"Well, if I were a swell--like you!" she scoffed, "it would take a heap sight more than a drunken man munching pansies and rum and Bible-texts to--to jolt me out of my limousines and steam yachts and Adirondack bungalows!"
Quite against all intention Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth"s clashed together in the irremediable antagonism of caste,--the Plebeian"s scornful impatience with the Aristocrat, equaled only by the Aristocrat"s condescending patience with the Plebeian.
It was no more than right that the Aristocrat should recover her self-possession first. "Never mind about your understanding. Zillah dear," she said softly. "Your hair is the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life!"
Along Zillah Forsyth"s ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red began to show. With much more nonchalance than was really necessary she pointed towards her half-packed trunk.
"It wasn"t--Sunday school--I was coming home from--when I got my motto!"
she remarked dryly, with a wink at no one in particular. "And, so far as I know," she proceeded with increasing sarcasm, "the man who inspired my n.o.ble life was not in any way--particularly addicted to the use of alcoholic beverages!" As though her collar was suddenly too tight she rammed her finger down between her stiff white neck-band and her soft white throat. "He was a--New York doctor!" she hastened somewhat airily to explain. "Gee! But he was a swell! And he was spending his summer holiday up in the same Maine town where I was tending soda fountain.
And he used to drop into the drug-store, nights, after cigars and things. And he used to tell me stories about the drugs and things, sitting up there on the counter swinging his legs and pointing out this and that,--quinine, ipecac, opium, hasheesh,--all the silly patent medicines, every sloppy soothing syrup! Lordy! He knew "em as though they were people! Where they come from! Where they"re going to! Yarns about the tropics that would kink the hair along the nape of your neck!
Jokes about your own town"s soup-kettle pharmacology that would make you yell for joy! Gee! But the things that man had seen and known! Gee! But the things that man could make you see and know! And he had an automobile," she confided proudly. "It was one of those billion dollar French cars. And I lived just round the corner from the drug-store. But we used to ride home by way of--New Hampshire!"
Almost imperceptibly her breath began to quicken. "Gee! Those nights!"
she muttered. "Rain or shine, moon or thunder,--tearing down those country roads at forty miles an hour, singing, hollering, whispering!
It was him that taught me to do my hair like this--instead of all the cheap rats and pompadours every other kid in town was wearing," she a.s.serted, quite irrelevantly; then stopped with a quick, furtive glance of suspicion towards both her listeners and mouthed her way delicately back to the beginning of her sentence again. "It was _he_ that taught me to do my hair like this," she repeated with the faintest possible suggestion of hauteur.
For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her cheek a narrow streak of red began to show again.
"And he went away very sudden at the last," she finished hurriedly. "It seems he was married all the time." Blandly she turned her wonderful face to the caressing light. "And--I hope he goes to h.e.l.l!" she added perfectly simply.
With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene Churchill reached out an immediate conscientious hand to her.
"Oh, Zillah!" she began. "Oh, poor Zillah dear! I"m so--sorry! I"m so--"
Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah Forsyth ignored the proffered hand.
"I don"t know what particular call you"ve got to be sorry for me, Helene Churchill," she drawled languidly. "I"ve got my character, same as you"ve got yours. And just about nine times as many good looks. And when it comes to nursing--" Like an alto song pierced suddenly by one shrill treble note, the girl"s immobile face sharpened transiently with a single jagged flash of emotion. "And when it comes to nursing? Ha!
Helene Churchill! You can lead your cla.s.s all you want to with your silk-lined manners and your fuddy-duddy book-talk! But when genteel people like you are moping round all ready to fold your patients" hands on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and murmur "Thy will be done,"--why, that"s the time that little "yours truly" is just beginning to roll up her sleeves and get to work!"
With real pa.s.sion her slender fingers went clutching again at her harsh linen collar. "It isn"t you, Helene Churchill," she taunted, "that"s ever been to the Superintendent on your bended knees and begged for the rabies cases--and the small-pox! Gee! You like nursing because you think it"s pious to like it! But I like it--_because I like it!"_ From brow to chin as though fairly stricken with sincerity her whole bland face furrowed startlingly with crude expressiveness. "The smell of ether!" she stammered. "It"s like wine to me! The clang of the ambulance gong? I"d rather hear it than fire-engines! I"d crawl on my hands and knees a hundred miles to watch a major operation! I wish there was a war! I"d give my life to see a cholera epidemic!"
