cap. He was rather afraid of the cap. "I cannot
+cripple the institution."
+
+It was the Dummy who solved that question. No one knew how he knew
+the necessity or why he had not come forward sooner; but come he did
+and would not be denied. The _interne_ went to a member of the staff
+about it.
+
+"The fellow works round the house," he explained; "but he's taken a
+great fancy to the girl and I hardly know what to do."
+
+"My dear boy," said the staff, "one of the greatest joys in the
+world is to suffer for a woman. Let him go to it."
+
+So the Dummy bared his old-young arm--not once, but many times.
+Always as the sharp razor nicked up its bit of skin he looked at the
+girl and smiled. In the early evening he perched the parrot on his
+bandaged arm and sat on the roof or by the fountain in the
+courtyard. When the breeze blew strong enough the water flung over
+the rim and made little puddles in the hollows of the cement
+pavement. Here belated sparrows drank or splashed their dusty
+feathers, and the parrot watched them crookedly.
+
+The Avenue Girl grew better with each day, but remained
+wistful-eyed. The ward no longer avoided her, though she was never
+one of them. One day the Probationer found a new baby in the
+children's ward; and, with the passion of maternity that is the real
+reason for every good woman's being, she cuddled the mite in her
+arms. She visited the nurses in the different wards.
+
+"Just look!" she would say, opening her arms. "If I could only steal
+it!"
+
+The Senior, who had once been beautiful and was now calm and placid,
+smiled at her. Old Maggie must peer and cry out over the child.
+Irish Delia must call down a blessing on it. And so up the ward to
+the Avenue Girl; the Probationer laid the baby in her arms.
+
+"Just a minute," she explained. "I'm idling and I have no business
+to. Hold it until I give the three o'clocks." Which means the
+three-o'clock medicines.
+
+When she came back the Avenue Girl had a new look in her eyes; and
+that day the little gleam of hope, that usually died, lasted and
+grew.
+
+At last came the day when the alibi was to be brought forward. The
+girl had written home and the home folks were coming. In his strange
+way the Dummy knew that a change was near. The kaleidoscope would
+shift again and the Avenue Girl would join the changing and
+disappearing figures that fringed the inner circle of his heart.
+
+One night he did not go to bed in the ward bed that was his only
+home, beside the little stand that held his only possessions. The
+watchman missed him and found him asleep in the chapel in one of the
+seats, with the parrot drowsing on the altar.
+
+Rose--who was the stout woman--came early. She wore a purple dress,
+with a hat to match, and purple gloves. The ward eyed her with scorn
+and a certain deference. She greeted the Avenue Girl effusively
+behind the screens that surrounded the bed.
+
+"Well, you do look pinched!" she said. "Ain't it a mercy it didn't
+get to your face! Pretty well chewed up, aren't you?"
+
+"Do you want to see it?"
+
+"Good land! No! Now look here, you've got to put me wise or I'll
+blow the whole thing. What's my little stunt? The purple's all right
+for it, isn't it?"
+
+"All you need to do," said the Avenue Girl wearily, "is to say that
+I've been sewing for you since I came to the city. And--if you can
+say anything good----"
+
+"I'll do that all right," Rose affirmed. She put a heavy silver bag
+on the bedside table and lowered herself into a chair. "You leave it
+to me, dearie. There ain't anything I won't say."
+
+The ward was watching with intense interest. Old Maggie, working the
+creaking bandage machine, was palpitating with excitement. From her
+chair by the door she could see the elevator and it was she who
+announced the coming of destiny.
+
+"Here comes the father," she confided to the end of the ward. "Guess
+the mother couldn't come."
+
+It was not the father though. It was a young man who hesitated in
+the doorway, hat in hand--a tall young man, with a strong and not
+unhandsome face. The Probationer, rather twitchy from excitement and
+anxiety, felt her heart stop and race on again. Jerry, without a
+doubt!
+
+The meeting was rather constrained. The girl went whiter than her
+pillows and half closed her eyes; but Rose, who would have been
+terrified at the sight of an elderly farmer, was buoyantly relieved
+and at her ease.
+
+"I'm sorry," said Jerry. "I--we didn't realise it had been so bad.
+The folks are well; but--I thought I'd better come. They're
+expecting you back home."
+
+"It was nice of you to come," said the girl, avoiding his eyes.
+"I--I'm getting along fine."
+
+"I guess introductions ain't necessary," put in Rose briskly. "I'm
+Mrs. Sweeney. She's been living with me--working for me, sewing.
+She's sure a fine sewer! She made this suit I'm wearing."
+
+Poor Rose, with "custom made" on every seam of the purple! But Jerry
+was hardly listening. His eyes were on the girl among the pillows.
+
+"I see," said Jerry slowly. "You haven't said yet, Elizabeth. Are
+you going home?"
+
+"If--they want me."
+
+"Of course they want you!" Again Rose: "Why shouldn't they? You've
+been a good girl and a credit to any family. If they say anything
+mean to you you let me know."
+
+"They'll not be mean to her. I'm sure they'll want to write and
+thank you. If you'll just give me your address, Mrs. Sweeney----"
+
+He had a pencil poised over a notebook. Rose hesitated. Then she
+gave her address on the Avenue, with something of bravado in her
+voice. After all, what could this country-store clerk know of the
+Avenue? Jerry wrote it down carefully.
+
+"Sweeney--with an e?" he asked politely.
+
+"With three e's," corrected Rose, and got up with dignity.
+
+"Well, good-bye, dearie," she said. "You've got your friends now and
+you don't need me. I guess you've had your lesson about going to
+sleep with a cig--about being careless with fire. Drop me a postal
+when you get the time."
+
+She shook hands with Jerry and rustled and jingled down the ward,
+her chin well up. At the door she encountered Old Maggie, her arms
+full of bandages.
+
+"How's the Avenue?" asked Old Maggie.
+
+Rose, however, like all good actresses, was still in the part
+as she made her exit. She passed Old Maggie unheeding, severe
+respectability in every line of her figure, every nod of her purple
+plumes. She was still in the part when she encountered the
+Probationer.
+
+"It's going like a house afire!" she said. "He swallowed it
+all--hook and bait! And--oh, yes, I've got something for you." She
+went down into her silver bag and pulled out a roll of bills. "I've
+felt meaner'n a dog every time I've thought of you buying that
+parrot. I've got a different view of life--maybe--from yours; but
+I'm not taking candy from a baby."
+
+When the Probationer could speak Rose was taking herself and the
+purple into the elevator and waving her a farewell.
+
+"Good-bye!" she said. "If ever you get stuck again just call on me."
+
+With Rose's departure silence fell behind the screen. The girl broke
+it first.
+
+"They're all well, are they?"
+
+"All well. Your mother's been kind of poorly. She thought you'd
+write to her." The girl clenched her hands under the bedclothing.
+She could not speak just then. "There's nothing much happened. The
+post office burned down last summer. They're building a new one.
+And--I've been building. I tore down the old place."
+
+"Are you going to be married, Jerry?"
+
+"Some day, I suppose. I'm not worrying about it. It was something to
+do; it kept me from--thinking."
+
+The girl looked at him and something gripped her throat. He knew!
+Rose might have gone down with her father, but Jerry knew! Nothing
+was any use. She knew his rigid morality, his country-bred horror of
+the thing she was. She would have to go back--to Rose and the
+others. He would never take her home.
+
+Down at the medicine closet the Probationer was carbolising
+thermometers and humming a little song. Everything was well. The
+Avenue Girl was with her people and at seven o'clock the Probationer
+was going to the roof--to meet some one who was sincerely repentant
+and very meek.
+
+In the convalescent ward next door they were singing softly--one of
+those spontaneous outbursts that have their origin in the hearts of
+people and a melody all their own:
+
+          _'Way down upon de S'wanee Ribber,
+             Far, far away,
+           Dere's wha my heart is turnin' ebber--
+             Dere's wha de old folks stay._
+
+It penetrated back of the screen, where the girl lay in white
+wretchedness--and where Jerry, with death in his eyes, sat rigid in
+his chair.
+
+"Jerry?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I--I guess I've been pretty far away."
+
+"Don't tell me about it!" A cry, this.
+
+"You used to care for me, Jerry. I'm not expecting that now; but if
+you'd only believe me when I say I'm sorry----"
+
+"I believe you, Elizabeth."
+
+"One of the nurses here says----Jerry, won't you look at me?" With
+some difficulty he met her eyes. "She says that because one starts
+wrong one needn't go wrong always. I was ashamed to write. She made
+me do it."
+
+She held out an appealing hand, but he did not take it. All his life
+he had built up a house of morality. Now his house was crumbling and
+he stood terrified in the wreck. "It isn't only because I've been
+hurt that I--am sorry," she went on. "I loathed it! I'd have
+finished it all long ago, only--I was afraid."
+
+"I would rather have found you dead!"
+
+There is a sort of anesthesia of misery. After a certain amount of
+suffering the brain ceases to feel. Jerry watched the white curtain
+of the screen swaying in the wind, settled his collar, glanced at
+his watch. He was quite white. The girl's hand still lay on the
+coverlet. Somewhere back in the numbed brain that would think only
+little thoughts he knew that if he touched that small, appealing
+hand the last wall of his house would fall.
+
+It was the Dummy, after all, who settled that for him. He came with
+his afternoon offering of cracked ice just then and stood inside the
+screen, staring. Perhaps he had known all along how it would end,
+that this, his saint, would go--and not alone--to join the vanishing
+circle that had ringed the inner circle of his heart. Just at the
+time it rather got him. He swayed a little and clutched at the
+screen; but the next moment he had placed the bowl on the stand and
+stood smiling down at the girl.
+
+"The only person in the world who believes in me!" said the girl
+bitterly. "And he's a fool!"
+
+The Dummy smiled into her eyes. In his faded, childish eyes there
+was the eternal sadness of his kind, eternal tenderness, and the
+blur of one who has looked much into a far distance. Suddenly he
+bent over and placed the man's hand over the girl's.
+
+The last wall was down! Jerry buried his face in the white
+coverlet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _interne_ was pacing the roof anxiously. Golden sunset had faded
+to lavender--to dark purple--to night.
+
+The Probationer came up at last--not a probationer now, of course;
+but she had left off her cap and was much less stately.
+
+"I'm sorry," she explained; "but I've been terribly busy. It went
+off so well!"
+
+"Of course--if you handled it."
+
+"You know--don't you?--it was the lover who came. He looks so strong
+and good--oh, she is safe now!"
+
+"That's fine!" said the _interne_ absently. They were sitting on the
+parapet now and by sliding his hand along he found her fingers.
+"Isn't it a glorious evening?" He had the fingers pretty close by
+that time; and suddenly gathering them up he lifted the hand to his
+lips.
+
+"Such a kind little hand!" he said over it. "Such a dear, tender
+little hand! My hand!" he said, rather huskily.
+
+Down in the courtyard the Dummy sat with the parrot on his knee. At
+his feet the superintendent's dog lay on his side and dreamed of
+battle. The Dummy's eyes lingered on the scar the Avenue Girl had
+bandaged--how long ago!
+
+His eyes wandered to the window with the young John among the
+lilies. In the stable were still the ambulance horses that talked to
+him without words. And he had the parrot. If he thought at all it
+was that his Father was good and that, after all, he was not alone.
+The parrot edged along his knee and eyed him with saturnine
+affection.
+
+
+
+
+THE MIRACLE
+
+
+I
+
+Big Mary was sweeping the ward with a broom muffled in a white bag.
+In the breeze from the open windows, her blue calico wrapper
+ballooned about her and made ludicrous her frantic thrusts after the
+bits of fluff that formed eddies under the beds and danced in the
+spring air.
+
+She finished her sweeping, and, with the joyous scraps captured in
+her dust-pan, stood in the doorway, critically surveying the ward.
+It was brilliantly clean and festive; on either side a row of beds,
+fresh white for the day; on the centre table a vase of Easter
+lilies, and on the record-table near the door a potted hyacinth. The
+Nurse herself wore a bunch of violets tucked in her apron-band. One
+of the patients had seen the Junior Medical give them to her. The
+Eastern sun, shining across the beds, made below them, on the
+polished floor, black islands of shadow in a gleaming sea of light.
+
+And scattered here and there, rocking in chairs or standing at
+windows, enjoying the Sunday respite from sewing or the
+bandage-machine, women, grotesque and distorted of figure, in
+attitudes of weariness and expectancy, with patient eyes awaited
+their crucifixion. Behind them, in the beds, a dozen perhaps who had
+come up from death and held the miracle in their arms.
+
+The miracles were small and red, and inclined to feeble and
+ineffectual wrigglings. Fists were thrust in the air and brought
+down on smiling, pale mother faces. With tight-closed eyes and open
+mouths, each miracle squirmed and nuzzled until the mother would
+look with pleading eyes at the Nurse. And the Nurse would look
+severe and say:
+
+"Good gracious, Annie Petowski, surely you don't want to feed that
+infant again! Do you want the child to have a dilated stomach?"
+
+Fear of that horrible and mysterious condition, a dilated stomach,
+would restrain Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara
+for a time. With the wisdom of the serpent, she would give the child
+her finger to suck--a finger so white, so clean, so soft in the last
+week that she was lost in admiration of it. And the child would take
+hold, all its small body set rigid in lines of desperate effort.
+Then it would relax suddenly, and spew out the finger, and the quiet
+hospital air would be rent with shrieks of lost illusion. Then Annie
+Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara would watch the
+Nurse with open hostility and defiance, and her rustling exit from
+the ward would be followed by swift cessation of cries, and, close
+to Annie or Jennie or Maggie's heart, there would be small ecstatic
+gurglings--and peace.
+
+In her small domain the Nurse was queen. From her throne at the
+record-table, she issued proclamations of baths and fine combs, of
+clean bedding and trimmed nails, of tea and toast, of regular hours
+for the babies. From this throne, also, she directed periodic
+searches of the bedside stands, unearthing scraps of old toast,
+decaying fruit, candy, and an occasional cigarette. From the throne,
+too, she sent daily a blue-wrappered and pig-tailed brigade to the
+kitchen, armed with knives, to attack the dinner potatoes.
+
+But on this Easter morning, the queen looked tired and worn. Her
+crown, a starched white cap, had slipped back on her head, and her
+blue-and-white dress was stained and spotted. Even her fresh apron
+and sleevelets did not quite conceal the damage. She had come in for
+a moment at the breakfast hour, and asked the Swede, Ellen Ollman,
+to serve the breakfast for her; and at half past eight she had
+appeared again for a moment, and had turned down one of the beds and
+put hot-water bottles in it.
+
+The ward ate little breakfast. It was always nervous when a case was
+"on." Excursions down the corridor by one or another of the
+blue-wrappered brigade brought back bits of news:
+
+"The doctor is smoking a cigarette in the hall;" or, "Miss Jones,
+the day assistant, has gone in;" and then, with bated breath, "The
+doctor with the red mustache has come"--by which it was known that
+things were going badly, the staff man having been summoned.
+
+Suggestions of Easter began to appear even in this isolated ward,
+denied to all visitors except an occasional husband, who was usually
+regarded with a mixture of contempt and scepticism by the other
+women. But now the lilies came, and after them a lame young woman
+who played the organ in the chapel on Sundays, and who afterward
+went from ward to ward, singing little songs and accompanying
+herself on the mandolin she carried with her. The lame young woman
+seated herself in the throne-chair and sang an Easter anthem, and
+afterward limped around and placed a leaflet and a spray of
+lilies-of-the-valley on each bedside stand.
+
+She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as "Liz"
+in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse. Elizabeth
+always read the tracts. She had been there four times, and knew all
+the nurses and nearly all the doctors. "Liz" had been known, in a
+shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the
+hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white
+gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the
+queen herself in regalness and authority.
+
+The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed.
+"Shall I put one here?" she asked, fingering a tract.
+
+Liz meditated majestically.
+
+"Well, I guess I would," she said. "Not that it'll do any good."
+
+"Why?"
+
+Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.
+
+"She's not getting on very well," she said; "and, even if she gets
+through, she won't read the tract. She held her fingers in her ears
+last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here. She's young. Says she
+hopes she and the kid'll both die."
+
+The mandolin-player was not unversed in the psychology of the ward.
+
+"Then she--isn't married?" she asked, and because she was young, she
+flushed painfully.
+
+Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her
+eyes.
+
+"Well, no," she admitted; "I guess that's what's worrying her. She's
+a fool, she is. She can put the kid in a home. That's what I do.
+Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble? Wouldn't
+he be always throwing it up to her?"
+
+The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy
+of life.
+
+"Have--have you a baby here?" she asked timidly.
+
+"Have I!" said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed. She
+turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red
+atom, so like the others that only mother love could have
+distinguished it.
+
+"This is mine," she said airily. "Funny little mutt, isn't he?"
+
+The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.
+
+"He--he's very little," she said.
+
+"Little!" said Liz. "He holds the record here for the last six
+months--eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived. The
+little devil!"
+
+She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil's sleeping
+form. The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing
+to say.
+
+"Does--does he look like his father?" she asked timidly. But
+apparently Liz did not hear. She had moved down the ward. The
+mandolin-player heard only a snicker from Annie Petowski's bed, and,
+vaguely uncomfortable, she moved toward the door.
+
+Liz was turning down the cover of the empty bed, and the Nurse, with
+tired but shining eyes, was wheeling in the operating table.
+
+The mandolin-player stepped aside to let the table pass. From the
+blankets she had a glimpse of a young face, bloodless and wan--of
+hurt, defiant blue eyes. She had never before seen life so naked, so
+relentless. She shrank back against the wall, a little sick. Then
+she gathered up her tracts and her mandolin, and limped down the
+hall.
+
+The door of the mysterious room was open, and from it came a shrill,
+high wail, a rising and falling note of distress--the voice of a new
+soul in protest. She went past with averted face.
+
+Back in the ward Liz leaned over the table and, picking the girl up
+bodily, deposited her tenderly in the warm bed. Then she stood back
+and smiled down at her, with her hands on her hips.
+
+"Well," she said kindly, "it's over, and here you are! But it's no
+picnic, is it?"
+
+The girl on the bed turned her head away. The coarsening of her
+features in the last month or two had changed to an almost bloodless
+refinement. With her bright hair, she looked as if she had been
+through the furnace of pain and had come out pure gold. But her eyes
+were hard.
+
+"Go away," she said petulantly.
+
+Liz leaned down and pulled the blanket over her shoulders.
+
+"You sleep now," she said soothingly. "When you wake up you can have
+a cup of tea."
+
+The girl threw the cover off and looked up despairingly into Liz's
+face.
+
+"I don't want to sleep," she said. "My God, Liz, it's going to live
+and so am I!"
+
+
+II
+
+Now, the Nurse had been up all night, and at noon, after she had
+oiled the new baby and washed out his eyes and given him a
+teaspoonful of warm water, she placed Liz in charge of the ward, and
+went to her room to put on a fresh uniform. The first thing she did,
+when she got there, was to go to the mirror, with the picture of her
+mother tucked in its frame, and survey herself. When she saw her cap
+and the untidiness of her hair and her white collar all spotted, she
+frowned.
