"Just look!" she would say, opening her arms. "If I could only steal it!"
The Senior, who had once been beautiful and was now calm and placid, smiled at her. Old Maggie must peer and cry out over the child. Irish Delia must call down a blessing on it. And so up the ward to the Avenue Girl; the Probationer laid the baby in her arms.
"Just a minute," she explained. "I'm idling and I have no business to. Hold it until I give the three o'clocks." Which means the three-o'clock medicines.
When she came back the Avenue Girl had a new look in her eyes; and that day the little gleam of hope, that usually died, lasted and grew.
At last came the day when the alibi was to be brought forward. The girl had written home and the home folks were coming. In his strange way the Dummy knew that a change was near. The kaleidoscope would shift again and the Avenue Girl would join the changing and disappearing figures that fringed the inner circle of his heart.
One night he did not go to bed in the ward bed that was his only home, beside the little stand that held his only possessions. The watchman missed him and found him asleep in the chapel in one of the seats, with the parrot drowsing on the altar.
Rose—who was the stout woman—came early. She wore a purple dress, with a hat to match, and purple gloves. The ward eyed her with scorn and a certain deference. She greeted the Avenue Girl effusively behind the screens that surrounded the bed.
"Well, you do look pinched!" she said. "Ain't it a mercy it didn't get to your face! Pretty well chewed up, aren't you?"
"Do you want to see it?"
"Good land! No! Now look here, you've got to put me wise or I'll blow the whole thing. What's my little stunt? The purple's all right for it, isn't it?"
"All you need to do," said the Avenue Girl wearily, "is to say that I've been sewing for you since I came to the city. And—if you can say anything good——"
"I'll do that all right," Rose affirmed. She put a heavy silver bag on the bedside table and lowered herself into a chair. "You leave it to me, dearie. There ain't anything I won't say."
The ward was watching with intense interest. Old Maggie, working the creaking bandage machine, was palpitating with excitement. From her chair by the door she could see the elevator and it was she who announced the coming of destiny.
"Here comes the father," she confided to the end of the ward. "Guess the mother couldn't come."
It was not the father though. It was a young man who hesitated in the doorway, hat in hand—a tall young man, with a strong and not unhandsome face. The Probationer, rather twitchy from excitement and anxiety, felt her heart stop and race on again. Jerry, without a doubt!
The meeting was rather constrained. The girl went whiter than her pillows and half closed her eyes; but Rose, who would have been terrified at the sight of an elderly farmer, was buoyantly relieved and at her ease.
"I'm sorry," said Jerry. "I—we didn't realise it had been so bad. The folks are well; but—I thought I'd better come. They're expecting you back home."
"It was nice of you to come," said the girl, avoiding his eyes. "I—I'm getting along fine."
"I guess introductions ain't necessary," put in Rose briskly. "I'm Mrs. Sweeney. She's been living with me—working for me, sewing. She's sure a fine sewer! She made this suit I'm wearing."
Poor Rose, with "custom made" on every seam of the purple! But Jerry was hardly listening. His eyes were on the girl among the pillows.
"I see," said Jerry slowly. "You haven't said yet, Elizabeth. Are you going home?"
"If—they want me."
"Of course they want you!" Again Rose: "Why shouldn't they? You've been a good girl and a credit to any family. If they say anything mean to you you let me know."
"They'll not be mean to her. I'm sure they'll want to write and thank you. If you'll just give me your address, Mrs. Sweeney——"
He had a pencil poised over a notebook. Rose hesitated. Then she gave her address on the Avenue, with something of bravado in her voice. After all, what could this country-store clerk know of the Avenue? Jerry wrote it down carefully.
"Sweeney—with an e?" he asked politely.
"With three e's," corrected Rose, and got up with dignity.
"Well, good-bye, dearie," she said. "You've got your friends now and you don't need me. I guess you've had your lesson about going to sleep with a cig—about being careless with fire. Drop me a postal when you get the time."
She shook hands with Jerry and rustled and jingled down the ward, her chin well up. At the door she encountered Old Maggie, her arms full of bandages.
"How's the Avenue?" asked Old Maggie.
Rose, however, like all good actresses, was still in the part as she made her exit. She passed Old Maggie unheeding, severe respectability in every line of her figure, every nod of her purple plumes. She was still in the part when she encountered the Probationer.
"It's going like a house afire!" she said. "He swallowed it all—hook and bait! And—oh, yes, I've got something for you." She went down into her silver bag and pulled out a roll of bills. "I've felt meaner'n a dog every time I've thought of you buying that parrot. I've got a different view of life—maybe—from yours; but I'm not taking candy from a baby."
When the Probationer could speak Rose was taking herself and the purple into the elevator and waving her a farewell.
"Good-bye!" she said. "If ever you get stuck again just call on me."
With Rose's departure silence fell behind the screen. The girl broke it first.
"They're all well, are they?"
"All well. Your mother's been kind of poorly. She thought you'd write to her." The girl clenched her hands under the bedclothing. She could not speak just then. "There's nothing much happened. The post office burned down last summer. They're building a new one. And—I've been building. I tore down the old place."
