"Yes, sir," crooned the White Linen Nurse.
Meek as an oiled machine she scuttled to her appointed place. Once More in smothered giggle and unprotesting acquiescence she sensed the resumption of eternal discipline. Already in just this trice of time she felt her rampant young mouth resettle tamely into lines of smug, determinate serenity. Already across her idle lap she felt her clasped fingers begin to frost and tingle again like a cheerfully non-concerned bunch of live wires waiting the one authoritative signal to connect somebody,--anybody,--with this world or the next. Already the facile tip of her tongue seemed fairly loaded and c.o.c.ked like a revolver with all the approximate "Yes, sirs," "No, sirs," that she thought she should probably need.
But the only immediate remarks that the Senior Surgeon addressed to any one were addressed distinctly to the crank of his automobile.
"d.a.m.n having a chauffeur who gets drunk the one day of the year when you need him most!" he muttered under his breath, as with the same exquisitely sensitive fingers that could have dissected like a caress the nervous system of a humming bird, or re-set unbruisingly the broken wing of a b.u.t.terfly, he hurled his hundred and eighty pounds of infuriate brute-strength against the calm, chronic, mechanical stubbornness of that auto crank. "d.a.m.n!" he swore on the upward pull.
"d.a.m.n!" he gasped on the downward push. "d.a.m.n!" he cursed and sputtered and spluttered. Purple with effort, bulging-eyed with strain, reeking with sweat, his frenzied outburst would have terrorized the entire hospital staff.
With an odd little twinge of homesickness, the White Linen Nurse slid cautiously out to the edge of her seat so that she might watch the struggle better. For thus, with dripping foreheads and knotted neck-muscles and breaking backs and rankly tempestuous language, did the untutored men-folk of her own beloved home-land hurl their great strength against bulls and boulders and refractory forest trees. Very startlingly as she watched, a brand new thought went zig-zagging through her consciousness. Was it possible,--was it even so much as remotely possible--that the great Senior Surgeon,--the great, wonderful, altogether formidable, altogether unapproachable Senior Surgeon,--was just a--was just a--? Stripped ruthlessly of all his social superiority,--of all his professional halo,--of all his scientific achievement, the Senior Surgeon stood suddenly forth before her--a mere man--just like other men! _Just exactly_ like other men? Like the sick drug-clerk? Like the new-born millionaire baby? Like the doddering old Dutch gaffer? The very delicacy of such a thought drove the blood panic-stricken from her face. It was the indelicacy of the thought that brought the blood surging back again to brow, to cheeks, to lips, even to the tips of her ears.
Glancing up casually from the roar and rumble of his abruptly repentant engine the Senior Surgeon swore once more under his breath to think that any female sitting perfectly idle and non-concerned in a seven thousand dollar car should have the nerve to flaunt such a furiously strenuous color.
Bristling with resentment and mink furs he strode around the fender and stumbled with increasing irritation across the White Linen Nurse"s knees to his seat. Just for an instant his famous fingers seemed to flash with apparent inconsequence towards one bit of mechanism and another. Then like a huge, portentous pill floated on smoothest syrup the car slid down the yawning street into the congested city.
Altogether monotonously in terms of pain and dirt and drug and disease the city wafted itself in and out of the White Linen Nurse"s well-grooved consciousness. From every filthy street corner sodden age or starved babyhood reached out its fluttering pulse to her. Then, suddenly sweet as a draught through a fever-tainted room, the squalid city freshened into jocund, luxuriant suburbs with rollicking tennis courts, and flaming yellow forsythia blossoms, and green velvet lawns prematurely posied with pale exotic hyacinths and great scarlet splotches of l.u.s.ty tulips.
Beyond this hectic horticultural outburst the leisurely Spring faded out again into April"s naturally sallow colors.
Glossy and black as an endless typewriter ribbon, the narrow, tense State Road seemed to wind itself everlastingly in--and in--and in--on some hidden spool of the car"s mysterious mechanism.