+
+Then she took the violets out of her belt and put them carefully in
+a glass of water, and feeling rather silly, she leaned over and
+kissed them. After that she felt better.
+
+She bathed her face in hot water and then in cold, which brought her
+colour back, and she put on everything fresh, so that she rustled
+with each step, which is proper for trained nurses; and finally she
+tucked the violets back where they belonged, and put on a new cap,
+which is also proper for trained nurses on gala occasions.
+
+If she had not gone back to the mirror to see that the general
+effect was as crisp as it should be, things would have been
+different for Liz, and for the new mother back in the ward. But she
+did go back; and there, lying on the floor in front of the bureau,
+all folded together, was a piece of white paper exactly as if it has
+been tucked in her belt with the violets.
+
+She opened it rather shakily, and it was a leaf from the ward
+order-book, for at the top it said:
+
+      Annie Petowski--may sit up for one hour.
+
+And below that:
+
+      Goldstein baby--bran baths.
+
+And below that:
+
+      I love you. E.J.
+
+"E.J." was the Junior Medical.
+
+So the Nurse went back to the ward, and sat down, palpitating, in
+the throne-chair by the table, and spread her crisp skirts, and
+found where the page had been torn out of the order-book.
+
+And as the smiles of sovereigns are hailed with delight by their
+courts, so the ward brightened until it seemed to gleam that Easter
+afternoon. And a sort of miracle happened: none of the babies had
+colic, and the mothers mostly slept. Also, one of the ladies of the
+House Committee looked in at the door and said:
+
+"How beautiful you are here, and how peaceful! Your ward is always a
+sort of benediction."
+
+The lady of the House Committee looked across and saw the new
+mother, with the sunshine on her yellow braids, and her face refined
+from the furnace of pain.
+
+"What a sweet young mother!" she said, and rustled out, leaving an
+odor of peau d'Espagne.
+
+The girl lay much as Liz had left her. Except her eyes, there was
+nothing in her face to show that despair had given place to wild
+mutiny. But Liz knew; Liz had gone through it all when "the first
+one" came; and so, from the end of the ward, she rocked and watched.
+
+The odor of peau d'Espagne was still in the air, eclipsing the
+Easter lilies, when Liz got up and sauntered down to the girl's bed.
+
+"How are you now, dearie?" she asked, and, reaching under the
+blankets, brought out the tiny pearl-handled knife with which the
+girl had been wont to clean her finger-nails. The girl eyed her
+savagely, but said nothing; nor did she resist when Liz brought out
+her hands and examined the wrists. The left had a small cut on it.
+
+"Now listen to me," said Liz. "None of that, do you hear? You ain't
+the only one that's laid here and wanted to end it all. And what
+happened? Inside of a month they're well and strong again, and they
+put the kid somewhere, and the folks that know what's happened get
+used to it, and the ones that don't know don't need to know. Don't
+be a fool!"
+
+She carried the knife off, but the girl made no protest. There were
+other ways.
+
+The Nurse was very tired, for she had been up almost all night. She
+sat at the record-table with her Bible open, and, in the intervals
+of taking temperatures, she read it. But mostly she read about Annie
+Petowski being allowed to sit up, and the Goldstein baby having bran
+baths, and the other thing written below!
+
+At two o'clock came the Junior Medical, in a frock-coat and grey
+trousers. He expected to sing "The Palms" at the Easter service
+downstairs in the chapel that afternoon, and, according to
+precedent, the one who sings "The Palms" on Easter in the chapel
+must always wear a frock-coat.
+
+Very conscious, because all the ward was staring at his
+gorgeousness, he went over to the bed where the new mother lay. Then
+he came back and stood by the table, looking at a record.
+
+"Have you taken her temperature?" he said, businesslike and erect.
+
+"Ninety-eight."
+
+"Her pulse is strong?"
+
+"Yes; she's resting quietly."
+
+"Good.--And--did you get my note?"
+
+This, much as if he had said, "Did you find my scarf-pin?" or
+anything merely casual; for Liz was hovering near.
+
+"Yes." The nurse's red lips were trembling, but she smiled up at
+him. Liz came nearer. She was only wishing him Godspeed with his
+wooing, but it made him uncomfortable.
+
+"Watch her closely," he said, "she's pretty weak and despondent."
+And he looked at Liz.
+
+"Elizabeth," said the Nurse, "won't you sit by Claribel and fan
+her?"
+
+Claribel was the new mother. Claribel is, of course, no name for a
+mother, but she had been named when she was very small.
+
+Liz went away and sat by the girl's bed, and said a little prayer to
+the effect that they were both so damned good to everybody, she
+hoped they'd hit it off. But perhaps the prayer of the wicked
+availeth nothing.
+
+"You know I meant that," he said, from behind a record. "I--I love
+you with all my heart--and if only you----"
+
+The nurse shook down a thermometer and examined it closely. "I love
+you, too!" she said. And, walking shakily to one of the beds, she
+put the thermometer upside down in Maggie McNamara's mouth.
+
+The Junior Medical went away with his shoulders erect in his
+frock-coat, and his heavy brown hair, which would never part
+properly and had to be persuaded with brilliantine, bristling with
+happiness.
+
+And the Nurse-Queen, looking over her kingdom for somebody to lavish
+her new joy on, saw Claribel lying in bed, looking at the ceiling
+and reading there all the tragedy of her broken life, all her
+despair.
+
+So she rustled out to the baby-room, where the new baby had never
+batted an eye since her bath and was lying on her back with both
+fists clenched on her breast, and she did something that no trained
+nurse is ever supposed to do.
+
+She lifted the baby, asleep and all, and carried her to her mother.
+
+But Claribel's face only darkened when she saw her.
+
+"Take the brat away," she said, and went on reading tragedies on the
+ceiling.
+
+Liz came and proffered her the little mite with every art she knew.
+She showed her the wrinkled bits of feet, the tiny, ridiculous
+hands, and how long the hair grew on the back of her head. But when
+Liz put the baby on her arm, she shuddered and turned her head away.
+So finally Liz took it back to the other room, and left it there,
+still sleeping.
+
+The fine edge of the Nurse's joy was dulled. It is a characteristic
+of great happiness to wish all to be well with the world; and here
+before her was dry-eyed despair. It was Liz who finally decided her.
+
+"I guess I'll sit up with her to-night," she said, approaching the
+table with the peculiar gait engendered of heel-less hospital
+carpet-slippers and Mother Hubbard wrappers. "I don't like the way
+she watches the ceiling."
+
+"What do you mean, Elizabeth?" asked the Nurse.
+
+"Time I had the twins--that's before your time," said Liz--"we had
+one like that. She went out the window head first the night after
+the baby came, and took the kid with her."
+
+The Nurse rose with quick decision.
+
+"We must watch her," she said. "Perhaps if I could find--I think
+I'll go to the telephone. Watch the ward carefully, Elizabeth, and
+if Annie Petowski tries to feed her baby before three o'clock, take
+it from her. The child's stuffed like a sausage every time I'm out
+for five minutes."
+
+Nurses know many strange things: they know how to rub an aching back
+until the ache is changed to a restful thrill, and how to change the
+bedding and the patient's night-dress without rolling the patient
+over more than once, which is a high and desirable form of
+knowledge. But also they get to know many strange people; their
+clean starchiness has a way of rubbing up against the filth of the
+world and coming away unsoiled. And so the Nurse went downstairs to
+the telephone, leaving Liz to watch for nefarious feeding.
+
+The Nurse called up Rose Davis; and Rosie, who was lying in bed with
+the Sunday papers scattered around her and a cigarette in her
+manicured fingers, reached out with a yawn and, taking the
+telephone, rested it on her laced and ribboned bosom.
+
+"Yes," she said indolently.
+
+The nurse told her who she was, and Rosie's voice took on a warmer
+tinge.
+
+"Oh, yes," she said. "How are you?... Claribel? Yes; what about
+her?... What!"
+
+"Yes," said the Nurse. "A girl--seven pounds."
+
+"My Gawd! Well, what do you think of that! Excuse me a moment; my
+cigarette's set fire to the sheet. All right--go ahead."
+
+"She's taking it pretty hard, and I--I thought you might help her.
+She--she----"
+
+"How much do you want?" said Rose, a trifle coldly. She turned in
+the bed and eyed the black leather bag on the stand at her elbow.
+"Twenty enough?"
+
+"I don't think it's money," said the Nurse, "although she needs that
+too; she hasn't any clothes for the baby. But--she's awfully
+despondent--almost desperate. Have you any idea who the child's
+father is?"
+
+Rosie considered, lighting a new cigarette with one hand and
+balancing the telephone with the other.
+
+"She left me a year ago," she said. "Oh, yes; I know now. What time
+is it?"
+
+"Two o'clock."
+
+"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Rosie. "I'll get the fellow on
+the wire and see what he's willing to do. Maybe he'll give her a
+dollar or two a week."
+
+"Do you think you could bring him to see her?"
+
+"Say, what do you think I am--a missionary?" The Nurse was wise, so
+she kept silent. "Well, I'll tell you what I will do. If I can bring
+him, I will. How's that yellow-haired she-devil you've got over
+there? I've got that fixed all right. She pulled a razor on me
+first--I've got witnesses. Well, if I can get Al, I'll do it. So
+long."
+
+It did not occur to the Nurse to deprecate having used an evil
+medium toward a righteous end. She took life much as she found it.
+And so she tiptoed past the chapel again, where a faint odour of
+peau d'Espagne came stealing out into the hall, and where the
+children from the children's ward, in roller-chairs and on crutches,
+were singing with all their shrill young voices, earnest eyes
+uplifted.
+
+The white Easter lilies on the altar sent their fragrance out over
+the gathering, over the nurses, young and placid, over the hopeless
+and the hopeful, over the faces where death had passed and left its
+inevitable stamp, over bodies freshly risen on this Easter Sunday
+to new hope and new life--over the Junior Medical, waiting with the
+manuscript of "The Palms" rolled in his hand and his heart singing a
+hymn of happiness.
+
+The Nurse went up to her ward, and put a screen around Claribel,
+and, with all her woman's art, tidied the immaculate white bed and
+loosened the uncompromising yellow braids, so that the soft hair
+fell across Claribel's bloodless forehead and softened the defiance
+in her blue eyes. She brought the pink hyacinth in its pot, too, and
+placed it on the bedside table. Then she stood off and looked at her
+work. It was good.
+
+Claribel submitted weakly. She had stopped staring at the wall, and
+had taken to watching the open window opposite with strange
+intentness. Only when the Nurse gave a final pat to the bedspread
+she spoke.
+
+"Was it a boy--or a girl?" she asked.
+
+"Girl," said the nurse briskly. "A little beauty, perfect in every
+way."
+
+"A girl--to grow up and go through this hell!" she muttered, and her
+eyes wandered back to the window.
+
+But the Nurse was wise with the accumulated wisdom of a sex that has
+had to match strength with wile for ages, and she was not yet ready.
+She went into the little room where eleven miracles lay in eleven
+cribs, and, although they all looked exactly alike, she selected
+Claribel's without hesitation, and carried it to the mysterious room
+down the hall--which was no longer a torture-chamber, but a
+resplendently white place, all glass and tile and sunlight, and
+where she did certain things that are not prescribed in the hospital
+rules.
+
+First of all, she opened a cupboard and took out a baby dress of
+lace and insertion,--and everybody knows that such a dress is used
+only when a hospital infant is baptised,--and she clothed Claribel's
+baby in linen and fine raiment, and because they are very, very red
+when they are so new, she dusted it with a bit of talcum--to break
+the shock, as you may say. It was very probable that Al had never
+seen so new a baby, and it was useless to spoil the joy of
+parenthood unnecessarily. For it really was a fine child, and
+eventually it would be white and beautiful.
+
+The baby smelled of violet, for the christening-robe was kept in a
+sachet.
+
+Finally she gave it another teaspoonful of warm water and put it
+back in its crib. And then she rustled starchily back to the
+throne-chair by the record-table, and opened her Bible at the place
+where it said that Annie Petowski might sit up, and the Goldstein
+baby--bran baths, and the other thing written just below.
+
+
+III
+
+The music poured up the well of the staircase; softened by distance,
+the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty basses of the medical
+staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty.
+
+Liz sat on the top step of the stairs, with her baby in her arms;
+and, as the song went on, Liz's eyes fell to her child and stayed
+there.
+
+At three o'clock the elevator-man brought Rosie Davis along the
+hall--Rosie, whose costume betrayed haste, and whose figure, under a
+gaudy motor-coat, gave more than a suggestion of being unsupported
+and wrapper-clad. She carried a clinking silver chatelaine, however,
+and at the door she opened it and took out a quarter, extending it
+with a regal gesture to the elevator-man.
+
+"Here, old sport," she said, "go and blow yourself to a drink. It's
+Easter."
+
+Such munificence appalled the ward.
+
+Rosie was not alone. Behind her, uncomfortable and sullen, was Al.
+The ward, turning from the episode of the quarter, fixed on him
+curious and hostile eyes; and Al, glancing around the ward from the
+doorway, felt their hostility, and plucked Rosie's arm.
+
+"Gee, Rose, I'm not going in there," he said. But Rosie pulled him
+in and presented him to the Nurse.
+
+Behind the screen, Claribel, shut off from her view of the open
+window, had taken to staring at the ceiling again.
+
+When the singing came up the staircase from the chapel, she had
+moaned and put her fingers in her ears.
+
+"Well, I found him," said Rosie cheerfully. "Had the deuce of a time
+locating him." And the Nurse, apprising in one glance his stocky
+figure and heavy shoulders, his ill-at-ease arrogance, his weak, and
+just now sullen but not bad-tempered face, smiled at him.
+
+"We have a little girl here who will be glad to see you," she said,
+and took him to the screen. "Just five minutes, and you must do the
+talking."
+
+Al hesitated between the visible antagonism of the ward and the
+mystery of the white screen. A vision of Claribel as he had seen her
+last, swollen with grief and despair, distorted of figure and
+accusing of voice, held him back. A faint titter of derision went
+through the room. He turned on Rosie's comfortable back a look of
+black hate and fury. Then the Nurse gave him a gentle shove, and he
+was looking at Claribel--a white, Madonna-faced Claribel, lying now
+with closed eyes, her long lashes sweeping her cheek.
+
+The girl did not open her eyes at his entrance. He put his hat
+awkwardly on the foot of the bed, and, tiptoeing around, sat on the
+edge of the stiff chair.
+
+"Well, how are you, kid?" he asked, with affected ease.
+
+She opened her eyes and stared at him. Then she made a little clutch
+at her throat, as if she were smothering.
+
+"How did you--how did you know I was here?"
+
+"Saw it in the paper, in the society column." She winced at that,
+and some fleeting sense of what was fitting came to his aid. "How
+are you?" he asked more gently. He had expected a flood of
+reproaches, and he was magnanimous in his relief.
+
+"I've been pretty bad; I'm better."
+
+"Oh, you'll be around soon, and going to dances again. The Maginnis
+Social Club's having a dance Saturday night in Mason's Hall."
+
+The girl did not reply. She was wrestling with a problem that is as
+old as the ages, although she did not know it--why this tragedy of
+hers should not be his. She lay with her hands crossed quietly on
+her breast and one of the loosened yellow braids was near his hand.
+He picked it up and ran it through his fingers.
+
+"Hasn't hurt your looks any," he said awkwardly. "You're looking
+pretty good."
+
+With a jerk of her head she pulled the braid out of his fingers.
+
+"Don't," she said and fell to staring at the ceiling, where she had
+written her problem.
+
+"How's the--how's the kid?"--after a moment.
+
+"I don't know--or care."
+
+There was nothing strange to Al in this frame of mind. Neither did
+he know or care.
+
+"What are you goin' to do with it?"
+
+"Kill it!"
+
+Al considered this a moment. Things were bad enough now, without
+Claribel murdering the child and making things worse.
+
+"I wouldn't do that," he said soothingly. "You can put it somewhere,
+can't you? Maybe Rosie'll know."
+
+"I don't want it to live."
+
+For the first time he realised her despair. She turned on him her
+tormented eyes, and he quailed.
+
+"I'll find a place for it, kid," he said. "It's mine, too. I guess
+I'm it, all right."
+
+"Yours!" She half rose on her elbow, weak as she was. "Yours! Didn't
+you throw me over when you found I was going to have it? Yours! Did
+you go through hell for twenty-four hours to bring it into the
+world? I tell you, it's mine--mine! And I'll do what I want with it.
+I'll kill it, and myself too!"
+
+"You don't know what you're saying!"
+
+She had dropped back, white and exhausted.
+
+"Don't I?" she said, and fell silent.
+
+Al felt defrauded, ill-treated. He had done the right thing; he had
+come to see the girl, which wasn't customary in those circles where
+Al lived and worked and had his being; he had acknowledged his
+responsibility, and even--why, hang it all----
+
+"Say the word and I'll marry you," he said magnanimously.
+
+"I don't want to marry you."
+
+He drew a breath of relief. Nothing could have been fairer than his
+offer, and she had refused it. He wished Rosie had been there to
+hear.
+
+And just then Rosie came. She carried the baby, still faintly
+odorous of violets, held tight in unaccustomed arms. She looked
+awkward and conscious, but her amused smile at herself was half
+tender.
+
+"Hello, Claribel," she said. "How are you? Just look here, Al! What
+do you think of this?"
+
+Al got up sheepishly and looked at the child.
+
+"Boy or girl?" he asked politely.
+
+"Girl; but it's the living image of you," said Rose--for Rose and
+the Nurse were alike in the wiles of the serpent.
+
+"Looks like me!" Al observed caustically. "Looks like an over-ripe
+tomato!"
+
+But he drew himself up a trifle. Somewhere in his young and
+hardened soul the germs of parental pride, astutely sowed, had taken
+quick root.
+
+"Feel how heavy she is," Rose commanded. And Al held out two arms
+unaccustomed to such tender offices.
+
+"Heavy! She's about as big as a peanut."
+
+"Mind her back," said Rose, remembering instructions.
+
+After her first glance Claribel had not looked at the child. But
+now, in its father's arms, it began to whimper. The mother stirred
+uneasily, and frowned.
+
+"Take it away!" she ordered. "I told them not to bring it here."
+
+The child cried louder. Its tiny red face, under the powder, turned
+purple. It beat the air with its fists. Al, still holding it in his
+outstretched arms, began vague motions to comfort it, swinging it up
+and down and across. But it cried on, drawing up its tiny knees in
+spasms of distress. Claribel put her fingers in her ears.
+
+"You'll have to feed it!" Rose shouted over the din.
+
+The girl comprehended without hearing, and shook her head in sullen
+obstinacy.
+
+"What do you think of that for noise?" said Al, not without pride.