"Are you going to be married, Jerry?"
"Some day, I suppose. I'm not worrying about it. It was something to do; it kept me from—thinking."
The girl looked at him and something gripped her throat. He knew! Rose might have gone down with her father, but Jerry knew! Nothing was any use. She knew his rigid morality, his country-bred horror of the thing she was. She would have to go back—to Rose and the others. He would never take her home.
Down at the medicine closet the Probationer was carbolising thermometers and humming a little song. Everything was well. The Avenue Girl was with her people and at seven o'clock the Probationer was going to the roof—to meet some one who was sincerely repentant and very meek.
In the convalescent ward next door they were singing softly—one of those spontaneous outbursts that have their origin in the hearts of people and a melody all their own:
'Way down upon de S'wanee Ribber,
Far, far away,
Dere's wha my heart is turnin' ebber—
Dere's wha de old folks stay.
It penetrated back of the screen, where the girl lay in white wretchedness—and where Jerry, with death in his eyes, sat rigid in his chair.
"Jerry?"
"Yes."
"I—I guess I've been pretty far away."
"Don't tell me about it!" A cry, this.
"You used to care for me, Jerry. I'm not expecting that now; but if you'd only believe me when I say I'm sorry——"
"I believe you, Elizabeth."
"One of the nurses here says——Jerry, won't you look at me?" With some difficulty he met her eyes. "She says that because one starts wrong one needn't go wrong always. I was ashamed to write. She made me do it."
She held out an appealing hand, but he did not take it. All his life he had built up a house of morality. Now his house was crumbling and he stood terrified in the wreck. "It isn't only because I've been hurt that I—am sorry," she went on. "I loathed it! I'd have finished it all long ago, only—I was afraid."
"I would rather have found you dead!"
There is a sort of anesthesia of misery. After a certain amount of suffering
the brain ceases to feel. Jerry watched the white curtain of the screen swaying in the wind, settled his collar, glanced at his watch. He was quite white. The girl's hand still lay on the coverlet. Somewhere back in the numbed brain that would think only little thoughts he knew that if he touched that small, appealing hand the last wall of his house would fall.
It was the Dummy, after all, who settled that for him. He came with his afternoon offering of cracked ice just then and stood inside the screen, staring. Perhaps he had known all along how it would end, that this, his saint, would go—and not alone—to join the vanishing circle that had ringed the inner circle of his heart. Just at the time it rather got him. He swayed a little and clutched at the screen; but the next moment he had placed the bowl on the stand and stood smiling down at the girl.
"The only person in the world who believes in me!" said the girl bitterly. "And he's a fool!"
The Dummy smiled into her eyes. In his faded, childish eyes there was the eternal sadness of his kind, eternal tenderness, and the blur of one who has looked much into a far distance. Suddenly he bent over and placed the man's hand over the girl's.
The last wall was down! Jerry buried his face in the white coverlet.
The interne was pacing the roof anxiously. Golden sunset had faded to lavender—to dark purple—to night.
The Probationer came up at last—not a probationer now, of course; but she had left off her cap and was much less stately.
"I'm sorry," she explained; "but I've been terribly busy. It went off so well!"
"Of course—if you handled it."
"You know—don't you?—it was the lover who came. He looks so strong and good—oh, she is safe now!"
"That's fine!" said the interne absently. They were sitting on the parapet now and by sliding his hand along he found her fingers. "Isn't it a glorious evening?" He had the fingers pretty close by that time; and suddenly gathering them up he lifted the hand to his lips.
"Such a kind little hand!" he said over it. "Such a dear, tender little hand! My hand!" he said, rather huskily.
Down in the courtyard the Dummy sat with the parrot on his knee. At his feet the superintendent's dog lay on his side and dreamed of battle. The Dummy's eyes lingered on the scar the Avenue Girl had bandaged—how long ago!
His eyes wandered to the window with the young John among the lilies. In the stable were still the ambulance horses that talked to him without words. And he had the parrot. If he thought at all it was that his Father was good and that, after all, he was not alone. The parrot edged along his knee and eyed him with saturnine affection.
THE MIRACLE
I
Big Mary was sweeping the ward with a broom muffled in a white bag. In the breeze from the open windows, her blue calico wrapper ballooned about her and made ludicrous her frantic thrusts after the bits of fluff that formed eddies under the beds and danced in the spring air.
She finished her sweeping, and, with the joyous scraps captured in her dust-pan, stood in the doorway, critically surveying the ward. It was brilliantly clean and festive; on either side a row of beds, fresh white for the day; on the centre table a vase of Easter lilies, and on the record-table near the door a potted hyacinth. The Nurse herself wore a bunch of violets tucked in her apron-band. One of the patients had seen the Junior Medical give them to her. The Eastern sun, shining across the beds, made below them, on the polished floor, black islands of shadow in a gleaming sea of light.
