Miss Paine came at seven o’clock and there were two hours of summer dusk in which she would sit knitting socks for her nephew in Australia. As the night came on, the beautiful peace would envelop Laskell more completely than ever. The noises in the street, the conversations of his Italian neighbors sitting on their stoops, the calls sent out to bring the children in to bed, and then just the indistinguishable, undifferentiated sounds of life—these seemed to Laskell at once full of sadness and of delight. Quite often, after Miss Debry had mentioned them, he would think at this time of day about the ailing priests in the Montreal hospital, old men soon to be finished with life.
He learned to call her Paine, dropping the Miss. Her first name, as she shyly told him, was Nerissa. She would talk whenever Laskell seemed to want her to, telling him stories of her life, and in the stories she was always called Paine with no Miss. It made her seem to Laskell that much more English. She was what he knew so well from all English books he had read. She was the family nurse or housekeeper, she was the nanny or the governess you went to visit when you were grown. She was a deeply connected person, willful and self-respecting and loyal, and she was the repository of all your childhood. In her eyes you were never innocent but you were never more than naughty or wild or inconsiderate.
Paine had nursed in a hospital in 1917 and 1918, an officers’ hospital, a great country house incredibly named “Lances,” and she had many stories about Splendid Fellows. Each one of the young officers who figured in her stories was a splendid fellow. She had a general admiration for manhood that followed tradition and built empire, and with it went a special interest in that manhood when it was in sickness or pain. Laskell had only to lie there with Paine in attendance to be himself a splendid fellow with full license to be in bed.
She taught him cribbage, bringing her own little board and pegs for the scoring, and he learned to say “one for his nobs.” At his direction she dug up an old box of chessmen and they played what she called “bumble-puppy chess.” It was really not much more than a sedate and varied kind of checkers. “There are people to whom it is practically a science,” she explained. One of her patients had so regarded the game and it was he who had taught her the elements, but he had not been able to teach her more than these. “He could usually mate me in five or six moves unless he helped me,” Paine said. “But we have our own fun, don’t we?” And Laskell gravely agreed.
The doctor was the Crooms’ Dr. Graf, a grave, broad, comfortable man, mature and Jewish and apparently humorless. It was a strange thing about him that he owned, as he told Laskell, a large bulldog. He now came only once a day, but he did that with such regularity and examined so thoroughly that Laskell began to ask questions.
“It’s never a light thing at your age,” Dr. Graf answered, “and we have to watch out for secondary complications now that the danger is over.”
“Danger? What do you mean by danger?” asked Laskell.
“What do I mean by danger? Why, what do we ever mean by danger?” said the doctor.
“You mean I could have died?”
“You could have died, and if it gives you any satisfaction, I thought you would,” Dr. Graf said, and his voice was so dry that Laskell understood that he would have to revise his opinion of Graf’s humorlessness.
The doctor went on. “Your ears are all right and your heart is all right. Perfectly. Your hair may start falling out, but it may then come back after a while.” He spoke with the casualness of a man himself long established in baldness. “What we must watch is the kidneys. I think they’re clear but I’m going to use a catheter tomorrow.”
Laskell did not know what that was.
“We tap the bladder directly, with a thin rubber tube,” the doctor said.
When the doctor had gone, Miss Debry said, “It hurts. It hurts to be catheterized.” Laskell hated to have the information from her, at once so heedlessly and with such a note of childish awe at pain.
“I’m to be catheterized tomorrow, the doctor says,” he told Paine that evening.
“Yes, naturally. I’ve wondered why he hasn’t done it before.”
“It must be awkward. Does it hurt?”
“Nuisance, yes. Yes, it does hurt rather. Stays with you too a while.”
It did hurt and it stayed with him quite a while and he felt limp and humiliated.
“That’s to make sure there are no germs,” Miss Debry explained when the doctor had finished and left with his specimen. “Did you ever see a germ?”
“No.”
“I did—I saw one once. A doctor showed it to me in the hospital, through a microscope. But I can’t say what kind it was.”
Laskell kept silent.
“I can’t say what kind it was,” said Miss Debry.
Laskell said fretfully, “Why not?”
“I can’t.”
“Didn’t he tell you what kind it was?”
“Oh, yes. He told me.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Oh, yes. But I can’t say.” And she busied herself with her paraphernalia at the table.
“You mean you won’t.”
“Yes, I won’t.”
“Why won’t you?”
“Because. Because it wouldn’t be nice.”
Laskell wondered about the depths of a mind that grew coy about saying spirochete or gonococcus. “Oh, don’t be silly,” he said in exasperation.
She had been waiting only for a little show of force and she yielded at once. “Well, then—it was a baby germ.” And she blushed, really embarrassed by having said it.
