"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.
"d.a.m.n 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 ap.r.o.n.
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 const.i.tutional 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."
G.o.d"S FOOL
I
The great G.o.d 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 G.o.d"s fools, kindly, elemental, simple, as if from His palette the Artist of all had taken one colour instead of many.
The Dummy was G.o.d"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 G.o.d--why should he not know his Father?--there were bra.s.ses 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 bra.s.s plates on the beds. The plates said: "Endowed in perpetuity"--by various leading citizens, to whom G.o.d 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?