The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  She dropped asleep before the doctor came; and when, at something after eight, the door of the Wilson house slammed and a figure crossed the street, it was not Ed at all, but the surgeon.

  Sidney had been talking rather more frankly than usual. Lately there had been a reserve about her. K., listening intently that night, read between words a story of small persecutions and jealousies. But the girl minimized them, after her way.

  "It's always hard for probationers," she said. "I often think Miss Harrison is trying my mettle."

  "Harrison!"

  "Carlotta Harrison. And now that Miss Gregg has said she will accept me, it's really all over. The other nurses are wonderful--so kind and so helpful. I hope I shall look well in my cap."

  Carlotta Harrison was in Sidney's hospital! A thousand contingencies flashed through his mind. Sidney might grow to like her and bring her to the house. Sidney might insist on the thing she always spoke of--that he visit the hospital; and he would meet her, face to face. He could have depended on a man to keep his secret. This girl with her somber eyes and her threat to pay him out for what had happened to her--she meant danger of a sort that no man could fight.

  "Soon," said Sidney, through the warm darkness, "I shall have a cap, and be always forgetting it and putting my hat on over it--the new ones always do. One of the girls slept in hers the other night! They are tulle, you know, and quite stiff, and it was the most erratic-looking thing the next day!"

  It was then that the door across the street closed. Sidney did not hear it, but K. bent forward. There was a part of his brain always automatically on watch.

  "I shall get my operating-room training, too," she went on. "That is the real romance of the hospital. A--a surgeon is a sort of hero in a hospital. You wouldn't think that, would you? There was a lot of excitement to-day. Even the probationers' table was talking about it. Dr. Max Wilson did the Edwardes operation."

  The figure across the Street was lighting a cigarette. Perhaps, after all--

  "Something tremendously difficult--I don't know what. It's going into the medical journals. A Dr. Edwardes invented it, or whatever they call it. They took a picture of the operating-room for the article. The photographer had to put on operating clothes and wrap the camera in sterilized towels. It was the most thrilling thing, they say--"

  Her voice died away as her eyes followed K.'s. Max, cigarette in hand, was coming across, under the ailanthus tree. He hesitated on the pavement, his eyes searching the shadowy balcony.

  "Sidney?"

  "Here! Right back here!"

  There was vibrant gladness in her tone. He came slowly toward them.

  "My brother is not at home, so I came over. How select you are, with your balcony!"

  "Can you see the step?"

  "Coming, with bells on."

  K. had risen and pushed back his chair. His mind was working quickly. Here in the darkness he could hold the situation for a moment. If he could get Sidney into the house, the rest would not matter. Luckily, the balcony was very dark.

  "Is any one ill?"

  "Mother is not well. This is Mr. Le Moyne, and he knows who you are very well, indeed."

  The two men shook hands.

  "I've heard a lot of Mr. Le Moyne. Didn't the Street beat the Linburgs the other day? And I believe the Rosenfelds are in receipt of sixty-five cents a day and considerable peace and quiet through you, Mr. Le Moyne. You're the most popular man on the Street."

  "I've always heard that about YOU. Sidney, if Dr. Wilson is here to see your mother--"

  "Going," said Sidney. "And Dr. Wilson is a very great person, K., so be polite to him."

  Max had roused at the sound of Le Moyne's voice, not to suspicion, of course, but to memory. Without any apparent reason, he was back in Berlin, tramping the country roads, and beside him--

  "Wonderful night!"

  "Great," he replied. "The mind's a curious thing, isn't it. In the instant since Miss Page went through that window I've been to Berlin and back! Will you have a cigarette?"

  "Thanks; I have my pipe here."

  K. struck a match with his steady hands. Now that the thing had come, he was glad to face it. In the flare, his quiet profile glowed against the night. Then he flung the match over the rail.

  "Perhaps my voice took you back to Berlin."

  Max stared; then he rose. Blackness had descended on them again, except for the dull glow of K.'s old pipe.

  "For God's sake!"