Abruptly as it came the pa.s.sion faded from her face, leaving every feature tranquil again, demure, exaggeratedly innocent. With saccharine sweetness she turned to Rae Malgregor.
"Now, Little One," she mocked, "tell us the story of your lovely life.
Having heard me coyly confess that I went into nursing because I had such a crush on this world,--and Helene here brazenly affirm that she went into nursing because she had such a crush on the world to come,--it"s up to you now to confide to us just how you happened to take up so n.o.ble an endeavor! Had you seen some of the young house doctors"
beautiful, smiling faces depicted in the hospital catalogue? Or was it for the sake of the Senior Surgeon"s grim, gray mug that you jilted your poor plow-boy lover way up in the Annapolis Valley?"
"Why, Zillah!" gasped the country girl. "Why, I think you "re perfectly awful! Why, Zillah Forsyth! Don"t you ever say a thing like that again!
You can joke all you want to about the flirty young Internes. They"re nothing but fellows. But it isn"t--it isn"t respectful--for you to talk like that about the Senior Surgeon. He"s too--too terrifying!" she finished in an utter panic of consternation.
"Oh, now I know it was the Senior Surgeon that made you jilt your country beau!" taunted Zillah Forsyth with soft alto sarcasm.
"I didn"t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine!" stormed Rae Malgregor explosively. Backed up against her bureau, eyes flaming, breast heaving, little candy-box cap all tossed askew over her left ear, she stood defying her tormentor. "I didn"t, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine!" she rea.s.serted pa.s.sionately. "It was Joe Hazeltine that jilted me! And we "d been going together since we were kids! And now he"s married the dominie"s daughter and they"ve got a kid of their own most as old as he and I were when we first began courting each other. And it"s all because I insisted on being a trained nurse," she finished shrilly.
With an expression of real shock Helene Churchill peered up from her lowly seat on the floor.
"You mean?" she asked a bit breathlessly. "You mean that he didn"t want you to be a trained nurse? You mean that he wasn"t big enough,--wasn"t fine enough to appreciate the n.o.bility of the profession?"
"n.o.bility nothing!" snapped Rae Malgregor. "It was me scrubbing strange men with alcohol that he couldn"t stand for! And I don"t know as I exactly blame him," she added huskily. "It certainly is a good deal of a liberty when you stop to think about it."
Quite incongruously her big, childish, blue eyes narrowed suddenly into two dark, calculating slits. "It"s comic," she mused, "how there isn"t a man in the world who would stand letting his wife or daughter or sister have a male nurse. But look at the jobs we girls get sent out on! It"s very confusing!"
With sincere appeal she turned to Zillah Forsyth. "And yet--and yet,"
she stammered. "And yet--when everything scary that"s in you has once been scared out of you,--why, there"s nothing left in you to be scared _with_ any more, is there?"
"What? What?" pleaded Helene Churchill. "Say it again! What?"
"That"s what Joe and I quarreled about my first vacation home!"
persisted Rae Malgregor. "It was a traveling salesman"s thigh. It was broken bad. Somebody had to take care of it. So I did! Joe thought it wasn"t modest to be so willing." With a perplexed sort of defiance she raised her square little chin. "But you see I was willing!" she said.
"I was perfectly willing. Just one single solitary year of hospital training had made me perfectly willing. And you can"t _un_-willing a willing--even to please your beau, no matter how hard you try!" With a droll admixture of shyness and disdain she tossed her curly blonde head a trifle higher. "Shucks!" she attested. "What"s a traveling salesman"s thigh?"
"Shucks yourself!" scoffed Zillah Forsyth. "What"s a silly beau or two up in Nova Scotia to a girl with looks like you? You could have married that typhoid case a dozen times last winter if you"d crooked your little finger! Why, the fellow was crazy about you. And he was richer than Croesus. What queered it?" she demanded bluntly. "Did his mother hate you?"
Like one fairly cramped with astonishment Rae Malgregor doubled up very suddenly at the waist-line, and thrusting her neck oddly forward after the manner of a startled crane, stood peering sharply round the corner of the rocking-chair at Zillah Forsyth.
"Did his mother hate me?" she gasped. "Did--his--mother--hate--me? Well, what do you think? With me who never even saw plumbing till I came down here, setting out to explain to her with twenty tiled bathrooms how to be hygienic though rich? Did his mother hate me? Well, what do you think? With her who bore him, her who _bore_ him, mind you, kept waiting down stairs in the hospital ante-room--half an hour every day--on the raw edge of a rattan chair--waiting--worrying--all old and gray and scared--while little young, perky, pink and white _me_ is upstairs--brushing her own son"s hair and washing her own son"s face--and altogether getting her own son ready to see his own mother!