Laskell’s mind sank at the contemplation of her foolishness. It was no doubt her being Canadian, in conjunction with her mention of the sperm, that made him think of salmon, of the round translucent red eggs, of the great fish themselves with the firm pink flesh organized into one wonderful muscle with one sure instinct, of the spawning millions of salmon with their incredible redundancy of eggs, returning from the sea to the upper reaches of their home waters in a blind culminating energy in which love and death were one.
Miss Debry was as beautiful and complete as one of those great fish. Or she would be, if she did not have her foolish little social mind that had to be served by her powers of conversation. She was wonderfully beautiful as she stood there with her neck still touched by the pink of her blush and her deep dark eyes lowered in the mild unimportant shame she had contrived for her own purposes. But Laskell simply did not have the violence to fix on that superb physical being of hers and pass over the foolish triviality of a mind acquired in provincial schools and hospitals. Even in health he had never had that much violence and simplicity.
But there she was, now brought into the sexual ambit and beginning to glow with it. And Laskell himself was now enough in it for him to have to say something. “Your cap is very pretty,” he said crossly.
It was the first personal notice she had had from him and she turned toward him to take it with the practical self-consciousness of a small-town belle. “Do you like it?” she said. “It’s the cap of St. Michael’s Hospital. Every hospital has a distinctive cap,” she said as if she were repeating a lecture she had heard on the etiquette and ritual of her profession. “And St. Michael’s is by far the prettiest, I think.” She turned her head this way and that to let Laskell see it from all angles. “They give it to you when you graduate. ‘Capping’ it’s called.” She bent her head for him to see how it was fashioned on top. “And they give you this pin, too.”
The bodice of her uniform was fastened with a large round pin of blue enamel and gold. She sat down beside him on the bed so that he could see the emblem and device on the pin, leaning forward for him to examine it. She unfastened the pin and gave it to him. The V of her bodice opened somewhat wider.
It was at that moment that Paine put her head in at the door with a chirpy “Good evening.”
“One of the first rules,” Paine said as she put the thermometer into Laskell’s mouth just before his supper, “one of the f
irst rules is that you do not sit on the patient’s bed, unless to raise the head for feeding. No Edinburgh-trained nurse would any more think of it! It’s an ill-conditioned Canadian thing to do. Put that thermometer back in your mouth.”
She whisked out to fetch the tray. She came back with the tray and set it down on the dresser, read the thermometer and entered the reading on the chart.
“She wanted to show me her hospital pin,” Laskell said.
Paine stood holding the tray, looking down at him. “Show you her pin!” she said with a finality of scorn.
And then a rich and wicked smile broke over the dutiful face. She said with a large concessive admiration, taking in, in a broad and more than tolerant view, the way of the world, “Well, I’ve got to admit that they looked as if they were worth showing.”
And she laid the tray across his knees.
It was so. Miss Debry’s breasts seen under the too elaborate lace beneath the starched white cotton bodice, seen when the neck of her dress was unfastened, these were the objects of Paine’s judgment. It was a judgment made without any bitterness or jealousy. It did not bring into question or comparison Paine’s own meager bosom. She made it without reference to anything but Laskell. She was judging as a young man judges. She knew what young men thought worth looking at, what the splendid fellows liked. It was a natural part of their being so splendid. And they ought to have what they wanted—it was as if she had made Laskell the free offer of Miss Debry’s remarkable charms. The offer made, it was permanent, and therefore Laskell felt no need to accept it for the present.
If Laskell woke thirsty in the night, Paine knew it at once, as if she could hear his eyelids parting. When she had given him the drink, holding up his head with her arm beneath the pillow, she would ask, “Enough?” as though she wanted him to consider before he answered. He would think carefully whether he had enough before he said, “Yes, thank you, Paine.” She always took the occasion of his waking to sponge his face and neck with a tepid washcloth. It felt like a mask being removed and he would murmur contentedly, “Thank you, Paine,” asleep before she had finished toweling his face.
Laskell’s kidneys, said Dr. Graf, would need watching for some time, but at present they were clear. There was no longer need for two nurses. One nurse on duty through the twenty-four hours would do.
“And so you can let Miss Paine go,” said Dr. Graf.
“Why let Miss Paine go?”
Dr. Graf shrugged. “Just the usual way. The usual thing is to keep the day-nurse and let the night-nurse go. But if you prefer—”
“I’d rather keep Miss Paine.”
“She’s more efficient?”
“Yes. And quieter.”
“The other one talks too much?”
“Incessantly.”
“I’ll see if I can manage it without tears,” said Dr. Graf.
Laskell noted what seemed to be an expression about the doctor’s eyebrows. It perhaps meant that Dr. Graf thought it odd that Laskell should prefer to spend the days of his convalescence with Miss Paine rather than with Miss Debry. It even seemed as if the doctor, had he been in the same situation, would have chosen Miss Debry. Laskell tried for a moment to think of Miss Debry as she might appear to him when health returned. But having thought, he said to Dr. Graf, “I’d be very grateful if you would.”