  "Sh! The neighbors next door have a bad habit of sitting just inside the curtains."

  "But--you!"

  "Sit down. Sidney will be back in a moment. I'll talk to you, if you'll sit still. Can you hear me plainly?"

  After a moment--"Yes."

  "I've been here--in the city, I mean--for a year. Name's Le Moyne. Don't forget it--Le Moyne. I've got a position in the gas office, clerical. I get fifteen dollars a week. I have reason to think I'm going to be moved up. That will be twenty, maybe twenty-two."

  Wilson stirred, but he found no adequate words. Only a part of what K. said got to him. For a moment he was back in a famous clinic, and this man across from him--it was not believable!

  "It's not hard work, and it's safe. If I make a mistake there's no life hanging on it. Once I made a blunder, a month or two ago. It was a big one. It cost me three dollars out of my own pocket. But--that's all it cost."

  Wilson's voice showed that he was more than incredulous; he was profoundly moved.

  "We thought you were dead. There were all sorts of stories. When a year went by--the Titanic had gone down, and nobody knew but what you were on it--we gave up. I--in June we put up a tablet for you at the college. I went down for the--for the services."

  "Let it stay," said K. quietly. "I'm dead as far as the college goes, anyhow. I'll never go back. I'm Le Moyne now. And, for Heaven's sake, don't be sorry for me. I'm more contented than I've been for a long time."

  The wonder in Wilson's voice was giving way to irritation.

  "But--when you had everything! Why, good Heavens, man, I did your operation to-day, and I've been blowing about it ever since."

  "I had everything for a while. Then I lost the essential. When that happened I gave up. All a man in our profession has is a certain method, knowledge--call it what you like,--and faith in himself. I lost my self-confidence; that's all. Certain things happened; kept on happening. So I gave it up. That's all. It's not dramatic. For about a year I was damned sorry for myself. I've stopped whining now."

  "If every surgeon gave up because he lost cases--I've just told you I did your operation to-day. There was just a chance for the man, and I took my courage in my hands and tried it. The poor devil's dead."

  K. rose rather wearily and emptied his pipe over the balcony rail.

  "That's not the same. That's the chance he and you took. What happened to me was--different."

  Pipe in hand, he stood staring out at the ailanthus tree with its crown of stars. Instead of the Street with its quiet houses, he saw the men he had known and worked with and taught, his friends who spoke his language, who had loved him, many of them, gathered about a bronze tablet set in a wall of the old college; he saw their earnest faces and grave eyes. He heard--

  He heard the soft rustle of Sidney's dress as she came into the little room behind them.

  CHAPTER XIII

  A few days after Wilson's recognition of K., two most exciting things happened to Sidney. One was that Christine asked her to be maid of honor at her wedding. The other was more wonderful. She was accepted, and given her cap.

  Because she could not get home that night, and because the little house had no telephone, she wrote the news to her mother and sent a note to Le Moyne:

  DEAR K.,--I am accepted, and IT is on my head at this minute. I am as conscious of it as if it were a halo, and as if I had done something to deserve it, instead of just hoping that someday I shall. I am writing this on the bureau, so that when I lift my eyes I may see It. I am afraid just now I am thinking
more of the cap than of what it means. It IS becoming!

  Very soon I shall slip down and show it to the ward. I have promised. I shall go to the door when the night nurse is busy somewhere, and turn all around and let them see it, without saying a word. They love a little excitement like that.

  You have been very good to me, dear K. It is you who have made possible this happiness of mine to-night. I am promising myself to be very good, and not so vain, and to love my enemies--, although I have none now. Miss Harrison has just congratulated me most kindly, and I am sure poor Joe has both forgiven and forgotten.

  Off to my first lecture!

  SIDNEY.

  K. found the note on the hall table when he got home that night, and carried it upstairs to read. Whatever faint hope he might have had that her youth would prevent her acceptance he knew now was over. With the letter in his hand, he sat by his table and looked ahead into the empty years. Not quite empty, of course. She would be coming home.

