The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  It was particularly inconvenient to move Sidney just then. Carlotta Harrison was off duty, ill. She had been ailing for a month, and now she was down with a temperature. As the Head went toward Sidney's ward, her busy mind was playing her nurses in their wards like pieces on a checkerboard.

  Sidney went into the operating-room that afternoon. For her blue uniform, kerchief, and cap she exchanged the hideous operating-room garb: long, straight white gown with short sleeves and mob-cap, gray-white from many sterilizations. But the ugly costume seemed to emphasize her beauty, as the habit of a nun often brings out the placid saintliness of her face.

  The relationship between Sidney and Max had reached that point that occurs in all relationships between men and women: when things must either go forward or go back, but cannot remain as they are. The condition had existed for the last three months. It exasperated the man.

  As a matter of fact, Wilson could not go ahead. The situation with Carlotta had become tense, irritating. He felt that she stood ready to block any move he made. He would not go back, and he dared not go forward.

  If Sidney was puzzled, she kept it bravely to herself. In her little room at night, with the door carefully locked, she tried to think things out. There were a few treasures that she looked over regularly: a dried flower from the Christmas roses; a label that he had pasted playfully on the back of her hand one day after the rush of surgical dressings was over and which said "Rx, Take once and forever."

  There was another piece of paper over which Sidney spent much time. It was a page torn out of an order book, and it read: "Sigsbee may have light diet; Rosenfeld massage." Underneath was written, very small:

  "You are the most beautiful person in the world."

  Two reasons had prompted Wilson to request to have Sidney in the operating-room. He wanted her with him, and he wanted her to see him at work: the age-old instinct of the male to have his woman see him at his best.

  He was in high spirits that first day of Sidney's operating-room experience. For the time at least, Carlotta was out of the way. Her somber eyes no longer watched him. Once he looked up from his work and glanced at Sidney where she stood at strained attention.

  "Feeling faint?" he said.

  She colored under the eyes that were turned on her.

  "No, Dr. Wilson."

  "A great many of them faint on the first day. We sometimes have them lying all over the floor."

  He challenged Miss Gregg with his eyes, and she reproved him with a shake of her head, as she might a bad boy.

  One way and another, he managed to turn the attention of the operating-room to Sidney several times. It suited his whim, and it did more than that: it gave him a chance to speak to her in his teasing way.

  Sidney came through the operation as if she had been through fire--taut as a string, rather pale, but undaunted. But when the last case had been taken out, Max dropped his bantering manner. The internes were looking over instruments; the nurses were busy on the hundred and one tasks of clearing up; so he had a chance for a word with her alone.

  "I am proud of you, Sidney; you came through it like a soldier."

  "You made it very hard for me."

  A nurse was coming toward him; he had only a moment.

  "I shall leave a note in the mail-box," he said quickly, and proceeded with the scrubbing of his hands which signified the end of the day's work.

  The operations had lasted until late in the afternoon. The night nurses had taken up their stations; prayers were over. The internes were gathered in the smoking-room, threshing over the day's work, as was their custom. When Sidney was free, she went to the office for the note. It was very brief:--

  I have something I want to say to you, dear. I think you know what it is. I never see you alone at home any more. If you can get off for an hour, won't you take the trolley to the end of Division Street? I'll be there with the car at eight-thirty, and I promise to have you back by ten o'clock.

  MAX.

  The office was empty. No one saw her as she stood by the mail-box. The ticking of the office clock, the heavy rumble of a dray outside, the roll of the ambulance as it went out through the gateway, and in her hand the realization of what she had never confessed as a hope, even to herself! He, the great one, was going to stoop to her. It had been in his eyes that afternoon; it was there, in his letter, now.

  It was eight by the office clock. To get out of her uniform and into street clothing, fifteen minutes; on the trolley, another fifteen. She would need to hurry.

  But she did not meet him, after all. Miss Wardwell met her in the upper hall.

  "Did you get my message?" she asked anxiously.