Clickety-Click-Click-Clack,--faster than any human mind could think,--faster than any human hand could finger,--hurtling up hazardous hills of thought,--sliding down facile valleys of fancy,--roaring with emphasis,--shrieking with punctuation,--the great car yielded itself perforce to Fate"s dictation.
Robbed successively of the city"s humanitarian pang, of the suburb"s esthetic pleasure, the White Linen Nurse found herself precipitated suddenly into a mere blur of sight, a mere chaos of sound. In whizzing speed and crashing breeze,--houses--fences--meadows--people--slapped across her eyeb.a.l.l.s like pictures on a fan. On and on and on through kaleidoscopic yellows and rushing grays the great car sped, a purely mechanical factor in a purely mechanical landscape.
Rigid with concentration the Senior Surgeon stared like a dead man into the intrepid, on-coming road.
Intermittently from her green, plushy laprobes the little crippled girl struggled to her feet, and sprawling clumsily across whose-ever shoulder suited her best, raised a brazenly innocent voice, deliberately flatted, in a shrill and maddeningly repet.i.tive chant of her own making, to the effect that
All the birds were there With yellow feathers instead of hair, And b.u.mble bees crocheted in the trees-- And b.u.mble bees crocheted in the trees-- And all the birds were there-- And--And--
Intermittently from the front seat the Senior Surgeon"s wooden face relaxed to the extent of a grim mouth twisting distractedly sideways in one furious bellow.
"Will--you--stop--your--_noise_--and--go--back--to--your--seat!"
Nothing else happened at all until at last, out of unbroken stretches of winter-staled stubble, a high, formal hemlock hedge and a neat, pebbled driveway proclaimed the Senior Surgeon"s ultimate destination.
Cautiously now, with an almost tender skill, the big car circled a tiny, venturesome clump of highway violets and crept through a prancing, leaping fluff of yellow collie dogs to the door of the big stone house.
Instantly from inestimable resources a liveried serving man appeared to help the Surgeon from his car; another, to take the Surgeon"s coat; another, to carry his bag.
Lingering for an instant to stretch his muscles and shake his great shoulders, the Senior Surgeon breathed into his cramped lungs a friendly impulse as well as a scent of budding cherry trees.
"You may come in with me, if you want to, Miss Malgregor." he conceded.
"It"s an extraordinary case. You will hardly see another one like it."
Palpably he lowered his already almost indistinguishable voice. "The boy is young," he confided, "about your age, I should guess, a college foot-ball hero, the most superbly perfect specimen of young manhood it has ever been my privilege to behold. It will be a long case. They have two nurses already, but would like another. The work ought not to be hard. Now if they should happen to--fancy you!" In speechless expressiveness his eyes swept estimatingly over sun-parlors, stables, garages, Italian gardens, rapturous blue-shadowed mountain views--every last intimate detail of the mansion"s wonderful equipment.
Like a drowning man feeling his last floating spar wrenched away from him, the White Linen Nurse dug her finger-nails frantically into every reachable wrinkle and crevice of the heavily upholstered seat.
"Oh, but sir, I don"t want to go in!" she protested pa.s.sionately. "I tell you, sir, I"m quite done with all that sort of thing! It would break my heart! It would! Oh, sir, this worrying about people for whom you"ve got no affection,--it"s like sledding without any snow! It grits right down on your naked nerves. It--"
Before the Senior Surgeon"s glowering, incredulous stare her heart began to plunge and pound again, but it plunged and pounded no harder, she realized suddenly, than when in the calm, white hospital precincts she was obliged to pa.s.s his terrifying presence in the corridor and murmur an inaudible "Good Morning" or "Good Evening." "After all, he"s nothing but a man--nothing but a man--nothing but a mere--ordinary--two-legged man," she reasoned over and over to herself. With a really desperate effort she smoothed her frightened face into an expression of utter guilelessness and peace and smiled unflinchingly right into the Senior Surgeon"s rousing anger as she had once seen an animal-trainer smile into the snarl of a crouching tiger.
"Th--ank you very much!" she said. "But I think I won"t go in, sir,--thank you! My--my face is still pretty tired!"
