The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  So it was the Probationer and the Dummy who received the new case, while the Senior ate cold salmon and fried potatoes with other seniors, and inveighed against lectures on Saturday evening and other things that seniors object to, such as things lost in the wash, and milk in the coffee instead of cream, and women from the Avenue who drank carbolic acid and kept the ambulance busy.

  The Probationer was from the country and she had never heard of the Avenue. And the Dummy, who walked there daily with the superintendent's dog, knew nothing of its wickedness. In his soul, where there was nothing but kindness, there was even a feeling of tenderness for the Avenue. Once the dog had been bitten by a terrier from one of the houses, and a girl had carried him in and washed the wounds and bound them up. Thereafter the Dummy had watched for her and bowed when he saw her. When he did not see her he bowed to the house.

  The Dummy finished the brass plates and, gathering up his rags and polish, shuffled to the door. His walk was a patient shamble, but he covered incredible distances. When he reached the emergency bed he stopped and pointed to it. The Probationer looked startled.

  "He's tellin' you to get it ready," shrilled Irish Delia, sitting up in the next bed. "He did that before you was brought in," she called to Old Maggie across the ward. "Goodness knows how he finds out—but he knows. Get the spread off the bed, miss. There's something coming."

  The Probationer had come from the country and naturally knew nothing of the Avenue. Sometimes on her off duty she took short walks there, wondering if the passers-by who stared at her knew that she was a part of the great building that loomed over the district, happily ignorant of the real significance of their glances. Once a girl, sitting behind bowed shutters, had leaned out and smiled at her.

  "Hot to-day, isn't it?" she said.

  The Probationer stopped politely.

  "It's fearful! Is there any place near where I can get some soda water?"

  The girl in the window stared.

  "There's a drug store two squares down," she said. "And say, if I were you——"

  "Yes?"

  "Oh, nothing!" said the girl in the window, and quite unexpectedly slammed the shutters.

  The Probationer had puzzled over it quite a lot. More than once she walked by the house, but she did not see the smiling girl—only, curiously enough, one day she saw the Dummy passing the house and watched him bow and take off his old cap, though there was no one in sight.

  Sooner or later the Avenue girls get to the hospital. Sometimes it is because they cannot sleep, and lie and think things over—and there is no way out; and God hates them—though, of course, there is that story about Jesus and the Avenue woman. And what is the use of going home and being asked questions that cannot be answered? So they try to put an end to things generally—and end up in the emergency bed, terribly frightened, because it has occurred to them that if they do not dare to meet the home folks how are they going to meet the Almighty?

  Or sometimes it is jealousy. Even an Avenue woman must love some one; and, because she's an elemental creature, if the object of her affections turns elsewhere she's rather apt to use a knife or a razor. In that case it is the rival who ends up on the emergency bed.

  Or the life gets her, as it does sooner or later, and she comes in with typhoid or a cough, or other things, and lies alone, day after day, without visitors or inquiries, making no effort to get better, because—well, why should she?

  And so the Dummy's Avenue Girl met her turn and rode down the street in a clanging ambulance, and was taken up in the elevator and along a grey hall to where the emergency bed was waiting; and the Probationer, very cold as to hands and feet, was sending mental appeals to the Senior to come—and come quickly. The ward got up on elbows and watched. Also it told the Probationer what to do.

  "Hot-water bottles and screens," it said variously. "Take her temperature. Don't be frightened! There'll be a doctor in a minute."

  The girl lay on the bed with her eyes shut. It was Irish Delia who saw the Dummy and raised a cry.

  "Look at the Dummy!" she said. "He's crying."

  The Dummy's world had always been a small one. There was the superintendent, who gave him his old clothes; and there was the engineer, who brought him tobacco; and there were the ambulance horses, who talked to him now and then without speech. And, of course, there was his Father.