And then me obliged to turn her out again in ten minutes, flip as you please, for fear she"d stayed too long,--while I stay on the rest of the night? _Did his mother hate me!"_
Stealthily as an a.s.sa.s.sin she crept around the corner of the rocking-chair and grabbed Zillah Forsyth by her astonished linen shoulder.
"Did his mother hate me?" she persisted mockingly. "Did his mother hate me? Well rather! Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn"t hate us? Is there any woman from here to Kamchatka who doesn"t look upon a trained nurse as her natural born enemy? I don"t blame "em!" she added chokingly. "Look at the impudent jobs we get sent out on! Quarantined upstairs for weeks at a time with their inflammable, diphtheritic bridegrooms--while they sit down stairs--brooding over their wedding teaspoons! Hiked off indefinitely to Atlantic City with their gouty bachelor uncles! Hearing their own innocent little sisters"
blood-curdling deathbed deliriums! s.n.a.t.c.hing their own new-born babies away from their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and showing them, virgin-handed, how to nurse them better! The impudence of it, I say! The disgusting, confounded impudence! Doing things perfectly--flippantly--_right_--for twenty-five dollars a week--and washing--that all the achin" love in the world don"t know how to do right--just for love!"
Furiously she began to jerk her victim"s shoulder. "I tell you it"s awful, Zillah Forsyth!" she insisted. "I tell you I just won"t stand it!"
With muscles like steel wire Zillah Forsyth scrambled to her feet, and pushed Rae Malgregor back against the bureau.
"For Heaven"s sake, Rae, shut up!" she said. "What in Creation"s the matter with you to-day? I never saw you act so before!" With real concern she stared into the girl"s turbid eyes. "If you feel like that about it, what in thunder did you go into nursing for?" she demanded not unkindly.
Very slowly Helene Churchill rose from her lowly seat by her precious book-case and came round and looked at Rae Malgregor rather oddly.
"Yes," faltered Helene Churchill. "What did you go into nursing for?"
The faintest possible taint of asperity was in her voice.
Quite dumbly for an instant Rae Malgregor"s natural timidity stood battling the almost fanatic professional fervor in Helene Churchill"s frankly open face, the raw, scientific pa.s.sion, of very different caliber, but no less intensity, hidden so craftily behind Zillah Forsyth"s plastic features. Then suddenly her own hands went clutching back at the bureau for support, and all the flaming, raging red went ebbing out of her cheeks, leaving her lips with hardly blood enough left to work them.
"I went into nursing," she mumbled, "and it"s G.o.d"s own truth,--I went into nursing because--because I thought the uniforms were so cute."
Furiously, the instant the words were gone from her mouth, she turned and snarled at Zillah"s hooting laughter.
"Well, I had to do something!" she attested. The defense was like a flat blade slapping the air.
Desperately she turned to Helene Churchill"s goading, faintly supercilious smile, and her voice edged suddenly like a twisted sword.
"Well, the uniforms _are_ cute!" she parried. "They are! They are! I bet you there"s more than one girl standing high in the graduating cla.s.s to-day who never would have stuck out her first year"s bossin" and slops and worry and death--if she"d had to stick it out in the unimportant looking clothes she came from home in! Even you, Helene Churchill, with all your pious talk,--the day they put your coachman"s son in as new Interne and you got called down from the office for failing to stand when Mr. Young Coachman came into the room, you bawled all night,--you did,--and swore you"d chuck your whole job and go home the next day--if it wasn"t that you"d just had a life-size photo taken in full nursing costume to send to your brother"s chum at Yale! So there!"
With a gasp of ineffable satisfaction she turned from Helene Churchill.
"Sure the uniforms are cute!" she slashed back at Zillah Forsyth. "That"s the whole trouble with "em. They"re so awfully--masqueradishly--cute! Sure, I could have got engaged to the Typhoid Boy. It would have been as easy as robbing a babe! But lots of girls, I notice, get engaged in their uniforms, feeding a patient perfectly scientifically out of his own silver spoon, who don"t seem to stay engaged so especially long in their own street clothes, bungling just plain naturally with their own knives and forks! Even you, Zillah Forsyth," she hacked, "even you who trot round like the Lord"s Anointed in your pure white togs, you"re just as Dutchy looking as anybody else, come to put you in a red hat and a tan coat and a blue skirt!"