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."