+"She's like me, all right. When I'm hungry, there's hell to pay if
+I'm not fed quick. Here,"--he bent down over Claribel,--"you might
+as well have dinner now, and stop the row."
+
+Not ungently, he placed the squirming mass in the baptismal dress
+beside the girl on the bed. With the instinct of ages, the baby
+stopped wailing and opened her mouth.
+
+"The little cuss!" cried Al, delighted. "Ain't that me all over?
+Little angel-face the minute I get to the table!"
+
+Unresisting now, Claribel let Rose uncover her firm white breast.
+The mother's arm, passively extended by Rose to receive the small
+body, contracted around it unconsciously.
+
+She turned and looked long at the nuzzling, eager mouth, at the red
+hand lying trustfully open on her breast, at the wrinkled face, the
+indeterminate nose, the throbbing fontanelle where the little life
+was already beating so hard.
+
+"A girl, Rose!" she said. "My God, what am I going to do with her?"
+
+Rose was not listening. The Junior Medical's turn had come at last.
+Downstairs in the chapel, he was standing by the organ, his head
+thrown back, his heavy brown hair (which would never stay parted
+without the persuasion of brilliantine) bristling with earnestness.
+
+       "_O'er all the way, green palms and blossoms gay_,"
+
+he sang, and his clear tenor came welling up the staircase to Liz,
+and past her to the ward, and to the group behind the screen.
+
+       "_Are strewn this day in festal preparation,
+         Where Jesus comes to wipe our tears away--
+         E'en now the throng to welcome Him prepare._"
+
+On the throne-chair by the record-table, the Nurse sat and listened.
+And because it was Easter and she was very happy and because of the
+thrill in the tenor voice that came up the stairs to her, and
+because of the page in the order-book about bran baths and the rest
+of it, she cried a little, surreptitiously, and let the tears drop
+down on a yellow hospital record.
+
+The song was almost done. Liz, on the stairs, had fed her baby
+twenty minutes too soon, and now it lay, sleeping and sated, in her
+lap. Liz sat there, brooding over it, and the last line of the song
+came up the staircase.
+
+      "_Blessed is He who comes bringing sal-va-a-a-ation!_"
+
+the Junior Medical sang.
+
+The services were over. Downstairs the small crowd dispersed slowly.
+The minister shook hands with the nurses at the door, and the Junior
+Medical rolled up his song and wondered how soon he could make
+rounds upstairs again.
+
+Liz got up, with her baby in her arms, and padded in to the
+throne-chair by the record-table.
+
+"He can sing some, can't he!" she said.
+
+"He has a beautiful voice." The Nurse's eyes were shining.
+
+Liz moved off. Then she turned and came back.
+
+"I--I know you'll tell me I'm a fool," she said; "but I've decided
+to keep the kid, this time. I guess I'll make out, somehow."
+
+Behind the screen, Rosie had lighted a cigarette and was smoking,
+sublimely unconscious of the blue smoke swirl that rose in telltale
+clouds high above her head. The baby had dropped asleep, and
+Claribel lay still. But her eyes were not on the ceiling; they were
+on the child.
+
+Al leaned forward and put his lips to the arm that circled the baby.
+
+"I'm sorry, kid," he said. "I guess it was the limit, all right. Do
+you hate me?"
+
+She looked at him, and the hardness and defiance died out of her
+eyes. She shook her head.
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you--still--like me a little?"
+
+"Yes," in a whisper.
+
+"Then what's the matter with you and me and the little mutt getting
+married and starting all over--eh?"
+
+He leaned over and buried his face with a caressing movement in the
+hollow of her neck.
+
+Rose extinguished her cigarette on the foot of the bed, and, careful
+of appearances, put the butt in her chatelaine.
+
+"I guess you two don't need me any more," she said yawning. "I'm
+going back home to bed."
+
+
+
+
+"ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!"
+
+
+I
+
+There are certain people who will never understand this story,
+people who live their lives by rule of thumb. Little lives they are,
+too, measured by the letter and not the spirit. Quite simple too.
+Right is right and wrong is wrong.
+
+That shadowy No Man's Land between the trenches of virtue and sin,
+where most of us fight our battles and are wounded, and even die,
+does not exist for them.
+
+The boy in this story belonged to that class. Even if he reads it he
+may not recognise it. But he will not read it or have it read to
+him. He will even be somewhat fretful if it comes his way.
+
+"If that's one of those problem things," he will say, "I don't want
+to hear it. I don't see why nobody writes adventure any more."
+
+Right is right and wrong is wrong. Seven words for a creed, and all
+of life to live!
+
+This is not a war story. But it deals, as must anything that
+represents life in this year of our Lord of Peace, with war. With
+war in its human relations. Not with guns and trenches, but with
+men and women, with a boy and a girl.
+
+For only in the mass is war vast. To the man in the trench it
+reduces itself to the man on his right, the man on his left, the man
+across, beyond the barbed wire, and a woman.
+
+The boy was a Canadian. He was twenty-two and not very tall. His
+name in this story is Cecil Hamilton. He had won two medals for
+life-saving, each in a leather case. He had saved people from
+drowning. When he went abroad to fight he took the medals along. Not
+to show. But he felt that the time might come when he would not be
+sure of himself. A good many men on the way to war have felt that
+way. The body has a way of turning craven, in spite of high
+resolves. It would be rather comforting, he felt, to have those
+medals somewhere about him at that time. He never looked at them
+without a proud little intake of breath and a certain swelling of
+the heart.
+
+On the steamer he found that a medal for running had slipped into
+one of the cases. He rather chuckled over that. He had a sense of
+humour, in spite of his seven-word creed. And a bit of superstition,
+for that night, at dusk, he went out on to the darkened deck and
+flung it overboard.
+
+The steamer had picked him up at Halifax--a cold dawn, with a few
+pinched faces looking over the rail. Forgive him if he swaggered up
+the gangway. He was twenty-two, he was a lieutenant, and he was a
+fighting man.
+
+The girl in the story saw him then. She was up and about, in a short
+sport suit, with a white tam-o'-shanter on her head and a white
+woolen scarf tucked round her neck. Under her belted coat she wore a
+middy blouse, and when she saw Lieutenant Cecil Hamilton, with
+his eager eyes--not unlike her own, his eyes were young and
+inquiring--she reached into a pocket of the blouse and dabbed her
+lips with a small stick of cold cream.
+
+Cold air has a way of drying lips.
+
+He caught her at it, and she smiled. It was all over for him then,
+poor lad!
+
+Afterward, when he was in the trenches, he wondered about that. He
+called it "Kismet" to himself. It was really a compound, that first
+day or two, of homesickness and a little furtive stirring of anxiety
+and the thrill of new adventure that was in his blood.
+
+On the second afternoon out they had tea together, she in her
+steamer chair and he calmly settled next to her, in a chair
+belonging to an irritated English lawyer. Afterward he went down to
+his cabin, hung round with his new equipment, and put away the
+photograph of a very nice Toronto girl, which had been propped up
+back of his hairbrushes.
+
+They got rather well acquainted that first day.
+
+"You know," he said, with his cup in one hand and a rather stale
+cake in the other, "it's awfully bully of you to be so nice to me."
+
+She let that go. She was looking, as a matter of fact, after a tall
+man with heavily fringed eyes and English clothes, who had just gone
+by.
+
+"You know," he confided--he frequently prefaced his speeches with
+that--"I was horribly lonely when I came up the gangway. Then I saw
+you, and you were smiling. It did me a lot of good."
+
+"I suppose I really should not have smiled." She came back to him
+with rather an effort. "But you caught me, you know. It wasn't
+rouge. It was cold cream. I'll show you."
+
+She unbuttoned her jacket, against his protest, and held out the
+little stick. He took it and looked at it.
+
+"You don't need even this," he said rather severely. He disapproved
+of cosmetics. "You have a lovely mouth."
+
+"It's rather large. Don't you think so?"
+
+"It's exactly right."
+
+He was young, and as yet more interested in himself than in anything
+in the world. So he sat there and told her who he was, and what he
+hoped to do and, rather to his own astonishment, about the medals.
+
+"How very brave you are!" she said.
+
+That made him anxious. He hoped she did not think he was swanking.
+It was only that he did not make friends easily, and when he did
+meet somebody he liked he was apt to forget and talk too much about
+himself. He was so afraid that he gulped down his tepid tea in a
+hurry and muttered something about letters to write, and got himself
+away. The girl stared after him with a pucker between her eyebrows.
+And the tall man came and took the place he vacated.
+
+Things were worrying the girl--whose name, by the way, was Edith. On
+programs it was spelled "Edythe," but that was not her fault. Yes,
+on programs--Edythe O'Hara. The business manager had suggested
+deHara, but she had refused. Not that it mattered much. She had been
+in the chorus. She had a little bit of a voice, rather sweet, and
+she was divinely young and graceful.
+
+In the chorus she would have remained, too, but for one of those
+queer shifts that alter lives. A girl who did a song and an
+eccentric dance had wrenched her knee, and Edith had gone on in her
+place. Something of her tomboy youth remained in her, and for a few
+minutes, as she frolicked over the stage, she was a youngster,
+dancing to her shadow.
+
+She had not brought down the house, but a man with heavily fringed
+eyes, who watched her from the wings, made a note of her name. He
+was in America for music-hall material for England, and he was
+shrewd after the manner of his kind. Here was a girl who frolicked
+on the stage. The English, accustomed to either sensuous or sedate
+dancing, would fall hard for her, he decided. Either that, or she
+would go "bla." She was a hit or nothing.
+
+And that, in so many words, he told her that afternoon.
+
+"Feeling all right?" he asked her.
+
+"Better than this morning. The wind's gone down, hasn't it?"
+
+He did not answer her. He sat on the side of the chair and looked
+her over.
+
+"You want to keep well," he warned her. "The whole key to your doing
+anything is vitality. That's the word--Life."
+
+She smiled. It seemed so easy. Life? She was full-fed with the joy
+of it. Even as she sat, her active feet in their high-heeled shoes
+were aching to be astir.
+
+"Working in the gymnasium?" he demanded.
+
+"Two hours a day, morning and evening. Feel."
+
+She held out her arm to him, and he felt its small, rounded muscle,
+with a smile. But his heavily fringed eyes were on her face, and he
+kept his hold until she shook it off.
+
+"Who's the soldier boy?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Lieutenant Hamilton. He's rather nice. Don't you think so?"
+
+"He'll do to play with on the trip. You'll soon lose him in London."
+
+The winter darkness closed down round them. Stewards were busy
+closing ports and windows with fitted cardboards. Through the night
+the ship would travel over the dangerous lanes of the sea with only
+her small port and starboard lights. A sense of exhilaration
+possessed Edith. This hurling forward over black water, this sense
+of danger, visualised by precautions, this going to something new
+and strange, set every nerve to jumping. She threw back her rug, and
+getting up went to the rail. Lethway, the manager, followed her.
+
+"Nervous, aren't you?"
+
+"Not frightened, anyhow."
+
+It was then that he told her how he had sized the situation up. She
+was a hit or nothing.
+
+"If you go all right," he said, "you can have the town. London's for
+you or against you, especially if you're an American. If you go
+flat----"
+
+"Then what?"
+
+She had not thought of that. What would she do then? Her salary was
+not to begin until the performances started. Her fare and expenses
+across were paid, but how about getting back? Even at the best her
+salary was small. That had been one of her attractions to Lethway.
+
+"I'll have to go home, of course," she said. "If they don't like me,
+and decide in a hurry, I--I may have to borrow money from you to get
+back."
+
+"Don't worry about that." He put a hand over hers as it lay on the
+rail, and when she made no effort to release it he bent down and
+kissed her warm fingers. "Don't you worry about that," he repeated.
+
+She did worry, however. Down in her cabin, not so tidy as the
+boy's--littered with her curiously anomalous belongings, a great
+bunch of violets in the wash bowl, a cheap toilet set, elaborate
+high-heeled shoes, and a plain muslin nightgown hanging to the
+door--down there she opened her trunk and got out her contract.
+There was nothing in it about getting back home.
+
+For a few minutes she was panicky. Her hands shook as she put the
+document away. She knew life with all the lack of illusion of two
+years in the chorus. Even Lethway--not that she minded his casual
+caress on the deck. She had seen a lot of that. It meant nothing.
+Stage directors either bawled you out or petted you. That was part
+of the business.
+
+But to-night, all day indeed, there had been something in Lethway's
+face that worried her. And there were other things.
+
+The women on the boat replied coldly to her friendly advances. She
+had spoken to a nice girl, her own age or thereabouts, and the
+girl's mother or aunt or chaperon, whoever it was, had taken her
+away. It had puzzled her at the time. Now she knew. The crowd that
+had seen her off, from the Pretty Coquette Company--that had queered
+her, she decided. That and Lethway.
+
+None of the girls had thought it odd that she should cross the ocean
+with Lethway. They had been envious, as a matter of fact. They had
+brought her gifts, the queer little sachets and fruit and boxes of
+candy that littered the room. In that half hour before sailing they
+had chattered about her, chorus unmistakably, from their smart,
+cheap little hats to their short skirts and fancy shoes. Her
+roommate, Mabel, had been the only one she had hated to leave. And
+Mabel had queered her, too, with her short-bobbed yellow hair.
+
+She did a reckless thing that night, out of pure defiance. It was a
+winter voyage in wartime. The night before the women had gone down,
+sedately dressed, to dinner. The girl she had tried to speak to had
+worn a sweater. So Edith dressed for dinner.
+
+She whitened her neck and arms with liquid powder, and slicked up
+her brown hair daringly smooth and flat. Then she put on her one
+evening dress, a black net, and pinned on her violets. She rouged
+her lips a bit too.
+
+The boy, meeting her on the companionway, gasped.
+
+That night he asked permission to move over to her table, and after
+that the three of them ate together, Lethway watching and saying
+little, the other two chattering. They were very gay. They gambled
+to the extent of a quarter each, on the number of fronds, or
+whatever they are, in the top of a pineapple that Cecil ordered in,
+and she won. It was delightful to gamble, she declared, and put the
+fifty cents into a smoking-room pool.
+
+The boy was clearly infatuated. She looked like a debutante, and,
+knowing it, acted the part. It was not acting really. Life had only
+touched her so far, and had left no mark. When Lethway lounged away
+to an evening's bridge Cecil fetched his military cape and they went
+on deck.
+
+"I'm afraid it's rather lonely for you," he said. "It's always like
+this the first day or two. Then the women warm up and get friendly."
+
+"I don't want to know them. They are a stupid-looking lot. Did you
+ever see such clothes?"
+
+"You are the only person who looks like a lady to-night," he
+observed. "You look lovely. I hope you don't mind my saying it?"
+
+She was a downright young person, after all. And there was something
+about the boy that compelled candour. So, although she gathered
+after a time that he did not approve of chorus girls, was even
+rather skeptical about them and believed that the stage should be an
+uplifting influence, she told him about herself that night.
+
+It was a blow. He rallied gallantly, but she could see him
+straggling to gain this new point of view.
+
+"Anyhow," he said at last, "you're not like the others." Then
+hastily: "I don't mean to offend you when I say that, you know. Only
+one can tell, to look at you, that you are different." He thought
+that sounded rather boyish, and remembered that he was going to the
+war, and was, or would soon be, a fighting man. "I've known a lot of
+girls," he added rather loftily. "All sorts of girls."
+
+It was the next night that Lethway kissed her. He had left her alone
+most of the day, and by sheer gravitation of loneliness she and the
+boy drifted together. All day long they ranged the ship, watched a
+boxing match in the steerage, fed bread to the hovering gulls from
+the stern. They told each other many things. There had been a man in
+the company who had wanted to marry her, but she intended to have a
+career. Anyhow, she would not marry unless she loved a person very
+much.
+
+He eyed her wistfully when she said that.
+
+At dusk he told her about the girl in Toronto.
+
+"It wasn't an engagement, you understand. But we've been awfully
+good friends. She came to see me off. It was rather awful. She
+cried. She had some sort of silly idea that I'll get hurt."
+
+It was her turn to look wistful. Oh, they were getting on! When he
+went to ask the steward to bring tea to the corner they had found,
+she looked after him. She had been so busy with her own worries that
+she had not thought much of the significance of his neatly belted
+khaki. Suddenly it hurt her. He was going to war.
+
+She knew little about the war, except from the pictures in
+illustrated magazines. Once or twice she had tried to talk about it
+with Mabel, but Mabel had only said, "It's fierce!" and changed the
+subject.
+
+The uniforms scattered over the ship and the precautions taken at
+night, however, were bringing this thing called war very close to
+her. It was just beyond that horizon toward which they were heading.
+And even then it was brought nearer to her.
+
+Under cover of the dusk the girl she had tried to approach came up
+and stood beside her. Edith was very distant with her.
+
+"The nights make me nervous," the girl said. "In the daylight it is
+not so bad. But these darkened windows bring it all home to me--the
+war, you know."
+
+"I guess it's pretty bad."
+
+"It's bad enough. My brother has been wounded. I am going to him."
+
+Even above the sound of the water Edith caught the thrill in her
+voice. It was a new tone to her, the exaltation of sacrifice.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said. And some subconscious memory of Mabel made
+her say: "It's fierce!"
+
+The girl looked at her.
+
+"That young officer you're with, he's going, of course. He seems
+very young. My brother was older. Thirty."
+
+"He's twenty-two."
+
+"He has such nice eyes," said the girl. "I wish----"
+
+But he was coming back, and she slipped away.
+
+During tea Cecil caught her eyes on him more than once. He had taken
+off his stiff-crowned cap, and the wind blew his dark hair round.
+
+"I wish you were not going to the war," she said unexpectedly. It
+had come home to her, all at once, the potentialities of that trim
+uniform. It made her a little sick.
+
+"It's nice of you to say that."
+
+There was a new mood on her, of confession, almost of consecration.
+He asked her if he might smoke. No one in her brief life had ever
+before asked her permission to smoke.
+
+"I'll have to smoke all I can," he said. "The fellows say cigarettes
+are scarce in the trenches. I'm taking a lot over."
+
+He knew a girl who smoked cigarettes, he said. She was a nice girl
+too. He couldn't understand it. The way he felt about it, maybe
+a cigarette for a girl wasn't a crime. But it led to other
+things--drinking, you know, and all that.
+
+"The fellows don't respect a girl that smokes," he said. "That's the
+plain truth. I've talked to her a lot about it."
+
+"It wasn't your friend in Toronto, was it?"
+
+"Good heavens, no!" He repudiated the idea with horror.
+
+It was the girl who had to readjust her ideas of life that day. She
+had been born and raised in that neutral ground between the lines of
+right and wrong, and now suddenly her position was attacked and she
+must choose sides. She chose.
+
+"I've smoked a cigarette now and then. If you think it is wrong I'll
+not do it any more."
+
+He was almost overcome, both at the confession and at her
+renunciation. To tell the truth, among the older Canadian officers
+he had felt rather a boy. Her promise reinstated him in his own
+esteem. He was a man, and a girl was offering to give something up
+if he wished it. It helped a lot.