And scattered here and there, rocking in chairs or standing at windows, enjoying the Sunday respite from sewing or the bandage-machine, women, grotesque and distorted of figure, in attitudes of weariness and expectancy, with patient eyes awaited their crucifixion. Behind them, in the beds, a dozen perhaps who had come up from death and held the miracle in their arms.
The miracles were small and red, and inclined to feeble and ineffectual wrigglings. Fists were thrust in the air and brought down on smiling, pale mother faces. With tight-closed eyes and open mouths, each miracle squirmed and nuzzled until the mother would look with pleading eyes at the Nurse. And the Nurse would look severe and say:
"Good gracious, Annie Petowski, surely you don't want to feed that infant again! Do you want the child to have a dilated stomach?"
Fear of that horrible and mysterious condition, a dilated stomach, would restrain Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara for a time. With the wisdom of the serpent, she would give the child her finger to suck—a finger so white, so clean, so soft in the last week that she was lost in admiration of it. And the child would take hold, all its small body set rigid in lines of desperate effort. Then it would relax suddenly, and spew out the finger, and the quiet hospital air would be rent with shrieks of lost illusion. Then Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara would watch the Nurse with open hostility and defiance, and her rustling exit from the ward would be followed by swift cessation of cries, and, close to Annie or Jennie or Maggie's heart, there would be small ecstatic gurglings—and peace.
In her small domain the Nurse was queen. From her throne at the record-table, she issued proclamations of baths and fine combs, of clean bedding and trimmed nails, of tea and toast, of regular hours for the babies. From this throne, also, she directed periodic searches of the bedside stands, unearthing scraps of old toast, decaying fruit, candy, and an occasional cigarette. From the throne, too, she sent daily a blue-wrappered and pig-tailed brigade to the kitchen, armed with knives, to attack the dinner potatoes.
But on this Easter morning, the queen looked tired and worn. Her crown, a starched white cap, had slipped back on her head, and her blue-and-white dress was stained and spotted. Even her fresh apron and sleevelets did not quite conceal the damage. She had come in for a moment at the breakfast hour, and asked the Swede, Ellen Ollman, to serve the breakfast for her; and at half past eight she had appeared again for a moment, and had turned down one of the beds and put hot-water bottles in it.
The ward ate little breakfast. It was always nervous when a case was "on." Excursions down the corridor by one or another of the blue-wrappered brigade brought back bits of news:
"The doctor is smoking a cigarette in the hall;" or, "Miss Jones, the day assistant, has gone in;" and then, with bated breath, "The doctor with the red mustache has come"—by which it was known that things were going badly, the staff man having been summoned.
Suggestions of Easter began to appear even in this isolated ward, denied to all visitors except an occasional husband, who was usually regarded with a mixture of contempt and scepticism by the other women. But now the lilies came, and after them a lame young woman who played the organ in the chapel on Sundays, and who afterward went from ward to ward, singing little songs and accompanying herself on the mandolin she carried with her. The lame young woman seated herself in the throne-chair and sang an Easter anthem, and afterward limped around and placed a leaflet and a spray of lilies-of-the-valley on each bedside stand.
She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as "Liz" in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse. Elizabeth always read the tracts. She had been there four times, and knew all the nurses and nearly all the doctors. "Liz" had been known, in a shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the queen herself in regalness and authority.
The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed. "Shall I put one here?" she asked, fingering a tract.
Liz meditated majestically.
"Well, I guess I would," she said. "Not that it'll do any good."
"Why?"
Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.
"She's not getting on very well," she said; "and, even if she gets through, she won't read the tract. She held her fingers in her ears last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here. She's young. Says she hopes she and the kid'll both die."
The mandolin-player was not
unversed in the psychology of the ward.
"Then she—isn't married?" she asked, and because she was young, she flushed painfully.
Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her eyes.
"Well, no," she admitted; "I guess that's what's worrying her. She's a fool, she is. She can put the kid in a home. That's what I do. Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble? Wouldn't he be always throwing it up to her?"
The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy of life.
"Have—have you a baby here?" she asked timidly.
"Have I!" said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed. She turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red atom, so like the others that only mother love could have distinguished it.
"This is mine," she said airily. "Funny little mutt, isn't he?"
The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.
"He—he's very little," she said.
"Little!" said Liz. "He holds the record here for the last six months—eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived. The little devil!"
She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil's sleeping form. The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing to say.
"Does—does he look like his father?" she asked timidly. But apparently Liz did not hear. She had moved down the ward. The mandolin-player heard only a snicker from Annie Petowski's bed, and, vaguely uncomfortable, she moved toward the door.
Liz was turning down the cover of the empty bed, and the Nurse, with tired but shining eyes, was wheeling in the operating table.
The mandolin-player stepped aside to let the table pass. From the blankets she had a glimpse of a young face, bloodless and wan—of hurt, defiant blue eyes. She had never before seen life so naked, so relentless. She shrank back against the wall, a little sick. Then she gathered up her tracts and her mandolin, and limped down the hall.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 430