  "What message?"

  "Miss Harrison wants to see you. She has been moved to a private room."

  Sidney glanced at K.'s little watch.

  "Must she see me to-night?"

  "She has been waiting for hours--ever since you went to the operating-room."

  Sidney sighed, but she went to Carlotta at once. The girl's condition was puzzling the staff. There was talk of "T.R."--which is hospital for "typhoid restrictions." But T.R. has apathy, generally, and Carlotta was not apathetic. Sidney found her tossing restlessly on her high white bed, and put her cool hand over Carlotta's hot one.

  "Did you send for me?"

  "Hours ago." Then, seeing her operating-room uniform: "You've been THERE, have you?"

  "Is there anything I can do, Carlotta?"

  Excitement had dyed Sidney's cheeks with color and made her eyes luminous. The girl in the bed eyed her, and then abruptly drew her hand away.

  "Were you going out?"

  "Yes; but not right away."

  "I'll not keep you if you have an engagement."

  "The engagement will have to wait. I'm sorry you're ill. If you would like me to stay with you tonight--"

  Carlotta shook her head on her pillow.

  "Mercy, no!" she said irritably. "I'm only worn out. I need a rest. Are you going home to-night?"

  "No," Sidney admitted, and flushed.

  Nothing escaped Carlotta's eyes--the younger girl's radiance, her confusion, even her operating room uniform and what it signified. How she hated her, with her youth and freshness, her wide eyes, her soft red lips! And this engagement--she had the uncanny divination of fury.

  "I was going to ask you to do something for me," she said shortly; "but I've changed my mind about it. Go on and keep your engagement."

  To end the interview, she turned over and lay with her face to the wall. Sidney stood waiting uncertainly. All her training had been to ignore the irritability of the sick, and Carlotta was very ill; she could see that.

  "Just remember that I am ready to do anything I can, Carlotta," she said. "Nothing will--will be a trouble."

  She waited a moment, but, receiving no acknowledgement of her offer, she turned slowly and went toward the door.

  "Sidney!"

  She went back to the bed.

  "Yes. Don't sit up, Carlotta. What is it?"

  "I'm frightened!"

  "You're feverish and nervous. There's nothing to be frightened about."

  "If it's typhoid, I'm gone."

  "That's childish. Of course you're not gone, or anything like it. Besides, it's probably not typhoid."

  "I'm afraid to sleep. I doze for a little, and when I waken there are people in the room. They stand around the bed and talk about me."

  Sidney's precious minutes were flying; but Carlotta had gone into a paroxysm of terror, holding to Sidney's hand and begging not to be left alone.

  "I'm too young to die," she would whimper. And in the next breath: "I want to die--I don't want to live!"

  The hands of the little watch pointed to eight-thirty when at last she lay quiet, with closed eyes. Sidney, tiptoeing to the door, was brought up short by her name again, this time in a more normal voice:--

  "Sidney."

  "Yes, dear."

  "Perhaps you are right and I'm going to get over this."

&n
bsp; "Certainly you are. Your nerves are playing tricks with you to-night."

  "I'll tell you now why I sent for you."

  "I'm listening."

  "If--if I get very bad,--you know what I mean,--will you promise to do exactly what I tell you?"

  "I promise, absolutely."

  "My trunk key is in my pocket-book. There is a letter in the tray--just a name, no address on it. Promise to see that it is not delivered; that it is destroyed without being read."

  Sidney promised promptly; and, because it was too late now for her meeting with Wilson, for the next hour she devoted herself to making Carlotta comfortable. So long as she was busy, a sort of exaltation of service upheld her. But when at last the night assistant came to sit with the sick girl, and Sidney was free, all the life faded from her face. He had waited for her and she had not come. Would he understand? Would he ask her to meet him again? Perhaps, after all, his question had not been what she had thought.