+
+That evening he laid out his entire equipment in his small cabin,
+and invited her to see it. He put his mother's picture behind his
+brushes, where the other one had been, and when all was ready he
+rang for a stewardess.
+
+"I am going to show a young lady some of my stuff," he explained.
+"And as she is alone I wish you'd stay round, will you? I want her
+to feel perfectly comfortable."
+
+The stewardess agreed, and as she was an elderly woman, with a son
+at the front, a boy like Cecil, she went back to her close little
+room over the engines and cried a little, very quietly.
+
+It was unfortunate that he did not explain the presence of the
+stewardess to the girl. For when it was all over, and she had stood
+rather awed before his mother's picture, and rather to his surprise
+had smoothed her hair with one of his brushes, she turned to him
+outside the door.
+
+"That stewardess has a lot of nerve," she said. "The idea of
+standing in the doorway, rubbering!"
+
+"I asked her," he explained. "I thought you'd prefer having some one
+there."
+
+She stared at him.
+
+
+II
+
+Lethway had won the ship's pool that day. In the evening he played
+bridge, and won again. He had been drinking a little. Not much, but
+enough to make him reckless.
+
+For the last rubber or two the thought of Edith had obsessed him,
+her hand on the rail as he had kissed it, her cool eyes that were at
+once so wise and so ignorant, her lithe body in the short skirt and
+middy blouse. He found her more alluring, so attired, than she had
+been in the scant costume of what to him was always "the show."
+
+He pondered on that during all of a dummy hand, sitting low in his
+chair with his feet thrust far under the table. The show business
+was going to the bad. Why? Because nobody connected with it knew
+anything about human nature. He formulated a plan, compounded of
+liquor and real business acumen, of dressing a chorus, of suggesting
+the feminine form instead of showing it, of veiling it in chiffons
+of soft colours and sending a draft of air from electric fans in the
+wings to set the chiffons in motion.
+
+"Like the Aurora," he said to himself. "Only not so beefy. Ought to
+be a hit. Pretty? It will be the real thing!"
+
+The thought of Edith in such a costume, playing like a dryad over
+the stage, stayed with him when the dummy hand had been played and
+he had been recalled to the game by a thump on the shoulder. Edith
+in soft, pastel-coloured chiffons, dancing in bare feet to light
+string music. A forest setting, of course. Pan. A goat or two. All
+that sort of thing.
+
+On his way down to his cabin he passed her door. He went on,
+hesitated, came back and knocked.
+
+Now Edith had not been able to sleep. Her thrifty soul, trained
+against waste, had urged her not to fling her cigarettes overboard,
+but to smoke them.
+
+"And then never again," she said solemnly.
+
+The result was that she could not get to sleep. Blanketed to the
+chin she lay in her bunk, reading. The book had been Mabel's
+farewell offering, a thing of perverted ideals, or none, of cheap
+sentiment, of erotic thought overlaid with words. The immediate
+result of it, when she yawned at last and turned out the light over
+her bed, was a new light on the boy.
+
+"Little prig!" she said to herself, and stretched her round arms
+luxuriously above her head.
+
+Then Lethway rapped. She sat up and listened. Then, grumbling, she
+got out and opened the door an inch or two. The lights were low
+outside and her own cabin dark. But she knew him.
+
+"Are we chased?" she demanded. In the back of her mind, fear of
+pursuit by a German submarine was dogging her across the Atlantic.
+
+"Sure we are!" he said. "What are you so stingy about the door for?"
+
+She recognised his condition out of a not inconsiderable experience
+and did her best to force the door shut, but he put his foot over
+the sill and smiled.
+
+"Please go away, Mr. Lethway."
+
+"I'll go if you'll kiss me good night."
+
+She calculated the situation, and surrendered. There was nothing
+else to do. But when she upturned her face he slipped past her and
+into the room. Just inside the door, swinging open and shut with
+every roll of the ship, he took her in his arms and kissed her, not
+once but many times.
+
+She did not lose her head. She had an arm free and she rang the
+bell. Then she jerked herself loose.
+
+"I have rung for the stewardess," she said furiously. "If you are
+here when she comes I'll ask for help."
+
+"You young devil!" was all he said, and went, slamming the door
+behind him. His rage grew as he reached his own cabin. Damn the
+girl, anyhow! He had not meant anything. Here he was, spending money
+he might never get back to give her a chance, and she called the
+stewardess because he kissed her!
+
+As for the girl, she went back to bed. For a few moments sheer rage
+kept her awake. Then youth and fatigue triumphed and she fell
+asleep. Her last thought was of the boy, after all. "He wouldn't do
+a thing like that," she reflected. "He's a gentleman. He's the real
+thing. He's----"
+
+Her eyes closed.
+
+Lethway apologised the next day, apologised with an excess of manner
+that somehow made the apology as much of an insult as the act. But
+she matched him at that game--took her cue from him, even went him
+one better as to manner. When he left her he had begun to feel that
+she was no unworthy antagonist. The game would be interesting. And
+she had the advantage, if she only knew it. Back of his desire to
+get back at her, back of his mocking smile and half-closed eyes, he
+was just a trifle mad about her since the night before.
+
+That is the way things stood when they reached the Mersey. Cecil was
+in love with the girl. Very earnestly in love. He did not sleep at
+night for thinking about her. He remembered certain semi-harmless
+escapades of his college days, and called himself unworthy and
+various other things. He scourged himself by leaving her alone in
+her steamer chair and walking by at stated intervals. Once, in a
+white sweater over a running shirt, he went to the gymnasium and
+found her there. She had on a "gym" suit of baggy bloomers and the
+usual blouse. He backed away from the door hastily.
+
+At first he was jealous of Lethway. Then that passed. She confided
+to him that she did not like the manager. After that he was sorry
+for him. He was sorry for any one she did not like. He bothered
+Lethway by walking the deck with him and looking at him with what
+Lethway refused to think was compassion.
+
+But because, contrary to the boy's belief, none of us is quite good
+or quite evil, he was kind to the boy. The khaki stood for something
+which no Englishman could ignore.
+
+"Poor little devil!" he said on the last day in the smoking room,
+"he's going to a bad time, all right. I was in Africa for eight
+years. Boer war and the rest of it. Got run through the thigh in a
+native uprising, and they won't have me now. But Africa was cheery
+to this war."
+
+He asked the boy into the smoking room, which he had hitherto
+avoided. He had some queer idea that he did not care to take his
+uniform in there. Absurd, of course. It made him rather lonely in
+the hours Edith spent in her cabin, preparing variations of costume
+for the evening out of her small trunk. But he was all man, and he
+liked the society of men; so he went at last, with Lethway, and
+ordered vichy!
+
+He had not allowed himself to think much beyond the end of the
+voyage. As the ship advanced, war seemed to slip beyond the edge of
+his horizon. Even at night, as he lay and tossed, his thoughts were
+either of the next day, when he would see Edith again, or of that
+indefinite future when he would return, covered with honors, and go
+to her, wherever she was.
+
+He never doubted the honors now. He had something to fight for. The
+medals in their cases looked paltry to him, compared with what was
+coming. In his sleep he dreamed of the V.C., dreams he was too
+modest to put into thoughts in waking hours.
+
+Then they reached the Mersey. On the last evening of the voyage he
+and Edith stood on the upper deck. It was a zone of danger. From
+each side of the narrowing river flashlights skimmed the surface of
+the water, playing round but never on the darkened ship. Red and
+green lights blinked signals. Their progress was a devious one
+through the mine-strewn channel. There was a heavy sea even there,
+and the small lights on the mast on the pilot boat, as it came to a
+stop, described great arcs that seemed, first to starboard, then to
+port, to touch the very tips of the waves.
+
+"I'm not crazy about this," the girl said, as the wind tugged at her
+skirts. "It frightens me. Brings the war pretty close, doesn't it?"
+
+Emotion swelled his heart and made him husky--love and patriotism,
+pride and hope, and a hot burst of courage.
+
+"What if we strike a mine?" she asked.
+
+"I wouldn't care so much. It would give me a chance to save you."
+
+Overhead they were signalling the shore with a white light. Along
+with the new emotions that were choking him came an unaccustomed
+impulse of boastfulness.
+
+"I can read that," he said when she ignored his offer to save her.
+"Of course it's code, but I can spell it out."
+
+He made a move to step forward and watch the signaler, but she put
+her hand on his arm.
+
+"Don't go. I'm nervous, Cecil," she said.
+
+She had called him by his first name. It shook him profoundly, that
+and the touch of her hand on his arm.
+
+"Oh, I love you, love you!" he said hoarsely. But he did not try to
+take her in his arms, or attempt to caress the hand that still clung
+to him. He stood very erect, looking at the shadowy outline of her.
+Then, her long scarf blowing toward him, he took the end of it and
+kissed that very gravely.
+
+"I would die for you," he said.
+
+Then Lethway joined them.
+
+
+III
+
+London was not kind to him. He had felt, like many Canadians, that
+in going to England he was going home. But England was cold.
+
+Not the people on the streets. They liked the Canadians and they
+cheered them when their own regiments went by unhailed. It appealed
+to their rampant patriotism that these men had come from across the
+sea to join hands with them against common foe. But in the clubs,
+where his letters admitted the boy, there was a different
+atmosphere. Young British officers were either cool or, much worse,
+patronising. They were inclined to suspect that his quiet confidence
+was swanking. One day at luncheon he drank a glass of wine, not
+because he wanted it but because he did not like to refuse. The
+result was unfortunate. It loosened his tongue a bit, and he
+mentioned the medals.
+
+Not noisily, of course. In an offhand manner, to his next neighbor.
+It went round the table, and a sort of icy silence, after that,
+greeted his small sallies. He never knew what the trouble was, but
+his heart was heavy in him.
+
+And it rained.
+
+It was always raining. He had very little money beyond his pay, and
+the constant hiring of taxicabs worried him. Now and then he saw
+some one he knew, down from Salisbury for a holiday, but they had
+been over long enough to know their way about. They had engagements,
+things to buy. He fairly ate his heart out in sheer loneliness.
+
+There were two hours in the day that redeemed the others. One was
+the hour late in the afternoon when, rehearsal over, he took Edith
+O'Hara to tea. The other was just before he went to bed, when he
+wrote her the small note that reached her every morning with her
+breakfast.
+
+In the seven days before he joined his regiment at Salisbury he
+wrote her seven notes. They were candid, boyish scrawls, not love
+letters at all. This was one of them:
+
+      _Dear Edith_: I have put in a rotten evening and am just
+      going to bed. I am rather worried because you looked so
+      tired to-day. Please don't work too hard.
+
+      I am only writing to say how I look forward each night to
+      seeing you the next day. I am sending with this a small
+      bunch of lilies of the valley. They remind me of you.
+                                                  CECIL.
+
+The girl saved those letters. She was not in love with him, but he
+gave her something no one else had ever offered: a chivalrous
+respect that pleased as well as puzzled her.
+
+Once in a tea shop he voiced his creed, as it pertained to her, over
+a plate of muffins.
+
+"When we are both back home, Edith," he said, "I am going to ask you
+something."
+
+"Why not now?"
+
+"Because it wouldn't be quite fair to you. I--I may be killed, or
+something. That's one thing. Then, it's because of your people."
+
+That rather stunned her. She had no people. She was going to tell
+him that, but she decided not to. She felt quite sure that he
+considered "people" essential, and though she felt that, for any
+long period of time, these queer ideas and scruples of his would be
+difficult to live up to, she intended to do it for that one week.
+
+"Oh, all right," she said, meekly enough.
+
+She felt very tender toward him after that, and her new gentleness
+made it all hard for him. She caught him looking at her wistfully at
+times, and it seemed to her that he was not looking well. His eyes
+were hollow, his face thin. She put her hand over his as it lay on
+the table.
+
+"Look here," she said, "you look half sick, or worried, or
+something. Stop telling me to take care of myself, and look after
+yourself a little better."
+
+"I'm all right," he replied. Then soon after: "Everything's strange.
+That's the trouble," he confessed. "It's only in little things that
+don't matter, but a fellow feels such a duffer."
+
+On the last night he took her to dinner--a small French restaurant
+in a back street in Soho. He had heard about it somewhere. Edith
+classed it as soon as she entered. It was too retiring, too demure.
+Its very location was clandestine.
+
+But he never knew. He was divided that night between joy at getting
+to his regiment and grief at leaving her. Rather self-engrossed, she
+thought.
+
+They had a table by an open grate fire, with a screen "to shut off
+the draft," the waiter said. It gave the modest meal a delightfully
+homey air, their isolation and the bright coal fire. For the first
+time they learned the joys of mussels boiled in milk, of French
+_souffle_ and other things.
+
+At the end of the evening he took her back to her cheap hotel in a
+taxicab. She expected him to kiss her. Her experience of taxicabs
+had been like that. But he did not. He said very little on the way
+home, but sat well back and eyed her wistful eyes. She chattered to
+cover his silence--of rehearsals, of--with reservations--of Lethway,
+of the anticipated London opening. She felt very sad herself. He had
+been a tie to America, and he had been much more than that. Though
+she did not realise it, he had had a profound effect on her. In
+trying to seem what he thought her she was becoming what he thought
+her. Her old reckless attitude toward life was gone, or was going.
+
+The day before she had refused an invitation to a night club, and
+called herself a fool for doing it. But she had refused.
+
+Not that he had performed miracles with her. She was still frankly a
+dweller on the neutral ground. But to that instinct that had kept
+her up to that time what she would have called "straight" had been
+added a new refinement. She was no longer the reckless and romping
+girl whose abandon had caught Lethway's eye.
+
+She had gained a soul, perhaps, and lost a livelihood.
+
+When they reached the hotel he got out and went in with her. The
+hall porter was watching and she held out her hand. But he shook his
+head.
+
+"If I touched your hand," he said, "I would have to take you in my
+arms. Good-bye, dear."
+
+"Good-bye," she said. There were tears in her eyes. It was through a
+mist that she saw him, as the elevator went up, standing at salute,
+his eyes following her until she disappeared from sight.
+
+
+IV
+
+Things were going wrong with Lethway. The management was ragging
+him, for one thing.
+
+"Give the girl time," he said almost viciously, at the end of a
+particularly bad rehearsal. "She's had a long voyage and she's
+tired. Besides," he added, "these acts never do go at rehearsal.
+Give me a good house at the opening and she'll show you what she can
+do."
+
+But in his soul he was worried. There was a change in Edith O'Hara.
+Even her voice had altered. It was not only her manner to him. That
+was marked enough, but he only shrugged his shoulders over it. Time
+enough for that when the production was on.
+
+He had engaged a hoyden, and she was by way of becoming a lady.
+During the first week or so he had hoped that it was only the
+strangeness of her surroundings. He had been shrewd enough to lay
+some of it, however, to Cecil's influence.
+
+"When your soldier boy gets out of the way," he sneered one day in
+the wings, "perhaps you'll get down to earth and put some life in
+your work."
+
+But to his dismay she grew steadily worse. Her dancing was delicate,
+accurate, even graceful, but the thing the British public likes to
+think typically American, a sort of breezy swagger, was gone. To
+bill her in her present state as the Madcap American would be sheer
+folly.
+
+Ten days before the opening he cabled for another girl to take her
+place.
+
+He did not tell her. Better to let her work on, he decided. A German
+submarine might sink the ship on which the other girl was coming,
+and then where would they be?
+
+Up to the last, however, he had hopes of Edith. Not that he cared to
+save her. But he hated to acknowledge a failure. He disliked to
+disavow his own judgment.
+
+He made a final effort with her, took her one day to luncheon at
+Simpson's, and in one of the pewlike compartments, over mutton and
+caper sauce, he tried to "talk a little life into her."
+
+"What the devil has come over you?" he demanded savagely. "You were
+larky enough over in New York. There are any number of girls in
+London who can do what you are doing now, and do it better."
+
+"I'm doing just what I did in New York."
+
+"The hell you are! I could do what you're doing with a jointed doll
+and some wires. Now see here, Edith," he said, "either you put some
+go into the thing, or you go. That's flat."
+
+Her eyes filled.
+
+"I--maybe I'm worried," she said. "Ever since I found out that I've
+signed up, with no arrangement about sending me back, it's been on
+my mind."
+
+"Don't you worry about that."
+
+"But if they put some one on in my place?"
+
+"You needn't worry about that either. I'll look after you. You know
+that. If I hadn't been crazy about you I'd have let you go a week
+ago. You know that too."
+
+She knew the tone, knew instantly where she stood. Knew, too, that
+she would not play the first night in London. She went rather white,
+but she faced him coolly.
+
+"Don't look like that," he said. "I'm only telling you that if you
+need a friend I'll be there."
+
+It was two days before the opening, however, when the blow fell. She
+had not been sleeping, partly from anxiety about herself, partly
+about the boy. Every paper she picked up was full of the horrors of
+war. There were columns filled with the names of those who had
+fallen. Somehow even his uniform had never closely connected the boy
+with death in her mind. He seemed so young.
+
+She had had a feeling that his very youth would keep him from
+danger. War to her was a faintly conceived struggle between men, and
+he was a boy.
+
+But here were boys who had died, boys at nineteen. And the lists of
+missing startled her. One morning she read in the personal column a
+query, asking if any one could give the details of the death of a
+young subaltern. She cried over that. In all her care-free life
+never before had she wept over the griefs of others.
+
+Cecil had sent her his photograph taken in his uniform. Because he
+had had it taken to give her he had gazed directly into the eye of
+the camera. When she looked at it it returned her glance. She took
+to looking at it a great deal.
+
+Two days before the opening she turned from a dispirited rehearsal
+to see Mabel standing in the wings. Then she knew. The end had come.
+
+Mabel was jaunty, but rather uneasy.
+
+"You poor dear!" she said, when Edith went to her. "What on earth's
+happened? The cable only said--honest, dearie, I feel like a dog!"
+
+"They don't like me. That's all," she replied wearily, and picked
+up her hat and jacket from a chair. But Mabel was curious.
+Uncomfortable, too, as she had said. She slipped an arm round
+Edith's waist.
+
+"Say the word and I'll throw them down," she cried. "It looks like
+dirty work to me. And you're thin. Honest, dearie, I mean it."
+
+Her loyalty soothed the girl's sore spirit.
+
+"I don't know what's come over me," she said. "I've tried hard
+enough. But I'm always tired. I--I think it's being so close to the
+war."
+
+Mabel stared at her. There was a war. She knew that. The theatrical
+news was being crowded to a back page to make space for disagreeable
+diagrams and strange, throaty names.
+
+"I know. It's fierce, isn't it?" she said.
+
+Edith took her home, and they talked far into the night. She had
+slipped Cecil's picture into the wardrobe before she turned on the
+light. Then she explained the situation.
+
+"It's pep they want, is it?" said Mabel at last. "Well, believe me,
+honey, I'll give it to them. And as long as I've got a cent it's
+yours."