  Fringing this small inner circle of his heart was a kaleidoscope of changing faces, nurses, internes, patients, visitors—a wall of life that kept inviolate his inner shrine. And in the holiest place, where had dwelt only his Father, and not even the superintendent, the Dummy had recently placed the Avenue Girl. She was his saint, though he knew nothing of saints. Who can know why he chose her? A queer trick of the soul perhaps—or was it super-wisdom?—to choose her from among many saintly women and so enshrine her.

  Or perhaps—— Down in the chapel, in a great glass window, the young John knelt among lilies and prayed. When, at service on Sundays, the sunlight came through on to the Dummy's polished choir rail and candles, the young John had the face of a girl, with short curling hair, very yellow for the colour scheme. The Avenue Girl had hair like that and was rather like him in other ways.

  And here she was where all the others had come, and where countless others would come sooner or later. She was not unconscious and at Delia's cry she opened her eyes. The Probationer was off filling water bottles, and only the Dummy, stricken, round-shouldered, unlovely, stood beside her.

  "Rotten luck, old top!" she said faintly.

  To the Dummy it was a benediction. She could open her eyes. The miracle of speech was still hers.

  "Cigarette!" explained the Avenue Girl, seeing his eyes still on her. "Must have gone to sleep with it and dropped it. I'm—all in!"

  "Don't you talk like that," said Irish Delia, bending over from the next bed. "You'll get well a' right—unless you inhaled. Y'ought to 'a' kept your mouth shut."

  Across the ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and scorned it.

  "Humph!" she said, without troubling to lower her voice. "I've seen her often. I done her washing once. She's as bad as they make 'em."

  "You shut your mouth!" Irish Delia rose to the defence. "She's in trouble now and what she was don't matter. You go back to bed or I'll tell the Head Nurse on you. Look out! The Dummy——"

  The Dummy was advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands and jerked her away from the bed. Old Maggie reeled—almost fell.

  "You all seen that!" she appealed to the ward. "I haven't even spoke to him and he attacked me! I'll go to the superintendent about it. I'll——"

  The Probationer hurried in. Her young cheeks were flushed with excitement and anxiety; her arms were full of jugs, towels, bandages—anything she could imagine as essential. She found the Dummy on his knees polishing a bed plate, and the ward in order—only Old Maggie was grumbling and making her way back to bed; and Irish Delia was sitting up, with her eyes shining—for had not the Dummy, who could not hear, known what Old Maggie had said about the new girl? Had she not said that he knew many things that were hidden, though God knows how he knew them?

  The next hour saw the Avenue Girl through a great deal. Her burns were dressed by an interne and she was moved back to a bed at the end of the ward. The Probationer sat beside her, having refused supper. The Dummy was gone—the Senior Nurse had shooed him off as one shoos a chicken.

  "Get out of here! You're always under my feet," she had said—not unkindly—and pointed to the door.

  The Dummy had stood, with his faded old-young eyes on her, and had not moved. The Senior, who had the ward supper to serve and beds to brush out and backs to rub, not to mention having to make up the emergency bed and clear away the dressings—the Senior tried diplomacy
and offered him an orange from her own corner of the medicine closet. He shook his head.

  "I guess he wants to know whether that girl from the Avenue's going to get well," said Irish Delia. "He seems to know her."

  There was a titter through the ward at this. Old Maggie's gossiping tongue had been busy during the hour. From pity the ward had veered to contempt.

  "Humph!" said the Senior, and put the orange back. "Why, yes; I guess she'll get well. But how in Heaven's name am I to let him know?"

  She was a resourceful person, however, and by pointing to the Avenue Girl and then nodding reassuringly she got her message of cheer over the gulf of his understanding. In return the Dummy told her by gestures how he knew the girl and how she had bound up the leg of the superintendent's dog. The Senior was a literal person and not occult; and she was very busy. When the Dummy stooped to indicate the dog, a foot or so from the ground, she seized that as the key of the situation.

  "He's trying to let me know that he knew her when she was a baby," she observed generally. "All right, if that's the case. Come in and see her when you want to. And now get out, for goodness' sake!"