  She went miserably to bed. K.'s little watch ticked under her pillow. Her stiff cap moved in the breeze as it swung from the corner of her mirror. Under her window passed and repassed the night life of the city--taxicabs, stealthy painted women, tired office-cleaners trudging home at midnight, a city patrol-wagon which rolled in through the gates to the hospital's always open door. When she could not sleep, she got up and padded to the window in bare feet. The light from a passing machine showed a youthful figure that looked like Joe Drummond.

  Life, that had always seemed so simple, was growing very complicated for Sidney: Joe and K., Palmer and Christine, Johnny Rosenfeld, Carlotta--either lonely or tragic, all of them, or both. Life in the raw.

  Toward morning Carlotta wakened. The night assistant was still there. It had been a quiet night and she was asleep in her chair. To save her cap she had taken it off, and early streaks of silver showed in her hair.

  Carlotta roused her ruthlessly.

  "I want something from my trunk," she said.

  The assistant wakened reluctantly, and looked at her watch. Almost morning. She yawned and pinned on her cap.

  "For Heaven's sake," she protested. "You don't want me to go to the trunk-room at this hour!"

  "I can go myself," said Carlotta, and put her feet out of bed.

  "What is it you want?"

  "A letter on the top tray. If I wait my temperature will go up and I can't think."

  "Shall I mail it for you?"

  "Bring it here," said Carlotta shortly. "I want to destroy it."

  The young woman went without haste, to show that a night assistant may do such things out of friendship, but not because she must. She stopped at the desk where the night nurse in charge of the rooms on that floor was filling out records.

  "Give me twelve private patients to look after instead of one nurse like Carlotta Harrison!" she complained. "I've got to go to the trunk-room for her at this hour, and it next door to the mortuary!"

  As the first rays of the summer sun came through the window, shadowing the fire-escape like a lattice on the wall of the little gray-walled room, Carlotta sat up in her bed and lighted the candle on the stand. The night assistant, who dreamed sometimes of fire, stood nervously by.

  "Why don't you let me do it?" she asked irritably.

  Carlotta did not reply at once. The candle was in her hand, and she was staring at the letter.

  "Because I want to do it myself," she said at last, and thrust the envelope into the flame. It burned slowly, at first a thin blue flame tipped with yellow, then, eating its way with a small fine crackling, a widening, destroying blaze that left behind it black ash and destruction. The acrid odor of burning filled the room. Not until it was consumed, and the black ash fell into the saucer of the candlestick, did Carlotta speak again. Then:--

  "If every fool of a woman who wrote a letter burnt it, there would be less trouble in the world," she said, and lay back among her pillows.

  The assistant said nothing. She was sleepy and irritated, and she had crushed her best cap by letting the lid of Carlotta's trunk fall on her. She went out of the room with disapproval in every line of her back.

  "She burned it," she informed the night nurse at her desk. "A letter to a man--one of her suitors, I suppose. The name was K. Le Moyne."

  The deepening and broadening of Sidney's character had been very noticeable in the last few months. She had gained in decision without becoming hard; had learned to see things as they are, not through the rose mist of early girlhood; and, far from being daunted, had developed a philosophy that had for its basis God in His heaven and all well with the world.

  But her new theory of acceptance did not comprehend everything. She was in a state of wild revolt, for instance, as to Johnny Rosenfeld, and more remotely but not less deeply concerned over Grace Irving. Soon she was to learn of Tillie's predicament, and to take up the cudgels valiantly for her.

  But her revolt was to be for herself too. On the day after her failure to keep her appointment with Wilson she had her half-holiday. No word had come from him, and when, after a restless night, she went to her new station in the operating-room, it was to learn that he had been called out of the city in consultation and would not operate that day. O'Hara would take advantage of the free afternoon to run in some odds and ends of cases.

  The operating-room made gauze that morning, and small packets of tampons: absorbent cotton covered with sterilized gauze, and fastened together--twelve, by careful count, in each bundle.

  Miss Grange, who had been kind to Sidney in her probation months, taught her the method.