+
+They slept together in Edith's narrow bed, two slim young figures
+delicately flushed with sleep. As pathetic, had they known it, as
+those other sleepers in their untidy billets across the channel.
+Almost as hopeless too. Dwellers in the neutral ground.
+
+
+V
+
+Now war, after all, is to each fighting man an affair of small
+numbers, an affair of the men to his right and his left, of the
+A.M.S.C. in the rear and of a handful of men across. On his days of
+rest the horizon is somewhat expanded. It becomes then a thing of
+crowded and muddy village streets, of food and drink and tobacco and
+a place to sleep.
+
+Always, of course, it is a thing of noises.
+
+This is not a narrative of war. It matters very little, for
+instance, how Cecil's regiment left Salisbury and went to Soissons,
+in France. What really matters is that at last the Canadian-made
+motor lorries moved up their equipment, and that, after digging
+practice trenches in the yellow clay of old battlefields, they were
+moved up to the front.
+
+Once there, there seemed to be a great deal of time. It was the lull
+before Neuve Chapelle. Cecil's spirit grew heavy with waiting. Once,
+back on rest at his billet, he took a long walk over the half-frozen
+side roads and came without warning on a main artery. Three traction
+engines were taking to the front the first of the great British
+guns, so long awaited. He took the news back to his mess. The
+general verdict was that there would be something doing now.
+
+Cecil wrote a letter to Edith that day. He had written before, of
+course, but this was different. He wrote first to his mother, just
+in case anything happened, a long, boyish letter with a misspelled
+word here and there. He said he was very happy and very comfortable,
+and that if he did get his he wanted her to know that it was all
+perfectly cheerful and not anything like the war correspondents said
+it was. He'd had a bully time all his life, thanks to her. He hadn't
+let her know often enough how he felt about her, and she knew he was
+a dub at writing. There were a great many things worse than "going
+out" in a good fight. "It isn't at all as if you could see the
+blooming thing coming," he wrote. "You never know it's after you
+until you've got it, and then you don't."
+
+The letter was not to be sent unless he was killed. So he put in a
+few anecdotes to let her know exactly how happy and contented he
+was. Then he dropped the whole thing in the ten inches of mud and
+water he was standing in, and had to copy it all over.
+
+To Edith he wrote a different sort of letter. He told her that he
+loved her. "It's almost more adoration than love," he wrote, while
+two men next to him were roaring over a filthy story. "I mean by
+that, that I feel every hour of every day how far above me you are.
+It's like one of these _fusees_ the Germans are always throwing up
+over us at night. It's perfectly dark, and then something bright and
+clear and like a star, only nearer, is overhead. Everything looks
+different while it floats there. And so, my dear, my dear,
+everything has been different to me since I knew you."
+
+Rather boyish, all of it, but terribly earnest. He said he had
+wanted to ask her to marry him, but that the way he felt about it, a
+fellow had no right to ask a girl such a thing when he was going to
+a war. If he came back he would ask her. And he would love her all
+his life.
+
+The next day, at dawn, he went out with eighty men to an outpost
+that had been an abandoned farm. It was rather a forlorn hope. They
+had one machine gun. At nine o'clock the enemy opened fire on them
+and followed it by an attack. The major in charge went down early.
+At two Cecil was standing in the loft of the farmhouse, firing with
+a revolver on men who beneath him, outside, were placing dynamite
+under a corner of the building.
+
+To add to the general hopelessness, their own artillery, believing
+them all dead, opened fire on the building. They moved their wounded
+to the cellar and kept on fighting.
+
+At eight o'clock that night Cecil's right arm was hanging helpless,
+and the building was burning merrily. There were five of them left.
+They fixed bayonets and charged the open door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the boy opened his eyes he was lying in six inches of manure in
+a box car. One of his men was standing over him, keeping him from
+being trampled on. There was no air and no water. The ammonia fumes
+from the manure were stifling.
+
+The car lurched and jolted along. Cecil opened his eyes now and
+then, and at first he begged for water. When he found there was none
+he lay still. The men hammered on the door and called for air. They
+made frantic, useless rushes at the closed and barred door. Except
+Cecil, all were standing. They were herded like cattle, and there
+was no room to lie or sit.
+
+He lay there, drugged by weakness. He felt quite sure that he was
+dying, and death was not so bad. He voiced this feebly to the man
+who stood over him.
+
+"It's not so bad," he said.
+
+"The hell it's not!" said the man.
+
+For the time Edith was effaced from his mind. He remembered the
+wounded men left in the cellar with the building burning over them.
+That, and days at home, long before the war.
+
+Once he said "Mother." The soldier who was now standing astride of
+him, the better to keep off the crowding men, thought he was asking
+for water again.
+
+Thirty hours of that, and then air and a little water. Not enough
+water. Not all the water in all the cool streams of the earth would
+have slaked the thirst of his wound.
+
+The boy was impassive. He was living in the past. One day he recited
+at great length the story of his medals. No one listened.
+
+And all the time his right arm lay or hung, as he was prone or
+erect, a strange right arm that did not belong to him. It did not
+even swell. When he touched it the fingers were cold and bluish. It
+felt like a dead hand.
+
+Then, at the end of it all, was a bed, and a woman's voice, and
+quiet.
+
+The woman was large and elderly, and her eyes were very kind. She
+stirred something in the boy that had been dead of pain.
+
+"Edith!" he said.
+
+
+VI
+
+Mabel had made a hit. Unconscious imitator that she was, she stole
+Edith's former recklessness, and added to it something of her own
+dash and verve. Lethway, standing in the wings, knew she was not and
+never would be Edith. She was not fine enough. Edith at her best
+had frolicked. Mabel romped, was almost wanton. He cut out the
+string music at the final rehearsal. It did not fit.
+
+On the opening night the brass notes of the orchestra blared and
+shrieked. Mabel's bare feet flew, her loose hair, cut to her ears
+and held only by a band over her forehead, kept time in ecstatic
+little jerks. When at last she pulled off the fillet and bowed to
+the applause, her thick short hair fell over her face as she jerked
+her head forward. They liked that. It savoured of the abandoned. She
+shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her
+scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish
+body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its passion, its
+fire.
+
+Edith had been spring, palpitant with gladness.
+
+Lethway, looking with tired eyes from the wings, knew that he had
+made a commercial success. But back of his sordid methods there was
+something of the soul of an artist. And this rebelled.
+
+But he made a note to try flame-coloured chiffon for Mabel. Edith
+was to have danced in the pale greens of a water nymph.
+
+On the night of her triumph Mabel returned late to Edith's room,
+where she was still quartered. She was moving the next day to a
+small apartment. With the generosity of her class she had urged
+Edith to join her, and Edith had perforce consented.
+
+"How did it go?" Edith asked from the bed.
+
+"Pretty well," said Mabel. "Nothing unusual."
+
+She turned up the light, and from her radiant reflection in the
+mirror Edith got the truth. She lay back with a dull, sickening
+weight round her heart. Not that Mabel had won, but that she herself
+had failed.
+
+"You're awfully late."
+
+"I went to supper. Wish you'd been along, dearie. Terribly swell
+club of some sort." Then her good resolution forgotten: "I made them
+sit up and take notice, all right. Two invitations for supper
+to-morrow night and more on the way. And when I saw I'd got the
+house going to-night, and remembered what I was being paid for it,
+it made me sick."
+
+"It's better than nothing."
+
+"Why don't you ask Lethway to take you on in the chorus? It would do
+until you get something else."
+
+"I have asked him. He won't do it."
+
+Mabel was still standing in front of the mirror. She threw her head
+forward so her short hair covered her face, and watched the effect
+carefully. Then she came over and sat on the bed.
+
+"He's a dirty dog," she said.
+
+The two girls looked at each other. They knew every move in the game
+of life, and Lethway's methods were familiar ones.
+
+"What are you going to do about it?" Mabel demanded at last.
+"Believe me, old dear, he's got a bad eye. Now listen here," she
+said with impulsive generosity. "I've got a scheme. I'll draw enough
+ahead to send you back. I'll do it to-morrow, while the drawing's
+good."
+
+"And queer yourself at the start?" said Edith scornfully. "Talk
+sense, Mabel, I'm up against it, but don't you worry. I'll get
+something."
+
+But she did not get anything. She was reduced in the next week to
+entire dependence on the other girl. And, even with such miracles of
+management as they had both learned, it was increasingly difficult
+to get along.
+
+There was a new element too. Edith was incredulous at first, but at
+last she faced it. There was a change in Mabel. She was not less
+hospitable nor less generous. It was a matter of a point of view.
+Success was going to her head. Her indignation at certain phases of
+life was changing to tolerance. She found Edith's rampant virtue a
+trifle wearing. She took to staying out very late, and coming in
+ready to meet Edith's protest with defiant gaiety. She bought
+clothes too.
+
+"You'll have to pay for them sometime," Edith reminded her.
+
+"I should worry. I've got to look like something if I'm going to go
+out at all."
+
+Edith, who had never thought things out before, had long hours to
+think now. And the one thing that seemed clear and undeniable was
+that she must not drive Mabel into debt. Debt was the curse of most
+of the girls she knew. As long as they were on their own they could
+manage. It was the burden of unpaid bills, lightly contracted, that
+drove so many of them wrong.
+
+That night, while Mabel was asleep, she got up and cautiously
+lighted the gas. Then she took the boy's photograph out of its
+hiding place and propped it on top of her trunk. For a long time she
+sat there, her chin in her hands, and looked at it.
+
+It was the next day that she saw his name among the missing.
+
+She did not cry, not at first. The time came when it seemed to her
+she did nothing else. But at first she only stared. She was too
+young and too strong to faint, but things went gray for her.
+
+And gray they remained--through long spring days and eternal
+nights--days when Mabel slept all morning, rehearsed or played in
+the afternoons, was away all evening and far into the night. She did
+not eat or sleep. She spent money that was meant for food on papers
+and journals and searched for news. She made a frantic but
+ineffectual effort to get into the War Office.
+
+She had received his letter two days after she had seen his name
+among the missing. She had hardly dared to open it, but having read
+it, for days she went round with a strange air of consecration that
+left Mabel uneasy.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't look like that!" she said one morning. "You get
+on my nerves."
+
+But as time went on the feeling that he was dead overcame everything
+else. She despaired, rather than grieved. And following despair came
+recklessness. He was dead. Nothing else mattered. Lethway, meeting
+her one day in Oxford Circus, almost passed her before he knew her.
+He stopped her then.
+
+"Haven't been sick, have you?"
+
+"Me? No."
+
+"There's something wrong."
+
+She did not deny it and he fell into step beside her.
+
+"Doing anything?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head. With all the power that was in her she was
+hating his tall figure, his heavy-lashed eyes, even the familiar
+ulster he wore.
+
+"I wish you were a sensible young person," he said. But something in
+the glance she gave him forbade his going on. It was not an ugly
+glance. Rather it was cold, appraising--even, if he had known it,
+despairing.
+
+Lethway had been busy. She had been in the back of his mind rather
+often, but other things had crowded her out. This new glimpse of her
+fired him again, however. And she had a new quality that thrilled
+even through the callus of his soul. The very thing that had
+foredoomed her to failure in the theatre appealed to him strongly--a
+refinement, a something he did not analyse.
+
+When she was about to leave him he detained her with a hand on her
+arm.
+
+"You know you can always count on me, don't you?" he said.
+
+"I know I can't," she flashed back at him with a return of her old
+spirit.
+
+"I'm crazy about you."
+
+"Old stuff!" she said coolly, and walked off. But there was a tug of
+fear at her heart. She told Mabel, but it was typical of the change
+that Mabel only shrugged her shoulders.
+
+It was Lethway's shrewdness that led to his next move. He had tried
+bullying, and failed. He had tried fear, with the same lack of
+effect. Now he tried kindness.
+
+She distrusted him at first, but her starved heart was crying out
+for the very thing he offered her. As the weeks went on, with no
+news of Cecil, she accepted his death stoically at last. Something
+of her had died. But in a curious way the boy had put his mark on
+her. And as she grew more like the thing he had thought her to be
+the gulf between Mabel and herself widened. They had, at last, only
+in common their room, their struggle, the contacts of their daily
+life.
+
+And Lethway was now always in the background. He took her for quiet
+meals and brought her home early. He promised her that sometime he
+would see that she got back home.
+
+"But not just yet," he added as her colour rose. "I'm selfish,
+Edith. Give me a little time to be happy."
+
+That was a new angle. It had been a part of the boy's quiet creed to
+make others happy.
+
+"Why don't you give me something to do, since you're so crazy to
+have me hanging about?"
+
+"Can't do it. I'm not the management. And they're sore at you. They
+think you threw them down." He liked to air his American slang.
+
+Edith cupped her chin in her hand and looked at him. There was no
+mystery about the situation, no shyness in the eyes with which she
+appraised him. She was beginning to like him too.
+
+That night when she got back to Mabel's apartment her mood was
+reckless. She went to the window and stood looking at the crooked
+and chimney-potted skyline that was London.
+
+"Oh, what's the use?" she said savagely, and gave up the fight.
+
+When Mabel came home she told her.
+
+"I'm going to get out," she said without preamble.
+
+She caught the relief in Mabel's face, followed by a purely
+conventional protest.
+
+"Although," she hedged cautiously, "I don't know, dearie. People
+look at things sensibly these days. You've got to live, haven't you?
+They're mighty quick to jail a girl who tries to jump in the river
+when she's desperate."
+
+"I'll probably end there. And I don't much care."
+
+Mabel gave her a good talking to about that. Her early training had
+been in a church which regarded self-destruction as a cardinal sin.
+Then business acumen asserted itself:
+
+"He'll probably put you on somewhere. He's crazy about you, Ede."
+
+But Edith was not listening. She was standing in front of her opened
+trunk tearing into small pieces something that had been lying in the
+tray.
+
+
+VII
+
+Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that
+had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use
+his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land
+but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried
+feebly to move his right arm.
+
+But it was gone.
+
+At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there
+beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But
+when he looked it was not there.
+
+There was not one shock of discovery, but many. For each time he
+roused from sleep he had forgotten, and must learn the thing again.
+
+The elderly German woman stayed close. She was wise, and war had
+taught her many things. So when he opened his eyes she was always
+there. She talked to him very often of his mother, and he listened
+with his eyes on her face--eyes like those of a sick child.
+
+In that manner they got by the first few days.
+
+"It won't make any difference to her," he said once. "She'd take me
+back if I was only a fragment." Then bitterly: "That's all I am--a
+fragment! A part of a man!"
+
+After a time she knew that there was a some one else, some one he
+was definitely relinquishing. She dared not speak to him about it.
+His young dignity was militant. But one night, as she dozed beside
+him in the chair, he reached the limit of his repression and told
+her.
+
+"An actress!" she cried, sitting bolt upright. "_Du lieber_--an
+actress!"
+
+"Not an actress," he corrected her gravely. "A--a dancer. But good.
+She's a very good girl. Even when I was--was whole"--raging
+bitterness there--"I was not good enough for her."
+
+"No actress is good. And dancers!"
+
+"You don't know what you are talking about," he said roughly, and
+turned his back to her. It was almost insulting to have her assist
+him to his attitude of contempt, and to prop him in it with pillows
+behind his back. Lying there he tried hard to remember that this
+woman belonged to his hereditary foes. He was succeeding in hating
+her when he felt her heavy hand on his head.
+
+"Poor boy! Poor little one!" she said. And her voice was husky.
+
+When at last he was moved from the hospital to the prison camp she
+pinned the sleeve of his ragged uniform across his chest and kissed
+him, to his great discomfiture. Then she went to the curtained
+corner that was her quarters and wept long and silently.
+
+The prison camp was overcrowded. Early morning and late evening
+prisoners were lined up to be counted. There was a medley of
+languages--French, English, Arabic, Russian. The barracks were built
+round a muddy inclosure in which the men took what exercise they
+could.
+
+One night a boy with a beautiful tenor voice sang Auld Lang Syne
+under the boy's window. He stood with his hand on the cuff of his
+empty sleeves and listened. And suddenly a great shame filled him,
+that with so many gone forever, with men dying every minute of
+every hour, back at the lines, he had been so obsessed with himself.
+He was still bitter, but the bitterness was that he could not go
+back again and fight.
+
+When he had been in the camp a month he helped two British officers
+to escape. One of them had snubbed him in London months before. He
+apologised before he left.
+
+"You're a man, Hamilton," he said. "All you Canadians are men. I've
+some things to tell when I get home."
+
+The boy could not go with them. There would be canals to swim
+across, and there was his empty sleeve and weakness. He would never
+swim again, he thought. That night, as he looked at the empty beds
+of the men who had gone, he remembered his medals and smiled grimly.
+
+He was learning to use his left hand. He wrote letters home with it
+for soldiers who could not write. He went into the prison hospital
+and wrote letters for those who would never go home. But he did not
+write to the girl.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went back at last, when the hopelessly wounded were exchanged. To
+be branded "hopelessly wounded" was to him a stain, a stigma. It put
+him among the clutterers of the earth. It stranded him on the shore
+of life. Hopelessly wounded!
+
+For, except what would never be whole, he was well again. True,
+confinement and poor food had kept him weak and white. His legs had
+a way of going shaky at nightfall. But once he knocked down an
+insolent Russian with his left hand, and began to feel his own man
+again. That the Russian was weak from starvation did not matter. The
+point to the boy was that he had made the attempt.
+
+Providence has a curious way of letting two lives run along, each
+apparently independent of the other. Parallel lines they seem,
+hopeless of meeting. Converging lines really, destined, through long
+ages, by every deed that has been done to meet at a certain point
+and there fuse.
+
+Edith had left Mabel, but not to go to Lethway. When nothing else
+remained that way was open. She no longer felt any horror--only a
+great distaste. But two weeks found her at her limit. She, who had
+rarely had more than just enough, now had nothing.
+
+And no glory of sacrifice upheld her. She no longer believed that by
+removing the burden of her support she could save Mabel. It was
+clear that Mabel would not be saved. To go back and live on her,
+under the circumstances, was but a degree removed from the other
+thing that confronted her.
+
+There is just a chance that, had she not known the boy, she would
+have killed herself. But again the curious change he had worked in
+her manifested itself. He thought suicide a wicked thing.
+
+"I take it like this," he had said in his eager way: "life's a thing
+that's given us for some purpose. Maybe the purpose gets
+clouded--I'm afraid I'm an awful duffer at saying what I mean. But
+we've got to work it out, do you see? Or--or the whole scheme is
+upset."
+
+It had seemed very clear then.
+
+Then, on a day when the rare sun made even the rusty silk hats of
+clerks on tops of omnibuses to gleam, when the traffic glittered on
+the streets and the windows of silversmiths' shops shone painful to
+the eye, she met Lethway again.
+
+The sun had made her reckless. Since the boy was gone life was
+wretchedness, but she clung to it. She had given up all hope of
+Cecil's return, and what she became mattered to no one else.