  But more and more the life of the hospital would engross her. He surmised, too, very shrewdly, that, had he ever had a hope that she might come to care for him, his very presence in the little house militated against him. There was none of the illusion of separation; he was always there, like Katie. When she opened the door, she called "Mother" from the hall. If Anna did not answer, she called him, in much the same voice.

  He had built a wall of philosophy that had withstood even Wilson's recognition and protest. But enduring philosophy comes only with time; and he was young. Now and then all his defenses crumbled before a passion that, when he dared to face it, shook him by its very strength. And that day all his stoicism went down before Sidney's letter. Its very frankness and affection hurt--not that he did not want her affection; but he craved so much more. He threw himself face down on the bed, with the paper crushed in his hand.

  Sidney's letter was not the only one he received that day. When, in response to Katie's summons, he rose heavily and prepared for dinner, he found an unopened envelope on the table. It was from Max Wilson:--

  DEAR LE MOYNE,--I have been going around in a sort of haze all day. The fact that I only heard your voice and scarcely saw you last night has made the whole thing even more unreal.

  I have a feeling of delicacy about trying to see you again so soon. I'm bound to respect your seclusion. But there are some things that have got to be discussed.

  You said last night that things were "different" with you. I know about that. You'd had one or two unlucky accidents. Do you know any man in our profession who has not? And, for fear you think I do not know what I am talking about, the thing was threshed out at the State Society when the question of the tablet came up. Old Barnes got up and said: "Gentlemen, all of us live more or less in glass houses. Let him who is without guilt among us throw the first stone!" By George! You should have heard them!

  I didn't sleep last night. I took my little car and drove around the country roads, and the farther I went the more outrageous your position became. I'm not going to write any rot about the world needing men like you, although it's true enough. But our profession does. You working in a gas office, while old O'Hara bungles and hacks, and I struggle along on what I learned from you!

  It takes courage to step down from the pinnacle you stood on. So it's not cowardice that has set you down here. It's wrong conception. And I've thought of two things. The first, and best, is for you to go back. No one has taken your place, because no one could do the work. But if that's out of the question,--and only you know that, for only you know the facts,--the next best thing is this, and in all humility I make the suggestion.

  Take the State exams under your present name, and when you've got your certificate, come in with me. This isn't magnanimity. I'll be getting a damn sight more than I give.

  Think it over, old man.

  M.W.

  It is a curious fact that a man who is absolutely untrustworthy about women is often the soul of honor to other men. The younger Wilson, taking his pleasures lightly and not too discriminatingly, was making an offer that meant his ultimate eclipse, and doing it cheerfully, with his eyes open.

  K. was moved. It was like Max to make such an offer, like him to make it as if he were asking a favor and not conferring one. But the offer left him untempted. He had weighed himself in the balance, and found himself wanting. No tablet on the college wall could change that. And when, late that night, Wilson found him on the balcony and added appeal to argument, the situation remained unchanged. He realized its hopelessness when K. lapsed into whimsical humor.

  "I'm not absolutely useless where I am, you know, Max," he said. "I've raised three tomato plants and a family of kittens this summer, helped to plan a trousseau, assisted in selecting wall-paper for the room just inside,--did you notice it?--and developed a boy pitcher with a ball that twists around the bat like a Colles fracture around a splint!"

  "If you're going to be humorous--"

  "My dear fellow," said K. quietly, "if I had no sense of humor, I should go upstairs to-night, turn on the gas, and make a stertorous entrance into eternity. By the way, that's something I forgot!"

  "Eternity?" "No. Among my other activities, I wired the parlor for electric light. The bride-to-be expects some electroliers as wedding gifts, and--"

  Wilson rose and flung his cigarette into the grass.

  "I wish to God I understood you!" he said irritably.

  K. rose with him, and all the suppressed feeling of the interview was crowded into his last few words.

  "I'm not as ungrateful as you think, Max," he said. "I--you've helped a lot. Don't worry about me. I'm as well off as I deserve to be, and better. Good-night."