"Idiot!" snapped the Senior Surgeon as he turned on his heel and started up the steps.
From the green plushy robes on the back seat the White Linen Nurse could have sworn that she heard a sharply e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, maliciously joyful "Ha!"
piped out. But when both she and the Senior Surgeon turned sharply round to make sure, the Little Crippled Girl, in apparently complete absorption, sat amiably extracting tuft after tuft of fur from the thumb of one big sable glove, to the rumbling, sing-song monotone of "He loves me--Loves me not--Loves me--Loves me not."
Bristling with unutterable contempt for all femininity, the Senior Surgeon proceeded up the steps between two solemn-faced lackeys.
"Father!" wailed a feeble little voice. "Father!" There was no shrillness in the tone now, nor malice, nor any mischievous thing,--just desolation, the impulsive, panic-stricken desolation of a little child left suddenly alone with a stranger. "Father!" the frightened voice ventured forth a tiny bit louder. But the unheeding Senior Surgeon had already reached the piazza. "Fat Father!" screamed the little voice.
Barbed now like a shark-hook the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon"s dormant sensibilities. As one fairly yanked out of his thoughts he whirled around in his tracks.
"What do you want?" he thundered.
Helplessly the little girl sat staring from a lackey"s ill-concealed grin to her Father"s smoldering fury. Quite palpably she began to swallow with considerable difficulty. Then quick as a flash a diminutively crafty smile crooked across one corner of her mouth.
"Father?" she improvised dulcetly. "Father? May--may I--sit--in the White Linen Nurse"s lap?"
Just for an instant the Senior Surgeon"s narrowing eyes probed mercilessly into the reekingly false little smile. Then altogether brutally he shrugged his shoulders.
"I don"t care where in blazes you sit!" he muttered, and went on into the house.
With an air of unalterable finality the ma.s.sive oak door closed after him. In the resonant click of its latch the great wrought-iron lock seemed to smack its lips with ineffable satisfaction.
Wringing suddenly round with a whish of starched skirts the White Linen Nurse knelt up in her seat and grinned at the Little Crippled Girl.
""Ha"--yourself!" she said.
Against all possible expectancy the Little Crippled Girl burst out laughing. The laugh was wild, ecstatic, extravagantly boisterous, yet awkward withal, and indescribably b.u.mpy, like the first flight of a cage-cramped bird.
Quite abruptly the White Linen Nurse sat down again, and commenced nervously with the wrist of her chamois glove to polish the slightly tarnished bra.s.s lamp at her elbow. Equally abruptly after a minute she stopped polishing and looked back at the Little Crippled Girl.
"Would--you--like--to sit in my lap?" she queried conscientiously.
Insolent with astonishment the Little Girl parried the question. "Why in blazes--should I want to sit in your lap?" she quizzed harshly. Every accent of her voice, every remotest intonation, was like the Senior Surgeon"s at his worst. The suddenly forked eyebrow, the snarling twitch of the upper lip, turned the whole delicate little face into a grotesque but desperately unconscious caricature of the grim-jawed father.
As though the father himself had snubbed her for some unimaginable familiarity the White Linen Nurse winced back in hopeless confusion.
Just for sheer shock, short-circuited with fatigue, a big tear rolled slowly down one pink cheek.
Instantly to the edge of her seat the Little Girl jerked herself forward. "Don"t cry, Pretty!" she whispered. "Don"t cry! It"s my legs.
I"ve got fat iron braces on my legs. And people don"t like to hold me!"
Half the professional smile came flashing back to the White Linen Nurse"s mouth.
"Oh, I just adore holding people with iron braces on their legs," she affirmed, and, leaning over the back of the seat, proceeded with absolutely perfect mechanical tenderness to gather the poor, puny, surprised little body into her own strong, shapely arms. Then dutifully snuggling her shoulder to meet the stubborn little shoulder that refused to snuggle, to it, and dutifully easing her knees to suit the stubborn little knees that refused to be eased, she settled down resignedly in her seat again to await the return of the Senior Surgeon. "There! There!
There!" she began quite instinctively to croon and pat.