+
+Perhaps, more than anything else, she craved companionship. In
+all her crowded young life she had never before been alone.
+Companionship and kindness. She would have followed to heel, like
+a dog, for a kind word.
+
+Then she met Lethway. They walked through the park. When he left her
+her once clear, careless glance had a suggestion of furtiveness in
+it.
+
+That afternoon she packed her trunk and sent it to an address he
+had given her. In her packing she came across the stick of cold
+cream, still in the pocket of the middy blouse. She flung it, as
+hard as she could, across the room.
+
+She paid her bill with money Lethway had given her. She had exactly
+a sixpence of her own. She found herself in Trafalgar Square late in
+the afternoon. The great enlisting posters there caught her eye,
+filled her with bitterness.
+
+"Your king and your country need you," she read. She had needed the
+boy, too, but this vast and impersonal thing, his mother country,
+had taken him from her--taken him and lost him. She wanted to stand
+by the poster and cry to the passing women to hold their men back.
+As she now knew she hated Lethway, she hated England.
+
+She wandered on. Near Charing Cross she spent the sixpence for a
+bunch of lilies of the valley, because he had said once that she was
+like them. Then she was for throwing them in the street, remembering
+the thing she would soon be.
+
+"For the wounded soldiers," said the flower girl. When she
+comprehended that, she made her way into the station. There was a
+great crowd, but something in her face made the crowd draw back and
+let her through. They nudged each other as she passed.
+
+"Looking for some one, poor child!" said a girl and, following her,
+thrust the flowers she too carried into Edith's hand. She put them
+with the others, rather dazed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To Cecil the journey had been a series of tragedies. Not his own.
+There were two hundred of them, officers and men, on the boat across
+the Channel. Blind, maimed, paralysed, in motley garments, they were
+hilariously happy. Every throb of the turbine engines was a thrust
+toward home. They sang, they cheered.
+
+Now and then some one would shout: "Are we downhearted?" And
+crutches and canes would come down on the deck to the unanimous
+shout: "No!"
+
+Folkestone had been trying, with its parade of cheerfulness, with
+kindly women on the platform serving tea and buns. In the railway
+coach to London, where the officers sat, a talking machine played
+steadily, and there were masses of flowers, violets and lilies of
+the valley. At Charing Cross was a great mass of people, and as they
+slowly disembarked he saw that many were crying. He was rather
+surprised. He had known London as a cold and unemotional place. It
+had treated him as an alien, had snubbed and ignored him.
+
+He had been prepared to ask nothing of London, and it lay at his
+feet in tears.
+
+Then he saw Edith.
+
+Perhaps, when in the fullness of years the boy goes over to the
+life he so firmly believes awaits him, the one thing he will carry
+with him through the open door will be the look in her eyes when she
+saw him. Too precious a thing to lose, surely, even then. Such
+things make heaven.
+
+"What did I tell you?" cried the girl who had given Edith her
+flowers. "She has found him. See, he has lost his arm. Look
+out--catch him!"
+
+But he did not faint. He went even whiter, and looking at Edith he
+touched his empty sleeve.
+
+"As if that would make any difference to her!" said the girl, who
+was in black. "Look at her face! She's got him."
+
+Neither Edith nor the boy could speak. He was afraid of unmanly
+tears. His dignity was very dear to him. And the tragedy of his
+empty sleeve had her by the throat. So they went out together and
+the crowd opened to let them by.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nine o'clock that night Lethway stormed through the stage
+entrance of the theatre and knocked viciously at the door of Mabel's
+dressing room. Receiving no attention, he opened the door and went
+in.
+
+The room was full of flowers, and Mabel, ready to go on, was having
+her pink toes rouged for her barefoot dance.
+
+"You've got a nerve!" she said coolly.
+
+"Where's Edith?"
+
+"I don't know and I don't care. She ran away, when I was stinting
+myself to keep her. I'm done. Now you go out and close that door,
+and when you want to enter a lady's dressing room, knock."
+
+He looked at her with blazing hatred.
+
+"Right-o!" was all he said. And he turned and left her to her
+flowers.
+
+At exactly the same time Edith was entering the elevator of a small,
+very respectable hotel in Kensington. The boy, smiling, watched her
+in.
+
+He did not kiss her, greatly to the disappointment of the hall
+porter. As the elevator rose the boy stood at salute, the fingers of
+his left hand to the brim of his shabby cap. In his eyes, as they
+followed her, was all that there is of love--love and a new
+understanding.
+
+She had told him, and now he knew. His creed was still the same.
+Right was right and wrong was wrong. But he had learned of that
+shadowy No Man's Land between the lines, where many there were who
+fought their battles and were wounded, and even died.
+
+As he turned and went out two men on crutches were passing along the
+quiet street. They recognised him in the light of the doorway, and
+stopped in front of him. Their voices rang out in cheerful unison:
+
+"Are we downhearted? No!"
+
+Their crutches struck the pavement with a resounding thump.
+
+
+
+
+THE GAME
+
+
+I
+
+The Red Un was very red; even his freckles were red rather than
+copper-coloured. And he was more prodigal than most kings, for he
+had two crowns on his head. Also his hair grew in varying
+directions, like a wheatfields after a storm. He wore a coat without
+a tail, but with brass buttons to compensate, and a celluloid collar
+with a front attached. It was the Red Un's habit to dress first and
+wash after, as saving labour; instead of his neck he washed his
+collar.
+
+The Red Un was the Chief Engineer's boy and rather more impressive
+than the Chief, who was apt to decry his own greatness. It was the
+Red Un's duty to look after the Chief, carry in his meals, make his
+bed, run errands, and remind him to get his hair cut now and then.
+It was the Red Un's pleasure to assist unassumingly in the
+surveillance of that part of the ship where the great god, Steam,
+ruled an underworld of trimmers and oilers and stokers and assistant
+engineers--and even, with reservations, the Chief. The Red Un kept a
+sharp eye on the runs and read the Chief's log daily--so much coal
+in the bunkers; so much water in the wells; so many engine-room
+miles in twenty-four hours--which, of course, are not sea miles
+exactly, there being currents and winds, and God knows what, to
+waste steam on.
+
+The Red Un, like the assistants, was becoming a bear on the speed
+market. He had learned that, just when the engines get heated enough
+to work like demons, and there is a chance to break a record and get
+a letter from the management, some current or other will show up--or
+a fog, which takes the very tripe out of the cylinders and sends the
+bridge yapping for caution.
+
+The Red Un was thirteen; and he made the Chief's bed by pulling the
+counterpane neatly and smoothly over the chaos underneath--and got
+away with it, the Chief being weary at night. Also, in odd moments
+he made life miserable for the crew. Up to shortly before, he had
+had to use much energy and all his wits to keep life in his starved
+little body; and even keeping an eye on the log and the Chief's
+hair, and slipping down into the engine room, where he had no manner
+of business, hardly used up his activities. However, he did not lie
+and he looked the Chief square in the eye, as man to man.
+
+The Chief had salvaged him out of the Hudson, when what he had taken
+for a bobbing red tomato had suddenly revealed a blue face and two
+set and desperate eyes. After that the big Scot had forgotten all
+about him, except the next day when he put on his shoes, which had
+shrunk in the drying. The liner finished coaling about that time,
+took on passengers, luggage, steamer baskets and a pilot, and,
+having stowed the first two, examined the cards on the third and
+dropped the last, was pointed, nose to the east wind, for the race.
+
+The arrow on the twin dials pointed to Stand By! for the long
+voyage--three thousand miles or so without a stop. The gong, and
+then Half Ahead!--great elbows thrust up and down, up and down; the
+grunt of power overcoming inertia, followed by the easy swing of
+limitless strength. Full Ahead!--and so off again for the great
+struggle--man's wits and the engines and the mercy of God against
+the upreaching of the sea.
+
+The Chief, who sometimes dreamed his greatness, but who ignored it
+waking, snapped his watch shut.
+
+"Eleven-eleven!" he said to the Senior Second. "Well, here's luck!"
+That is what he said aloud; to himself he always said a bit of a
+prayer, realising perhaps even more than the bridge how little man's
+wits count in the great equation. He generally said something to the
+effect that "After all, it's up to Thee, O Lord!"
+
+He shook hands with the Senior Second, which also was his habit; and
+he smiled too, but rather grimly. They were playing a bit of a
+game, you see; and so far the Chief had won all the tricks--just an
+amusing little game and nothing whatever to do with a woman; the
+Second was married, but the Chief had put all such things out of his
+head years before, when he was a youngster and sailing to the Plate.
+Out of his head, quite certainly; but who dreams of greatness for
+himself alone? So the Chief, having glanced about and run his hand
+caressingly over various fearful and pounding steel creatures, had
+climbed up the blistering metal staircase to his room at the top and
+was proceeding to put down eleven-eleven and various other things
+that the first cabin never even heard of, when he felt that he was
+being stared at from behind.
+
+Now and then, after shore leave, a drunken trimmer or stoker gets up
+to the Chief's room and has to be subdued by the power of executive
+eye or the strength of executive arm. As most Chiefs are Scots, the
+eye is generally sufficient. So the Chief, mightily ferocious,
+turned about, eye set, as one may say, to annihilate a six-foot
+trimmer in filthy overalls and a hangover, and saw--a small
+red-haired boy in a Turkish towel.
+
+The boy quailed rather at the eye, but he had the courage of nothing
+to lose--not even a pair of breeches--and everything to gain.
+
+"Please," said the apparition, "the pilot's gone, and you can't put
+me off!"
+
+The Chief opened his mouth and shut it again. The mouth, and the
+modification of an eye set for a six-foot trimmer to an eye for a
+four-foot-ten urchin in a Turkish towel, produced a certain
+softening. The Red Un, who was like the Chief in that he earned his
+way by pitting his wits against relentless Nature, smiled a
+little--a surface smile, with fear just behind.
+
+"The Captain's boy's my size; I could wear his clothes," he
+suggested.
+
+Now, back in that time when the Chief had kept a woman's picture in
+his breast pocket instead of in a drawer of his desk, there had been
+small furtive hopes, the pride of the Scot to perpetuate his line,
+the desire of a man for a manchild. The Chief had buried all that in
+the desk drawer with the picture; but he had gone overboard in his
+best uniform to rescue a wharf-rat, and he had felt a curious sense
+of comfort when he held the cold little figure in his arms and was
+hauled on deck, sputtering dirty river water and broad Scotch, as
+was his way when excited.
+
+"And where ha' ye been skulking since yesterday?" he demanded.
+
+"In the bed where I was put till last night. This morning early----"
+he hesitated.
+
+"Don't lie! Where were ye?"
+
+"In a passenger's room, under a bed. When the passengers came aboard
+I had to get out."
+
+"How did ye get here?"
+
+This met with silence. Quite suddenly the Chief recognised the
+connivance of the crew, perhaps, or of a kindly stewardess.
+
+"Who told you this was my cabin?" A smile this time, rather like the
+Senior Second's when the Chief and he had shaken hands.
+
+"A nigger!" he said. "A coloured fella in a white suit."
+
+There was not a darky on the boat. The Red Un, whose code was the
+truth when possible, but any lie to save a friend--and that's the
+code of a gentleman--sat, defiantly hopeful, arranging the towel to
+cover as much as possible of his small person.
+
+"You're lying! Do you know what we do with liars on this ship? We
+throw them overboard!"
+
+"Then I'm thinking," responded the Turkish towel, "that you'll be
+needing another Chief Engineer before long!"
+
+Now, as it happened, the Chief had no boy that trip. The previous
+one had been adopted after the last trip by a childless couple who
+had liked the shape of his nose and the way his eyelashes curled on
+his cheek. The Chief looked at the Red Un; it was perfectly clear
+that no one would ever adopt him for the shape of his nose, and he
+apparently lacked lashes entirely. He rose and took a bathrobe from
+a hook on the door.
+
+"Here," he said; "cover your legs wi' that, and say a prayer if ye'
+know wan. The Captain's a verra hard man wi' stowaways."
+
+The Captain, however, who was a gentleman and a navigator and had a
+sense of humour also, was not hard with the Red Un. It being
+impracticable to take the boy to him, the great man made a special
+visit to the boy. The Red Un, in the Chief's bathrobe, sat on a
+chair, with his feet about four inches from the floor, and returned
+the Captain's glare with wide blue eyes.
+
+"Is there any reason, young man, why I shouldn't order you to the
+lockup for the balance of this voyage?" the Captain demanded, extra
+grim, and trying not to smile.
+
+"Well," said the Red Un, wiggling his legs nervously, "you'd have to
+feed me, wouldn't you? And I might as well work for my keep."
+
+This being a fundamental truth on which most economics and all
+governments are founded, and the Captain having a boy of his own at
+home, he gave a grudging consent, for the sake of discipline, to the
+Red Un's working for his keep as the Chief's boy, and left. Outside
+the door he paused.
+
+"The little devil's starved," he said. "Put some meat on those
+ribs, Chief, and--be a bit easy with him!"
+
+This last was facetious, the Chief being known to have the heart of
+a child.
+
+So the Red Un went on the payroll of the line, and requisition was
+made on the storekeeper for the short-tailed coat and the long
+trousers, and on the barber for a hair-cut. And in some curious way
+the Red Un and the Chief hit it off. It might have been a matter of
+red blood or of indomitable spirit.
+
+Spirit enough and to spare had the Red Un. On the trip out he had
+licked the Captain's boy and the Purser's boy; on the incoming trip
+he had lashed the Doctor's boy to his triumphant mast, and only
+three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting
+hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his
+attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.
+
+He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every
+corner of the ship--called the engines by name and the men by
+epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior
+Second's best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the
+eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge.
+
+"Aw, gwan!" he said to the Captain's boy. "Where'd you and your Old
+Man be but for us? In a blasted steel tank, floating about on the
+bloomin' sea! What's a ship without insides?"
+
+The Captain's boy, who was fourteen, and kept his bath sponge in a
+rubber bag, and shaved now and then with the Captain's razor,
+retorted in kind.
+
+"You fellows below think you're the whole bally ship!" he said
+loftily. "Insides is all right--we need 'em in our business. But
+what'd your steel tank do, with the engines goin', if she
+wasn't bein' navigated? Steamin' in circles, like a tinklin'
+merry-go-round!"
+
+It was some seconds after this that the Purser, a well-intentioned
+but interfering gentleman with a beard, received the kick that put
+him in dry dock for two days.
+
+
+II
+
+They were three days out of New York on the Red Un's second round
+trip when the Second, still playing the game and almost despairing,
+made a strategic move. The Red Un was laying out the Chief's
+luncheon on his desk--a clean napkin for a cloth; a glass; silver; a
+plate; and the menu from the first-cabin dining saloon. The menu was
+propped against a framed verse:
+
+          _But I ha' lived and I ha' worked!
+           All thanks to Thee, Most High._
+
+And as he placed the menu, the Red Un repeated the words from
+McAndrew's hymn. It had rather got him at first; it was a new
+philosophy of life. To give thanks for life was understandable, even
+if unnecessary. But thanks for work! There was another framed card
+above the desk, more within the Red Un's ken: "Cable crossing! Do
+not anchor here!"
+
+The card worked well with the first class, resting in the Chief's
+cabin after the arduous labours of seeing the engines.
+
+The Chief was below, flat on his back in a manhole looking for a
+staccato note that did not belong in his trained and orderly chorus.
+There was grease in his sandy hair, and the cranks were only a few
+inches from his nose. By opening the door the Red Un was able to
+command the cylinder tops, far below, and the fiddley, which is the
+roof of hell or a steel grating over the cylinders to walk
+on--depending on whether one is used to it or not. The Chief was
+naturally not in sight.
+
+This gave the Red Un two minutes' leeway--two minutes for
+exploration. A drawer in the desk, always heretofore locked, was
+unfastened--that is, the bolt had been shot before the drawer was
+entirely closed. The Red Un was jealous of that drawer. In two
+voyages he had learned most of the Chief's history and, lacking one
+of his own, had appropriated it to himself. Thus it was not unusual
+for him to remark casually, as he stood behind the Chief's chair at
+dinner: "We'd better send this here postcard to Cousin Willie, at
+Edinburgh."
+
+"Ou-ay!" the Chief would agree, and tear off the postcard of the
+ship that topped each day's menu; but, so far, all hints as to this
+one drawer had been futile; it remained the one barrier to their
+perfect confidence, the fly in the ointment of the Red Un's content.
+
+Now, at last---- Below, a drop of grease in the Chief's eye set him
+wiping and cursing; over his head hammered, banged and lunged his
+great babies; in the stokehole a gaunt and grimy creature, yclept
+the Junior Second, stewed in his own sweat and yelled for steam.
+
+The Red Un opened the drawed quickly and thrust in a hand. At first
+he thought it was empty, working as he did by touch, his eye on the
+door. Then he found a disappointing something--the lid of a
+cigar-box! Under that was a photograph. Here was luck! Had the Red
+Un known it, he had found the only two secrets in his Chief's open
+life. But the picture was disappointing--a snapshot of a young
+woman, rather slim, with the face obscured by a tennis racket,
+obviously thrust into the picture at the psychological moment. Poor
+spoil this--a cigar-box lid and a girl without a face! However,
+marred as it was, it clearly meant something to the Chief. For on
+its reverse side was another stanza from McAndrew's hymn:
+
+          _Ye know how hard an idol dies,
+             An' what that meant to me--
+           E'en tak' it for a sacrifice
+             Acceptable to Thee._
+
+The Red Un thrust it back into the drawer, with the lid. If she was
+dead what did it matter? He was a literal youth--so far, his own
+words had proved sufficient for his thoughts; it is after thirty
+that a man finds his emotions bigger than his power of expressing
+them, and turns to those that have the gift. The Chief was over
+thirty.
+
+It was as he shut the drawer that he realised he was not alone. The
+alley door was open and in it stood the Senior Second. The Red Un
+eyed him unpleasantly.
+
+"Sneaking!" said the Second.
+
+"None of your blamed business!" replied the Red Un.
+
+The Second, who was really an agreeable person, with a sense of
+humour, smiled. He rather liked the Red Un.
+
+"Do you know, William," he observed--William was the Red Un's
+name--"I'd be willing to offer two shillings for an itemised
+account of what's in that drawer?"
+
+"Fill it with shillings," boasted the Red Un, "and I'll not tell
+you."
+
+"Three?" said the Second cheerfully.
+
+"No."
+
+"Four?"
+
+"Why don't you look yourself?"
+
+"Just between gentlemen, that isn't done, young man. But if you
+volunteered the information, and I saw fit to make you a present of,
+say, a pipe, with a box of tobacco----"
+
+"What do you want to know for?"
+
+"I guess you know."
+
+The Red Un knew quite well. The Chief and the two Seconds were still
+playing their game, and the Chief was still winning; but even the
+Red Un did not know how the Chief won--and as for the two Seconds
+and the Third and the Fourth, they were quite stumped.