  The Dummy, with his patient shamble, made his way out of the ward and stored his polishes for the night in the corner of a scrub-closet. Then, ignoring supper, he went down the stairs, flight after flight, to the chapel. The late autumn sun had set behind the buildings across the courtyard and the lower part of the silent room was in shadow; but the afterglow came palely through the stained-glass window, with the young John and tall stalks of white lilies, and "To the Memory of My Daughter Elizabeth" beneath.

  It was only a coincidence—and not even that to the Dummy—but Elizabeth had been the Avenue Girl's name not so long ago.

  The Dummy sat down near the door very humbly and gazed at the memorial window.

  II

  Time may be measured in different ways—by joys; by throbs of pain; by instants; by centuries. In a hospital it is marked by night nurses and day nurses; by rounds of the Staff; by visiting days; by medicines and temperatures and milk diets and fever baths; by the distant singing in the chapel on Sundays; by the shift of the morning sun on the east beds to the evening sun on the beds along the west windows.

  The Avenue Girl lay alone most of the time. The friendly offices of the ward were not for her. Private curiosity and possible kindliness were over-shadowed by a general arrogance of goodness. The ward flung its virtue at her like a weapon and she raised no defence. In the first days things were not so bad. She lay in shock for a time, and there were not wanting hands during the bad hours to lift a cup of water to her lips; but after that came the tedious time when death no longer hovered overhead and life was there for the asking.

  The curious thing was that the Avenue Girl did not ask. She lay for hours without moving, with eyes that seemed tired with looking into the dregs of life. The Probationer was in despair.

  "She could get better if she would," she said to the interne one day. The Senior was off duty and they had done the dressing together. "She just won't try."

  "Perhaps she thinks it isn't worth while," replied the interne, who was drying his hands carefully while the Probationer waited for the towel.

  She was a very pretty Probationer.

  "She hasn't much to look forward to, you know."

  The Probationer was not accustomed to discussing certain things with young men, but she had the Avenue Girl on her mind.

  "She has a home—she admits it." She coloured bravely. "Why—why cannot she go back to it, even now?"

  The interne poured a little rosewater and glycerine into the palm of one hand and gave the Probationer the bottle. If his fingers touched hers, she never knew it.

  "Perhaps they'd not want her after—well, they'd never feel the same, likely. They'd probably prefer to think of her as dead and let it go at that. There—there doesn't seem to be any way back, you know."

  He was exceedingly self-conscious.

  "Then life is very cruel," said the Probationer with rather shaky lips.

  And going back to the Avenue Girl's bed she filled her cup with ice and straightened her pillows. It was her only way of showing defiance to a world that mutilated its children and turned them out to die. The interne watched her as she worked. It rather galled him to see her touching this patient. He had no particular sympathy for the Avenue Girl. He was a man, and ruthless, as men are apt to be in such things.

  The Avenue Girl had no visitors. She had had one or two at first—pretty girls with tired eyes and apologetic glances; a negress who got by the hall porter with a box of cigarettes, which the Senior promptly confiscated; and—the Dummy. Morning and evening came the Dummy and stood by her bed and worshipped. Morning and evening he brought tribute—a flower from the masses that came in daily; an orange, got by no one knows what trickery from the kitchen; a leadpencil; a box of cheap candies. At first the girl had been embarrassed by his visits. Later, as the unfriendliness of the ward grew more pronounced, she greeted him with a faint smile. The first time she smiled he grew quite pale and shuffled out. Late that night they found him sitting in the chapel looking at the window, which was only a blur.

  For certain small services in the ward the Senior depended on the convalescents—filling drinking cups; passing milk at eleven and three; keeping the white bedspreads in geometrical order. But the Avenue Girl was taboo. The boycott had been instituted by Old Maggie. The rampant respectability of the ward even went so far as to refuse to wash her in those early morning hours when the night nurse, flying about with her cap on one ear, was carrying tin basins about like a blue-and-white cyclone. The Dummy knew nothing of the washing; the early morning was the time when he polished the brass doorplate which said: Hospital and Free Dispensary. But he knew about the drinking cup and after a time that became his self-appointed task.