  "Good-night."

  Wilson's unexpected magnanimity put K. in a curious position--left him, as it were, with a divided allegiance. Sidney's frank infatuation for the young surgeon was growing. He was quick to see it. And where before he might have felt justified in going to the length of warning her, now his hands were tied.

  Max was interested in her. K. could see that, too. More than once he had taken Sidney back to the hospital in his car. Le Moyne, handicapped at every turn, found himself facing two alternatives, one but little better than the other. The affair might run a legitimate course, ending in marriage--a year of happiness for her, and then what marriage with Max, as he knew him, would inevitably mean: wanderings away, remorseful returns to her, infidelities, misery. Or, it might be less serious but almost equally unhappy for her. Max might throw caution to the winds, pursue her for a time,--K. had seen him do this,--and then, growing tired, change to some new attraction. In either case, he could only wait and watch, eating his heart out during the long evenings when Anna read her "Daily Thoughts" upstairs and he sat alone with his pipe on the balcony.

  Sidney went on night duty shortly after her acceptance. All of her orderly young life had been divided into two parts: day, when one played or worked, and night, when one slept. Now she was compelled to a readjustment: one worked in the night and slept in the day. Things seemed unnatural, chaotic. At the end of her first night report Sidney added what she could remember of a little verse of Stevenson's. She added it to the end of her general report, which was to the effect that everything had been quiet during the night except the neighborhood.

  "And does it not seem hard to you, When all the sky is clear and blue, And I should like so much to play, To have to go to bed by day?"

  The day assistant happened on the report, and was quite scandalized.

  "If the night nurses are to spend their time making up poetry," she said crossly, "we'd better change this hospital into a young ladies' seminary. If she wants to complain about the noise in the street, she should do so in proper form."

  "I don't think she made it up," said the Head, trying not to smile. "I've heard something like it somewhere, and, what with the heat and the noise of traffic, I don't see how any of them get any sleep."

  But, because discipline must be observed, she wrote on the slip the assistant carrie
d around: "Please submit night reports in prose."

  Sidney did not sleep much. She tumbled into her low bed at nine o'clock in the morning, those days, with her splendid hair neatly braided down her back and her prayers said, and immediately her active young mind filled with images--Christine's wedding, Dr. Max passing the door of her old ward and she not there, Joe--even Tillie, whose story was now the sensation of the Street. A few months before she would not have cared to think of Tillie. She would have retired her into the land of things-one-must-forget. But the Street's conventions were not holding Sidney's thoughts now. She puzzled over Tillie a great deal, and over Grace and her kind.

  On her first night on duty, a girl had been brought in from the Avenue. She had taken a poison--nobody knew just what. When the internes had tried to find out, she had only said: "What's the use?"

  And she had died.

  Sidney kept asking herself, "Why?" those mornings when she could not get to sleep. People were kind--men were kind, really,--and yet, for some reason or other, those things had to be. Why?

  After a time Sidney would doze fitfully. But by three o'clock she was always up and dressing. After a time the strain told on her. Lack of sleep wrote hollows around her eyes and killed some of her bright color. Between three and four o'clock in the morning she was overwhelmed on duty by a perfect madness of sleep. There was a penalty for sleeping on duty. The old night watchman had a way of slipping up on one nodding. The night nurses wished they might fasten a bell on him!

  Luckily, at four came early-morning temperatures; that roused her. And after that came the clatter of early milk-wagons and the rose hues of dawn over the roofs. Twice in the night, once at supper and again toward dawn, she drank strong black coffee. But after a week or two her nerves were stretched taut as a string.

  Her station was in a small room close to her three wards. But she sat very little, as a matter of fact. Her responsibility was heavy on her; she made frequent rounds. The late summer nights were fitful, feverish; the darkened wards stretched away like caverns from the dim light near the door. And from out of these caverns came petulant voices, uneasy movements, the banging of a cup on a bedside, which was the signal of thirst.