+
+This was the game: In bad weather, when the ports are closed and
+first-class passengers are yapping for air, it is the province of
+the engine room to see that they get it. An auxiliary engine pumps
+cubic feet of atmosphere into every cabin through a series of
+airtrunks.
+
+So far so good. But auxiliaries take steam; and it is exceedingly
+galling to a Junior or Senior, wagering more than he can afford on
+the run in his watch, to have to turn valuable steam to
+auxiliaries--"So that a lot of blooming nuts may smoke in their
+bunks!" as the Third put it.
+
+The first move in the game is the Chief's, who goes to bed and
+presumably to sleep. After that it's the engine-room move, which
+gives the first class time to settle down and then shuts off the
+airpumps. Now there is no noise about shutting off the air in the
+trunks. It flows or it does not flow. The game is to see whether the
+Chief wakens when the air stops or does not. So far he had always
+wakened.
+
+It was uncanny. It was worse than that--it was damnable! Did not the
+Old Man sleep at all?--not that he was old, but every Chief is the
+Old Man behind his back. Everything being serene, and the
+engine-room clock marking twelve-thirty, one of the Seconds would
+shut off the air very gradually; the auxiliary would slow down,
+wheeze, pant and die--and within two seconds the Chief's bell would
+ring and an angry voice over the telephone demand what the several
+kinds of perdition had happened to the air! Another trick in the
+game to the Chief!
+
+It had gone past joking now: had moved up from the uncanny to the
+impossible, from the impossible to the enraging. Surreptitious
+search of the Chief's room had shown nothing but the one locked
+drawer. They had taken advantage of the Chief's being laid up in
+Antwerp with a boil on his neck to sound the cabin for hidden wires.
+They had asked the ship's doctor anxiously how long a man could do
+without sleep. The doctor had quoted Napoleon.
+
+       *       *       *       *        *
+
+"If at any time," observed the Second pleasantly, "you would like
+that cigarette case the barber is selling, you know how to get it."
+
+"Thanks, old man," said the Red Un loftily, with his eye on the
+wall.
+
+The Second took a step forward and thought better of it.
+
+"Better think about it!"
+
+"I was thinking of something else," said the Red Un, still staring
+at the wall. The Second followed his eye. The Red Un was gazing
+intently at the sign which said: "Cable crossing! Do not anchor
+here!"
+
+As the Second slammed out, the Chief crawled from his manhole and
+struggled out of his greasy overalls. Except for his face, he was
+quite tidy. He ran an eye down the port tunnel, where the shaft
+revolved so swiftly that it seemed to be standing still, to where at
+the after end came the racing of the screw as it lifted, bearded
+with scud, out of the water.
+
+"It looks like weather to-night," he observed, with a twinkle, to
+the Fourth. "There'll aye be air wanted." But the Fourth was gazing
+at a steam gauge.
+
+
+III
+
+The Red Un's story, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts--his
+temptation, his fall and his redemption. All lives are so divided: a
+step back; a plunge; and then, in desperation and despair, a little
+climb up God's ladder.
+
+Seven days the liner lay in New York--seven days of early autumn
+heat, of blistering decks, of drunken and deserting trimmers, of
+creaking gear and grime of coal-dust. The cabin which held the Red
+Un and the Purser's boy was breathless. On Sunday the four ship's
+boys went to Coney Island and lay in the surf half the afternoon.
+The bliss of the water on their thin young legs and scrawny bodies
+was Heaven. They did not swim; they lay inert, letting the waves
+move them about, and out of the depths of a deep content making
+caustic comments about the human form as revealed by the relentless
+sea.
+
+"That's a pippin!" they would say; or, "My aunt! looks at his legs!"
+They voiced their opinions audibly and were ready to back them up
+with flight or fight.
+
+It was there that the Red Un saw the little girl. She had come from
+a machine, and her mother stood near. She was not a Coney Islander.
+She was first-cabin certainly--silk stockings on her thin ankles,
+sheer white frock; no jewelry. She took a snapshot of the four
+boys--to their discomfiture--and walked away while they were still
+writhing.
+
+"That for mine!" said the Red Un in one of his rare enthusiasms.
+
+They had supper--a sandwich and a glass of beer; they would have
+preferred pop, but what deep-water man on shore drinks pop?--and
+made their way back to the ship by moonlight. The Red Un was terse
+in his speech on the car: mostly he ate peanuts abstractedly. If he
+evolved any clear idea out of the chaos of his mind it was to wish
+she had snapped him in his uniform with the brass buttons.
+
+The heat continued; the men in the stokehole, keeping up only enough
+steam for the dynamos and donkey engines, took turns under the
+ventilators or crawled up to the boatdeck at dusk, too exhausted to
+dress and go ashore. The swimmers were overboard in the cool river
+with the first shadows of night; the Quartermaster, so old that he
+dyed his hair for fear he'd be superannuated, lowered his lean body
+hand over hand down a rope and sat by the hour on a stringpiece of
+the dock, with the water laving his hairy and tattooed old breast.
+
+The Red Un was forbidden the river. To be honest, he was rather
+relieved--not twice does a man dare the river god, having once been
+crowned with his slime and water-weed. When the boy grew very hot
+he slipped into a second-cabin shower, and stood for luxurious
+minutes with streams running off his nose and the ends of his
+fingers and splashing about his bony ankles.
+
+Then, one night, some of the men took as many passengers' lifebelts
+and went in. The immediate result was fun combined with safety; the
+secondary result was placards over the ship and the dock, forbidding
+the use of the ship's lifebelts by the crew.
+
+From that moment the Red Un was possessed for the river and a
+lifebelt. So were the other three. The signs were responsible.
+Permitted, a ship's lifebelt was a subterfuge of the cowardly,
+white-livered skunks who were afraid of a little water; forbidden, a
+ship's lifebelt took on the qualities of enemy's property--to be
+reconnoitred, assaulted, captured and turned to personal advantage.
+
+That very night, then, four small bodies, each naked save for a
+lifebelt, barrelshaped and extending from breast almost to knee,
+slipped over the side of the ship with awkward splashes and
+proceeded to disport themselves in the river. Scolding tugs sent
+waves for them to ride; ferries crawled like gigantic bugs with a
+hundred staring eyes. They found the Quartermaster on a stringpiece
+immersed to the neck and smoking his pipe, and surrounded him--four
+small, shouting imps, floating barrels with splashing hands and
+kicking feet.
+
+"Gwan, ye little devils!" said the Quartermaster, clutching the
+stringpiece and looking about in the gloom for a weapon. The Red Un,
+quite safe and audacious in his cork jacket, turned over on his back
+and kicked.
+
+"Gwan yerself, Methuselah!" he sang.
+
+They stole the old man's pipe and passed it from mouth to mouth;
+they engaged him in innocent converse while one of them pinched his
+bare old toe under water, crab-fashion. And at last they prepared to
+shin up the rope again and sleep the sleep of the young, the
+innocent and the refreshed.
+
+The Chief was leaning over the rail, just above, smoking!
+
+He leaned against the rail and smoked for three hours! Eight eyes,
+watching him from below, failed to find anything in his face but
+contemplation; eight hands puckered like a washerwoman's; eight feet
+turned from medium to clean, from clean to bleached--and still the
+Chief smoked on. He watched the scolding tugs and the ferryboats
+that crawled over the top of the water; he stood in rapt
+contemplation of the electric signs in Jersey, while the ship's
+bells marked the passage of time to eternity, while the
+Quartermaster slept in his bed, while the odours of the river stank
+in their nostrils and the pressure of the ship's lifebelts weighed
+like lead on their clammy bodies.
+
+At eight bells--which is midnight--the Chief emptied his
+twenty-fourth pipe over the rail and smiled into the gloom beneath.
+
+"Ye'll better be coming up," he remarked pleasantly. "I'm for
+turning in mysel'."
+
+He wandered away; none of the watch was near. The ship was dark,
+save for her riding lights. Hand over puckered hand they struggled
+up and wriggled out of the belts; stark naked they ducked through
+passageways and alleys, and stowed their damp and cringing forms
+between sheets.
+
+The Red Un served the Chief's breakfast the next morning very
+carefully. The Chief's cantaloupe was iced; his kipper covered with
+a hot plate; the morning paper propped against McAndrew's hymn. The
+Red Un looked very clean and rather bleached.
+
+The Chief was busy; he read the night reports, which did not amount
+to much, the well soundings, and a letter from a man offering to
+show him how to increase the efficiency of his engines fifty per
+cent, and another offering him a rake-off on a new lubricant.
+
+Outwardly the Chief was calm--even cold. Inwardly he was rather
+uncomfortable: he could feel two blue eyes fixed on his back and
+remembered the day he had pulled them out of the river, and how
+fixed and desperate they were then. But what was it McAndrew said?
+"Law, order, duty an' restraint, obedience, discipline!"
+
+Besides, if the boys were going to run off with the belts some
+damned first-class passenger was likely to get a cabin minus a belt
+and might write to the management. The line had had bad luck; it did
+not want another black eye. He cleared his throat; the Red Un
+dropped a fork.
+
+"That sort of thing last night won't do, William."
+
+"N-No, sir."
+
+"Ye had seen the signs, of course?"
+
+"Yes, sir." The Red Un never lied to the Chief; it was useless.
+
+The Chief toyed with his kipper.
+
+"Ye'll understand I'd ha' preferred dealin' with the matter mysel';
+but it's--gone up higher."
+
+The Quartermaster, of course! The Chief rose and pretended to glance
+over the well soundings.
+
+"The four of ye will meet me in the Captain's room in fifteen
+minutes," he observed casually.
+
+The Captain was feeding his cat when the Red Un got there. The four
+boys lined up uncomfortably; all of them looked clean, subdued,
+apprehensive. If they were to be locked up in this sort of weather,
+and only three days to sailing time--even a fine would be better.
+The Captain stroked the cat and eyed them.
+
+"Well," he said curtly, "what have you four young imps been up to
+now?"
+
+The four young imps stood panicky. They looked as innocent as choir
+boys. The cat, eating her kipper, wheezed.
+
+"Please, sir," said the Captain's boy solicitously, "Peter has
+something in his throat."
+
+"Perhaps it's a ship's lifebelt," said the Captain grimly, and
+caught the Chief's eye.
+
+The line palpitated; under cover of its confusion the Chief,
+standing in the doorway with folded arms, winked swiftly at the
+Captain; the next moment he was more dour than ever.
+
+"You are four upsetters of discipline," said the Captain, suddenly
+pounding the table. "You four young monkeys have got the crew by the
+ears, and I'm sick of it! Which one of you put the fish in Mrs.
+Schmidt's bed?"
+
+Mrs. Schmidt was a stewardess. The Red Un stepped forward.
+
+"Who turned the deckhose into the Purser's cabin night before last?"
+
+"Please," said the Doctor's boy pallidly, "I made a mistake in the
+room. I thought----"
+
+"Who," shouted the Captain, banging again, "cut the Quartermaster's
+rope two nights ago and left him sitting under the dock for four
+hours?"
+
+The Purser's boy this time, white to the lips! Fresh panic seized
+them; it could hardly be mere arrest if he knew all this; he might
+order them hanged from a yardarm or shot at sunrise. He looked like
+the latter. The Red Un glanced at the Chief, who looked apprehensive
+also, as if the thing was going too far. The Captain may have read
+their thoughts, for he said:
+
+"You're limbs of Satan, all of you, and hanging's too good for you.
+What do you say, Chief? How can we make these young scamps lessons
+in discipline to the crew?"
+
+Everybody breathed again and looked at the Chief--who stood tall and
+sandy and rather young to be a Chief--in the doorway.
+
+"Eh, mon," he said, and smiled, "I'm aye a bit severe. Don't ask me
+to punish the bairns."
+
+The Captain sniffed.
+
+"Severe!" he observed. "You Scots are hard in the head, but soft in
+the disposition. Come, Chief--shall they walk the plank?"
+
+"Good deescipline," assented the Chief, "but it would leave us a bit
+shorthanded."
+
+"True," said the Captain gloomily.
+
+"I was thinkin'," remarked the Chief diffidently--one hates to think
+before the Captain; that's always supposed to be his job.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"That we could make a verra fine example of them and still retain
+their services. Ha' ye, by chance, seen a crow hangin' head down in
+the field, a warnin' to other mischief-makers?"
+
+"Ou-ay!" said the Captain, who had a Scotch mother. The line wavered
+again; the Captain's boy, who pulled his fingers when he was
+excited, cracked three knuckles.
+
+"It would be good deescipline," continued the Chief, "to stand the
+four o' them in ship's belt at the gangway, say for an hour, morning
+and evening--clad, ye ken, as they were during the said
+infreengements."
+
+"You're a great man, Chief!" said the Captain. "You hear that,
+lads'?"
+
+"With--with no trousers'?" gasped the Doctor's boy.
+
+"If you wore trousers last night. If not----"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The thing was done that morning. Four small boys, clad only in
+ship's belts, above which rose four sheepish heads and freckled
+faces, below which shifted and wriggled eight bare legs, stood in
+line at the gangway and suffered agonies of humiliation at the hands
+of crew and dockmen, grinning customs inspectors, coalpassers, and a
+newspaper photographer hunting a human-interest bit for a Sunday
+paper. The cooks came up from below and peeped out at them; the
+ship's cat took up a position in line and came out in the Sunday
+edition as "a fellow conspirator."
+
+The Red Un, owing to an early training that had considered clothing
+desirable rather than essential, was not vitally concerned. The
+Quartermaster had charge of the line; he had drawn a mark with chalk
+along the deck, and he kept their toes to it by marching up and down
+in front of them with a broomhandle over his shoulder.
+
+"Toe up, you little varmints!" he would snap. "God knows I'd be glad
+to get a rap at you--keeping an old man down in the water half the
+night! Toe up!"
+
+Whereupon, aiming an unlucky blow at the Purser's boy, he hit the
+Captain's cat. The line snickered.
+
+It was just after that the Red Un, surmising a snap by the
+photographer on the dock and thwarting it by putting his thumb to
+his nose, received the shock of his small life. The little girl from
+Coney Island, followed by her mother, was on the pier--was showing
+every evidence of coming up the gangway to where he stood. Was
+coming! Panic seized the Red Un--panic winged with flight. He
+turned--to face the Chief. Appeal sprang to the Red Un's lips.
+
+"Please!" he gasped. "I'm sick, sick as h--, sick as a dog, Chief.
+I've got a pain in my chest--I----"
+
+Curiously enough, the Chief did not answer or even hear. He, too,
+was looking at the girl on the gangway and at her mother. The next
+moment the Chief was in full flight, ignominious flight, his face,
+bleached with the heat of the engine room and the stokehole, set as
+no emergency of broken shaft or flying gear had ever seen it. Broken
+shaft indeed! A man's life may be a broken shaft.
+
+The woman and the girl came up the gangway, exidently to inspect
+staterooms. The Quartermaster had rallied the Red Un back to the
+line and stood before him, brandishing his broomhandle. Black fury
+was in the boy's eye; hate had written herself on his soul. His
+Chief had ignored his appeal--had left him to his degradation--had
+deserted him.
+
+The girl saw the line, started, blushed, recognised the Red Un--and
+laughed!
+
+
+IV
+
+The great voyage began--began with the band playing and much waving
+of flags and display of handkerchiefs; began with the girl and her
+mother on board; began with the Chief eating his heart out over coal
+and oil vouchers and well soundings and other things; began with the
+Red Un in a new celluloid collar, lying awake at night to hate his
+master, adding up his injury each day to greater magnitude.
+
+The voyage began. The gong rang from the bridge. Stand By! said the
+twin dials. Half Ahead! Full Ahead! Full Ahead! Man's wits once more
+against the upreaching of the sea! The Chief, who knew that
+somewhere above was his woman and her child, which was not his,
+stood under a ventilator and said the few devout words with which he
+commenced each voyage:
+
+"With Thy help!" And then, snapping his watch: "Three minutes past
+ten!"
+
+The chief engineer of a liner is always a gentleman and frequently a
+Christian. He knows, you see, how much his engines can do and how
+little. It is not his engines alone that conquer the sea, nor his
+engines plus his own mother wit. It is engines plus wit plus _x_,
+and the _x_ is God's mercy. Being responsible for two quantities out
+of the three of the equation, he prays--if he does--with an eye on a
+gauge and an ear open for a cylinder knock.
+
+There was gossip in the engineers' mess those next days: the Old Man
+was going to pieces. A man could stand so many years of the strain
+and then where was he? In a land berth, growing fat and paunchy, and
+eating his heart out for the sea, or---- The sea got him one way or
+another!
+
+The Senior Second stood out for the Chief.
+
+"Wrong with him? There's nothing wrong with him," he declared. "If
+he was any more on the job than he is I'd resign. He's on the job
+twenty-four hours a day, nights included."
+
+There was a laugh at this; the mess was on to the game. Most of them
+were playing it.
+
+So now we have the Red Un looking for revenge and in idle moments
+lurking about the decks where the girl played. He washed his neck
+under his collar those days.
+
+And we have the Chief fretting over his engines, subduing drunken
+stokers, quelling the frequent disturbances of Hell Alley, which led
+to the firemen's quarters, eating little and smoking much, devising
+out of his mental disquietude a hundred possible emergencies
+and--keeping away from the passengers. The Junior Second took down
+the two parties who came to see the engine room and gave them
+lemonade when they came up. The little girl's mother came with the
+second party and neither squealed nor asked questions--only at the
+door into the stokeholes she stood a moment with dilated eyes. She
+was a little woman, still slim, rather tragic. She laid a hand on
+the Junior's arm.
+
+"The--the engineers do not go in there, do they?"
+
+"Yes, madam. We stand four-hour watches. That is the Senior Second
+Engineer on that pile of cinders."
+
+The Senior Second was entirely black, except for his teeth and the
+whites of his eyes. There was a little trouble in a coalbunker;
+they had just discovered it. There would be no visitors after this
+until the trouble was over.
+
+The girl's mother said nothing more. The Junior Second led them
+around, helping a pretty young woman about and explaining to her.
+
+"This," he said, smiling at the girl, "is a pump the men have
+nicknamed Marguerite, because she takes most of one man's time and
+is always giving trouble."
+
+The young woman tossed her head.
+
+"Perhaps she would do better if she were left alone," she suggested.
+
+The girl's mother said nothing, but, before she left, she took one
+long look about the engine room. In some such bedlam of noise and
+heat _he_ spent his life. She was wrong, of course, to pity him; one
+need not measure labour by its conditions or by its cost, but by the
+joy of achievement. The woman saw the engines--sinister, menacing,
+frightful; the man saw power that answered to his hand--conquest,
+victory. The beat that was uproar to her ears was as the throbbing
+of his own heart.
+
+It was after they had gone that the Chief emerged from the forward
+stokehole where the trouble was. He had not seen her; she would not
+have known him, probably, had they met face to face. He was quite
+black and the light of battle gleamed in his eyes.
+
+They fixed the trouble somehow. It was fire in a coalbunker, one of
+the minor exigencies. Fire requiring air they smothered it one way
+and another. It did not spread, but it did not quite die. And each
+day's run was better than the day before.