  "Used instead of sponges," she explained. "If you noticed yesterday, they were counted before and after each operation. One of these missing is worse than a bank clerk out a dollar at the end of the day. There's no closing up until it's found!"

  Sidney eyed the small packet before her anxiously.

  "What a hideous responsibility!" she said.

  From that time on she handled the small gauze sponges almost reverently.

  The operating-room--all glass, white enamel, and shining nickel-plate--first frightened, then thrilled her. It was as if, having loved a great actor, she now trod the enchanted boards on which he achieved his triumphs. She was glad that it was her afternoon off, and that she would not see some lesser star--O'Hara, to wit--usurping his place.

  But Max had not sent her any word. That hurt. He must have known that she had been delayed.

  The operating-room was a hive of industry, and tongues kept pace with fingers. The hospital was a world, like the Street. The nurses had come from many places, and, like cloistered nuns, seemed to have left the other world behind. A new President of the country was less real than a new interne. The country might wash its soiled linen in public; what was that compared with enough sheets and towels for the wards? Big buildings were going up in the city. Ah! but the hospital took cognizance of that, gathering as it did a toll from each new story added. What news of the world came in through the great doors was translated at once into hospital terms. What the city forgot the hospital remembered. It took up life where the town left it at its gates, and carried it on or saw it ended, as the case might be. So these young women knew the ending of many stories, the beginning of some; but of none did they know both the first and last, the beginning and the end.

  By many small kindnesses Sidney had made herself popular. And there was more to it than that. She never shirked. The other girls had the respect for her of one honest worker for another. The episode that had caused her suspension seemed entirely forgotten. They showed her carefully what she was to do; and, because she must know the "why" of everything, they explained as best they could.

  It was while she was standing by the great sterilizer that she heard, through an open door, part of a conversation that sent her through the day with her world in revolt.

  The talkers were putting the anaesthetizing-room in readiness for the afternoon. Sidney, waiting for the time to open the sterilizer, was busy, for the first time in her hurried morning,
with her own thoughts. Because she was very human, there was a little exultation in her mind. What would these girls say when they learned of how things stood between her and their hero--that, out of all his world of society and clubs and beautiful women, he was going to choose her?

  Not shameful, this: the honest pride of a woman in being chosen from many.

  The voices were very clear.

  "Typhoid! Of course not. She's eating her heart out."

  "Do you think he has really broken with her?"

  "Probably not. She knows it's coming; that's all."

  "Sometimes I have wondered--"

  "So have others. She oughtn't to be here, of course. But among so many there is bound to be one now and then who--who isn't quite--"

  She hesitated, at a loss for a word.

  "Did you--did you ever think over that trouble with Miss Page about the medicines? That would have been easy, and like her."

  "She hates Miss Page, of course, but I hardly think--If that's true, it was nearly murder."

  There were two voices, a young one, full of soft southern inflections, and an older voice, a trifle hard, as from disillusion.

  They were working as they talked. Sidney could hear the clatter of bottles on the tray, the scraping of a moved table.

  "He was crazy about her last fall."

  "Miss Page?" (The younger voice, with a thrill in it.)

  "Carlotta. Of course this is confidential."

  "Surely."

  "I saw her with him in his car one evening. And on her vacation last summer--"

  The voices dropped to a whisper. Sidney, standing cold and white by the sterilizer, put out a hand to steady herself. So that was it! No wonder Carlotta had hated her. And those whispering voices! What were they saying? How hateful life was, and men and women. Must there always be something hideous in the background? Until now she had only seen life. Now she felt its hot breath on her cheek.

  She was steady enough in a moment, cool and calm, moving about her work with ice-cold hands and slightly narrowed eyes. To a sort of physical nausea was succeeding anger, a blind fury of injured pride. He had been in love with Carlotta and had tired of her. He was bringing her his warmed-over emotions. She remembered the bitterness of her month's exile, and its probable cause. Max had stood by her then. Well he might, if he suspected the truth.