  On Sundays he put on his one white shirt and a frayed collar two sizes too large and went to chapel. At those times he sat with his prayer book upside down and watched the Probationer who cared for his lady and who had no cap to hide her shining hair, and the interne, who was glad there was no cap because of the hair. God's fool he was, indeed, for he liked to look in the interne's eyes, and did not know an interne cannot marry for years and years, and that a probationer must not upset discipline by being engaged. God's fool, indeed, who could see into the hearts of men, but not into their thoughts or their lives; and who, seeing only thus, on two dimensions of life and not the third, found the Avenue Girl holy and worthy of all worship!

  The Probationer worried a great deal.

  "It must hurt her so!" she said to the Senior. "Did you see them call that baby away on visiting day for fear she would touch it?"

  "None are so good as the untempted," explained the Senior, who had been beautiful and was now placid and full of good works. "You cannot remake the world, child. Bodies are our business here—not souls." But the next moment she called Old Maggie to her.

  "I've been pretty patient, Maggie," she said. "You know what I mean. You're the ringleader. Now things are going to change, or—you'll go back on codliver oil to-night."

  "Yes'm," said Old Maggie meekly, with hate in her heart. She loathed the codliver oil.

  "Go back and straighten her bed!" commanded the Senior sternly.

  "Now?"

  "Now!"

  "It hurts my back to stoop over," whined Old Maggie, with the ward watching. "The doctor said that I——"

  The Senior made a move for the medicine closet and the bottles labelled C.

  "I'm going," whimpered Old Maggie. "Can't you give a body time?"

  And she went down to defeat, with the laughter of the ward in her ears—down to defeat, for the Avenue Girl would have none of her.

  "You get out of here!" she said fiercely as Old Maggie set to work at the draw sheet. "Get out quick—or I'll throw this cup in your face!"

  The Senior was watching. Old Maggie put on an air of benevolence and called the Avenue Girl an unlovely name under her brea
th while she smoothed her pillow. She did not get the cup, but the water out of it, in her hard old face, and matters were as they had been.

  The Girl did not improve as she should. The interne did the dressing day after day, while the Probationer helped him—the Senior disliked burned cases—and talked of skin grafting if a new powder he had discovered did no good. Internes are always trying out new things, looking for the great discovery.

  The powder did no good. The day came when, the dressing over and the white coverings drawn up smoothly again over her slender body, the Avenue Girl voiced the question that her eyes had asked each time.

  "Am I going to lie in this hole all my life?" she demanded.

  The interne considered.

  "It isn't healing—not very fast anyhow," he said. "If we could get a little skin to graft on you'd be all right in a jiffy. Can't you get some friends to come in? It isn't painful and it's over in a minute."

  "Friends? Where would I get friends of that sort?"

  "Well, relatives then—some of your own people?"

  The Avenue Girl shut her eyes as she did when the dressing hurt her.

  "None that I'd care to see," she said. And the Probationer knew she lied. The interne shrugged his shoulders.

  "If you think of any let me know. We'll get them here," he said briskly, and turned to see the Probationer rolling up her sleeve.

  "Please!" she said, and held out a bare white arm. The interne stared at it stupefied. It was very lovely.

  "I am not at all afraid," urged the Probationer, "and my blood is good. It would grow—I know it would."

  The interne had hard work not to stoop and kiss the blue veins that rose to the surface in the inner curve of her elbow. The dressing screens were up and the three were quite alone. To keep his voice steady he became stern.

  "Put your sleeve down and don't be a foolish girl!" he, commanded. "Put your sleeve down!" His eyes said: "You wonder! You beauty! You brave little girl!"

  Because the Probationer seemed to take her responsibilities rather to heart, however, and because, when he should have been thinking of other things, such as calling up the staff and making reports, he kept seeing that white arm and the resolute face above it, the interne worked out a plan.