+
+The weather was good. The steerage, hanging over the bow, saw far
+below the undercurling spray, white under dark blue--the blue
+growing paler, paler still, until the white drops burst to the top
+and danced free in the sun. A Greek, going home to Crete to marry a
+wife, made all day long tiny boats of coloured paper, weighted with
+corks, and sailed them down into the sea.
+
+"They shall carry back to America my farewells!" he said, smiling.
+"This to Pappas, the bootblack, who is my friend. This to a girl
+back in America, with eyes--behold that darkest blue, my children;
+so are her eyes! And this black one to my sister, who has lost a
+child."
+
+The first class watched the spray also--as it rose to the lip of a
+glass.
+
+Now at last it seemed they would break a record. Then rain set in,
+without enough wind to make a sea, but requiring the starboard ports
+to be closed. The Senior Second, going on duty at midnight that
+night, found his Junior railing at fate and the airpumps going.
+
+"Shut 'em off!" said the Senior Second furiously.
+
+"Shut 'em off yourself. I've tried it twice."
+
+The Senior Second gave a lever a vicious tug and the pump stopped.
+Before it had quite lapsed into inertia the Chief's bell rang.
+
+"Can you beat it?" demanded the Junior sulkily. "The old fox!"
+
+The Senior cursed. Then he turned abruptly and climbed the steel
+ladder he had just descended. The Junior, who was anticipating a
+shower and bed, stared after him.
+
+The Senior thought quickly--that was why he was a Senior. He found
+the Red Un's cabin and hammered at the door. Then, finding it was
+not locked, he walked in. The Red Un lay perched aloft; the shirt of
+his small pajamas had worked up about his neck and his thin torso
+lay bare. In one hand he clutched the dead end of a cigarette. The
+Senior wakened him by running a forefinger down his ribs, much as a
+boy runs a stick along a paling fence.
+
+"Wha' ish it?" demanded the Red Un in sleepy soprano. And then "Wha'
+d'ye want?" in bass. His voice was changing; he sounded like two
+people in animated discussion most of the time.
+
+"You boys want to earn a sovereign?"
+
+The Purser's boy, who had refused to rouse to this point, sat up in
+bed.
+
+"Whaffor?" he asked.
+
+"Get the Chief here some way. You"--to the Purser's boy--"go and
+tell him the Red Un's ill and asking for him. You"--to the Red
+Un--"double up; cry; do something. Start him off for the
+doctor--anything, so you keep him ten minutes or so!"
+
+The Red Un was still drowsy, and between sleeping and waking we are
+what we are.
+
+"I won't do it!"
+
+The Senior Second held out a gold sovereign on his palm.
+
+"Don't be a bally little ass!" he said.
+
+The Red Un, waking full, now remembered that he hated the Chief; for
+fear he did not hate him enough, he recalled the lifebelt, and his
+legs, and the girl laughing.
+
+"All right!" he said. "Gwan, Pimples! What'll I have?
+Appendiceetis?"
+
+"Have a toothache," snapped the Senior Second. "Tear off a few
+yells--anything to keep him!"
+
+It worked rather well; plots have a way of being successful in
+direct proportion to their iniquity. Beneficent plots, like loving
+relatives dressed as Santa Claus, frequently go wrong; while it has
+been shown that the leakiest sort of scheme to wreck a bank will go
+through with the band playing.
+
+The Chief came and found the Red Un in agony, holding his jaw. Owing
+to the fact that he lay far back in an upper bunk, it took time to
+drag him into the light. It took more time to get his mouth open;
+once open, the Red Un pointed to a snag that should have given him
+trouble if it didn't, and set up a fresh outcry.
+
+Not until long after could the Red Un recall without shame his share
+in that night's work--recall the Chief, stubby hair erect, kind blue
+eyes searching anxiously for the offending tooth. Recall it? Would
+he ever forget the arm the Chief put about him, and him: "Ou-ay!
+laddie; it's a weeked snag!"
+
+The Chief, to whom God had denied a son of his flesh, had taken Red
+Un to his heart, you see--fatherless wharf-rat and childless
+engineer; the man acting on the dour Scot principle of chastening
+whomsoever he loveth, and the boy cherishing a hate that was really
+only hurt love.
+
+And as the Chief, who had dragged the Red Un out of eternity and was
+not minded to see him die of a toothache, took him back to his cabin
+the pain grew better, ceased, turned to fright. The ten minutes or
+so were over and what would they find? The Chief opened the door; he
+had in mind a drop of whisky out of the flask he never touched on a
+trip--whisky might help the tooth.
+
+On the threshold he seemed to scent something amiss. He glanced at
+the ceiling over his bunk, where the airtrunk lay, and then--he
+looked at the boy. He stooped down and put a hand on the boy's head,
+turning it to the light.
+
+"Tell me now, lad," he said quietly, "did ye or did ye no ha' the
+toothache?"
+
+"It's better now," sullenly.
+
+"Did ye or did ye no?"
+
+"No."
+
+The Chief turned the boy about and pushed him through the doorway
+into outer darkness. He said nothing. Down to his very depths he was
+hurt. To have lost the game was something; but it was more than
+that. Had he been a man of words he might have said that once again
+a creature he loved had turned on him to his injury. Being a Scot
+and a man of few words he merely said he was damned, and crawled
+back into bed.
+
+The game? Well, that was simple enough. Directly over his pillow, in
+the white-painted airtrunk, was a brass plate, fastened with four
+screws. In case of anything wrong with the ventilator the plate
+could be taken off for purposes of investigation.
+
+The Chief's scheme had been simplicity itself--so easy that the
+Seconds, searching for concealed wires and hidden alarm bells, had
+never thought of it. On nights when the air must be pumped, and
+officious Seconds were only waiting the Chief's first sleep to shut
+off steam and turn it back to the main engines, the Chief unlocked
+the bolted drawer in his desk. First he took out the woman's picture
+and gazed at it; quite frequently he read the words on the
+back--written out of a sore heart, be sure. And then he took out
+the cigar-box lid.
+
+When he had unscrewed the brass plate over his head he replaced it
+with the lid of the cigar-box. So long as the pumps in the engine
+room kept the air moving, the lid stayed up by suction.
+
+When the air stopped the lid fell down on his head; he roused enough
+to press a signal button and, as the air started viciously, to
+replace the lid. Then, off to the sleep of the just and the crafty
+again. And so on _ad infinitum_.
+
+Of course the game was not over because it was discovered and the
+lid gone. There would be other lids. But the snap, the joy, was gone
+out of it. It would never again be the same, and the worst of all
+was the manner of the betrayal.
+
+He slept but little the remainder of the night; and, because unrest
+travels best from soul to soul at night, when the crowding emotions
+of the day give it place, the woman slept little also. She was
+thinking of the entrance to the stokehole, where one crouched under
+the bellies of furnaces, and where the engineer on duty stood on a
+pile of hot cinders. Toward morning her room grew very close: the
+air from the ventilator seemed to have ceased.
+
+Far down in the ship, in a breathless little cabin far aft, the Red
+Un kicked the Purser's boy and cried himself to sleep.
+
+
+V
+
+The old ship made a record the next night that lifted the day's run
+to four hundred and twenty. She was not a greyhound, you see.
+Generally speaking, she was a nine-day boat. She averaged well under
+four hundred miles. The fast boats went by her and slid over the
+edge of the sea, throwing her bits of news by wireless over a
+shoulder, so to speak.
+
+The little girl's mother was not a good sailor. She sat almost all
+day in a steamer chair, reading or looking out over the rail. Each
+day she tore off the postal from the top of her menu and sent it to
+the girl's father. She missed him more than she had expected. He had
+become a habit; he was solid, dependable, loyal. He had never heard
+of the Chief.
+
+"Dear Daddy," she would write: "Having a splendid voyage so far, but
+wish you were here. The baby is having such a good time--so popular;
+and won two prizes to-day at the sports! With love, Lily."
+
+They were all rather like that. She would drop them in the mailbox,
+with a tug of tenderness for the man who worked at home. Then she
+would go back to her chair and watch the sea, and recall the heat of
+the engine room below, and wonder, wonder----
+
+It had turned warm again; the edges of the horizon were grey and at
+night a low mist lay over the water. Rooms were stifling, humid. The
+Red Un discarded pajamas and slept in his skin. The engine-room
+watch came up white round the lips and sprawled over the boat deck
+without speech. Things were going wrong in the Red Un's small world.
+The Chief hardly spoke to him--was grave and quiet, and ate almost
+nothing. The Red Un hated himself unspeakably and gave his share of
+the sovereign to the Purser's boy.
+
+The Chief was suffering from lack of exercise in the air as well as
+other things. The girl's mother was not sleeping--what with heat and
+the memories the sea had revived. On the fifth night out, while the
+ship slept, these two met on the deck in the darkness--two shadows
+out of the past. The deck was dark, but a ray from a window touched
+his face and she knew him. He had not needed light to know her;
+every line of her was written on his heart, and for him there was no
+one at home to hold in tenderness.
+
+"I think I knew you were here all the time," she said, and held out
+both hands.
+
+The Chief took one and dropped it. She belonged to the person at
+home. He had no thought of forgetting that!
+
+"I saw your name on the passenger list, but I have been very busy."
+He never lapsed into Scotch with her; she had not liked it. "Is
+your husband with you?"
+
+"He could not come just now. I have my daughter."
+
+Her voice fell rather flat. The Chief could not think of anything to
+say. Her child, and not his! He was a one-woman man, you see--and
+this was the woman.
+
+"I have seen her," he said presently. "She's like you, Lily."
+
+That was a wrong move--the Lily; for it gave her courage to put her
+hand on his arm.
+
+"It is so long since we have met," she said wistfully. "Yesterday,
+after I saw the--the place where you lived and--and work----" She
+choked; she was emotional, rather weak. Having made the situation
+she should have let it alone; but, after all, it is not what the
+woman is, but what the man thinks she is.
+
+The Chief stroked her fingers on his sleeve.
+
+"It's not bad, Lily," he said. "It's a man's job. I like it."
+
+"I believe you had forgotten me entirely!"
+
+The Chief winced. "Isn't that the best thing you could wish me?" he
+said.
+
+"Are you happy?"
+
+"'I ha' lived and I ha' worked!'" he quoted sturdily.
+
+Very shortly after that he left her; he made an excuse of being
+needed below and swung off, his head high.
+
+
+VI
+
+They struck the derelict when the mist was thickest, about two that
+morning. The Red Un was thrown out of his berth and landed, stark
+naked, on the floor. The Purser's boy was on the floor, too, in a
+tangle of bedding. There was a sickening silence for a moment,
+followed by the sound of opening doors and feet in the passage.
+There was very little speech. People ran for the decks. The Purser's
+boy ran with them.
+
+The Red Un never thought of the deck. One of the axioms of the
+engine room is that of every man to his post in danger. The Red Un's
+post was with his Chief. His bare feet scorched on the steel ladders
+and the hot floor plates; he had on only his trousers, held up with
+a belt.
+
+The trouble was in the forward stokehole. Water was pouring in from
+the starboard side--was welling up through the floor plates. The
+wound was ghastly, fatal! The smouldering in the bunker had weakened
+resistance there and her necrosed ribs had given away. The Red Un,
+scurrying through the tunnel, was met by a maddened rush of trimmers
+and stokers. He went down under them and came up bruised, bleeding,
+battling for place.
+
+"You skunks!" he blubbered. "You crazy cowards! Come back and help!"
+
+A big stoker stopped and caught the boy's arm.
+
+"You come on!" he gasped. "The whole thing'll go in a minute. She'll
+go down by the head!"
+
+He tried to catch the boy up in his arms, but the Red Un struck him
+on the nose.
+
+"Let me go, you big stiff!" he cried, and kicked himself free.
+
+Not all the men had gone. They were working like fiends. It was up
+to the bulkhead now. If it held--if it only held long enough to get
+the passengers off!
+
+Not an engineer thought of leaving his place, though they knew,
+better even than the deck officers, how mortally the ship was hurt.
+They called to their aid every resource of a business that is
+nothing but emergencies. Engines plus wit, plus the grace of
+God--and the engines were useless. Wits, then, plus Providence. The
+pumps made no impression on the roaring flood; they lifted floor
+plates to strengthen the bulkheads and worked until it was death to
+work longer. Then, fighting for every foot, the little band
+retreated to the after stokehole. Lights were out forward. The Chief
+was the last to escape. He carried an oil lantern, and squeezed
+through the bulkhead door with a wall of water behind him.
+
+The Red Un cried out, but too late. The Chief, blinded by his
+lantern, had stumbled into the pit where a floor plate had been
+lifted. When he found his leg was broken he cried to them to go on
+and leave him, but they got him out somehow and carried him with
+them as they fought and retreated--fought and retreated. He was
+still the Chief; he lay on the floor propped up against something
+and directed the fight. The something he leaned against was the
+strained body of the Red Un, who held him up and sniffled shamefaced
+tears. She was down by the head already and rolling like a dying
+thing. When the water came into the after stokehole they carried the
+Chief into the engine room--the lights were going there.
+
+There had been no panic on deck. There were boats enough and the
+lights gave every one confidence. It was impossible to see the
+lights going and believe the ship doomed. Those who knew felt the
+list of the decks and hurried with the lowering of the boats; the
+ones who saw only the lights wished to go back to their cabins for
+clothing and money.
+
+The woman sat in the Quartermaster's boat, with her daughter in her
+arms, and stared at the ship. The Quartermaster said the engineers
+were still below and took off his cap. In her feeble way the woman
+tried to pray, and found only childish, futile things to say; but in
+her mind there was a great wonder--that they, who had once been life
+each to the other, should part thus, and that now, as ever, the good
+part was hers! The girl looked up into her mother's face.
+
+"The redhaired little boy, mother--do you think he is safe?"
+
+"First off, likely," mumbled the Quartermaster grimly.
+
+All the passengers were off. Under the mist the sea rose and fell
+quietly; the boats and rafts had drawn off to a safe distance. The
+Greek, who had humour as well as imagination, kept up the spirits of
+those about him while he held a child in his arms.
+
+"Shall we," he inquired gravely, "think you--shall we pay extra to
+the company for this excursion?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The battle below had been fought and lost. It was of minutes now.
+The Chief had given the order: "Every one for himself!" Some of the
+men had gone, climbing to outer safety. The two Seconds had refused
+to leave the Chief. All lights were off by that time. The after
+stokehole was flooded and water rolled sickeningly in the
+engine-pits. Each second it seemed the ship must take its fearful
+dive into the quiet sea that so insistently reached up for her.
+With infinite labour the Seconds got the Chief up to the fiddley,
+twenty feet or less out of a hundred, and straight ladders instead
+of a steel staircase. Ten men could not have lifted him without
+gear, and there was not time!
+
+Then, because the rest was hopeless, they left him there, propped
+against the wall, with the lantern beside him. He shook hands with
+them; the Junior was crying; the Senior went last, and after he had
+gone up a little way he turned and came back.
+
+"I can't do it, Chief!" he said. "I'll stick it out with you." But
+the Chief drove him up, with the name of his wife and child. Far up
+the shaft he turned and looked down. The lantern glowed faintly
+below.
+
+The Chief sat alone on his grating. He was faint with pain. The
+blistering cylinders were growing cold; the steel floor beneath was
+awash. More ominous still, as the ship's head sank, came crackings
+and groanings from the engines below. They would fall through at the
+last, ripping out the bulkheads and carrying her down bow first.
+
+Pain had made the Chief rather dull. "'I ha' lived and I ha'
+worked!'" he said several times--and waited for the end. Into his
+stupor came the thought of the woman--and another thought of the
+Red Un. Both of them had sold him out, so to speak; but the woman
+had grown up with his heart and the boy was his by right of
+salvage--only he thought of the woman as he dreamed of her, not as
+he had seen her on the deck. He grew rather confused, after a time,
+and said: "I ha' loved and I ha' worked!"
+
+Just between life and death there comes a time when the fight seems
+a draw, or as if each side, exhausted, had called a truce. There is
+no more struggle, but it is not yet death. The ship lay so. The
+upreaching sea had not conquered. The result was inevitable, but not
+yet. And in the pause the Red Un came back, came crawling down the
+ladder, his indomitable spirit driving his craven little body.
+
+He had got as far as the boat and safety. The gripping devils of
+fear that had followed him up from the engine room still hung to his
+throat; but once on deck, with the silent men who were working
+against time and eternity, he found he could not do it. He was the
+Chief's boy--and the Chief was below and hurt!
+
+The truce still held. As the ship rolled, water washed about the
+foot of the ladder and lapped against the cylinders. The Chief tried
+desperately to drive him up to the deck and failed.
+
+"It's no place for you alone," said the Red Un. His voice had
+lost its occasional soprano note; the Red Un was a grown man.
+"I'm staying!" And after a hesitating moment he put his small,
+frightened paw on the Chief's arm.
+
+It was that, perhaps, that roused the Chief--not love of life, but
+love of the boy. To be drowned like a rat in a hole--that was not so
+bad when one had lived and worked. A man may not die better than
+where he has laboured; but this child, who would die with him rather
+than live alone! The Chief got up on his usable knee.
+
+"I'm thinking, laddie," he said, "we'll go fighting anyhow."
+
+The boy went first, with the lantern. And, painful rung by painful
+rung, the Chief did the impossible, suffering hells as he moved. For
+each foot he gained the Red Un gained a foot--no more. What he would
+not have endured for himself, the Chief suffered for the boy.
+Halfway up, he clung, exhausted.
+
+The boy leaned down and held out his hand.
+
+"I'll pull," he said. "Just hang on to me."
+
+Only once again did he speak during that endless climb in the
+silence of the dying ship, and what he said came in gasps. He was
+pulling indeed.
+
+"About--that airtrunk," he managed to say--"I'm--sorry, sir!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The dawn came up out of the sea, like resurrection. In the
+Quartermaster's boat the woman slept heavily, with tears on her
+cheeks. The Quartermaster looked infinitely old and very tired with
+living.
+
+It was the girl, after all, who spied them--two figures--one inert
+and almost lifeless; one very like a bobbing tomato, but revealing a
+blue face and two desperate eyes above a ship's lifebelt.
+
+The Chief came to an hour or so later and found the woman near, pale
+and tragic, and not so young as he had kept her in his heart. His
+eyes rested on hers a moment; the bitterness was gone, and the ache.
+He had died and lived again, and what was past was past.
+
+"I thought," said the woman tremulously--"all night I thought that
+you----"
+
+The Chief, coming to full consciousness, gave a little cry. His
+eyes, travelling past hers, had happened on a small and languid
+youngster curled up at his feet, asleep. The woman drew back--as
+from an intrusion.
+
+As she watched, the Red Un yawned, stretched and sat up. His eyes
+met the Chief's, and between them passed such a look of
+understanding as made for the two one world, one victory!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Love Stories, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
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