Dr. Graf was not successful in managing it without tears. Miss Debry departed with scarcely a good-by said and Laskell was left with Paine.
He had no visitors. The quarantine sign was still on the door of the apartment. Those of his friends who had children could not, of course, think of coming. Paine reminded him of this when she thought he might be feeling lonely and neglected. A few of his friends who had no children did try to brave the sign, but Paine would not let them see her patient. At most she would let them enter the tiny vestibule. “You may call in to him from here,” she would say, and a friend would call in an embarrassed voice, “Hello, John, how are you?” And Laskell would call back in a formally cheerful way, disliking the situation, “Oh, fine, fine.” Then the summer deepened and there were fewer people in town and no visitors.
If Laskell ever had daydreams or thoughts of the future, they were about Paine. He thought of how he would keep his connection with her even when he was well. He would send her a present every Christmas. Now and then, say twice a year, he would take her to dinner and then to a theater. These evenings would be pretty dull evenings, relieved only by the shrewd things Paine would now and then say. But Laskell looked forward to them despite, or even because of, this dullness. Surrounded by the bustle and inclemency of winter—he always saw the scene with a wet snow falling—they would be quiet and restorative, a part of his life that his clever friends would not understand or know about, and so much the better for that.
Most of the time he lay there in his new sensation of awareness, the delicately pulsating apperception not of his mind only but of his whole being. This strange sensation was unlike anything he had ever felt before, although he sometimes thought it might have much to do with everything he would feel in the future.
It was Paine who led him to think that what he felt was love. She did not suggest this directly. But love, she said, was what he felt toward the remarkable flower which, at the end of his time in bed, so engaged his attention.
“You seem,” Paine said dryly, “to be having quite a love affair with that flower.”
Her dryness was a sympathetic one, as if the flower were a girl. It was the dryness with which people point out the natural weakness of human nature without reproving it, a tone often used about love. She was getting him ready for the night and she transferred the glass with the flower in it from the bed-table to the dresser with the same brusque but friendly air that she might have used to an attractive and very well brought up girl-visitor who, however charming she was, must now be sent packing so that the routine of the sickroom could go on.
The rose, like the others it had outlasted, was not red, not yellow, nor the “tea” color, but a strange new tone, a flushed and dusty pink, tawny and bronze. It drew Laskell as he had never been drawn by anything before. The dryness of Paine’s tone, together with her expressed admiration for the splendid fellows, suggested at first that she was mocking him. A high and continued regard for a rose was probably not to be considered manly. But from Paine’s manner it would appear that an involvement with a flower was quite the expectable thing in a splendid fellow. It was apparently an amiable weakness, as easily to be understood as gambling away a month’s pay or kissing a pretty probationary nurse or getting drunk.
It was, of course, a very feminine-looking flower with its depths and involutions of shape, with its color of tawny-pink. It seemed to have some secret to which he could penetrate. But of course there was no secret. There was nothing within or behind or beneath what he saw. The strength and continuity of his feeling was all the knowledge he would get. Part of the knowledge was the sense that the knowledge was limited. And eventually the flower died, and it amused and pleased Laskell that Paine announced the event by saying, “Well, Rosenkavalier, your days are ended.” She had a certain small store of surprising references which he could not account for in her general lack of education.
Now and then the world broke in on Laskell by way of the telephone. Arthur Croom called from the country to see if things were going well, and Paine came in beaming from her conversation to tell him about it.
“Oh, I do like that Mr. Croom,” she said. “He’s so lovely and straightforward. What is his line of work?”
“He’s a professor of economics,” Laskell said.
“A don!” said Paine. “But he seems so young.”
Don was scarcely the word for Arthur. Arthur quite destroyed the notion of donnishness with its meaning of retreat and isolation. As for his being young and a professor, that was at present one of the great things about Arthur. At twenty-eight, Arthur Croom was the political man whom the nation had not had in sufficient numbers. He was the m
an in whom the drive for power did not destroy intelligence and character. Henry Adams would have understood Arthur Croom and envied his chances. His political nature was not signalized by anything proconsular or hard or merely executive. On the other hand, he had a resistant toughness about the way of the world. But this was not cynicism; rather, it was the armor of idealism. Of Arthur’s idealism there could be no doubt, though it did not go with a lively sensibility, and among Laskell’s friends idealism and sensibility were usually found in company. There was strong talk of a Washington job for Arthur Croom, and this was not surprising. Laskell thought of his friend as the kind of man who was going to dominate the near future—not the far future when the apocalyptic days would come, but the time now at hand before things got very bad.
He tried to tell Paine something about this remarkable friend of his. He succeeded fairly well, for Paine was ready to appreciate the kind of person Arthur Croom was. “And so devoted to you!” she said. It was not possible to misinterpret the remark. She did not mean that it was surprising that Arthur Croom with all his gifts and promise should be devoted to Laskell. What she probably meant was that devotion was another of Arthur’s gifts, for she added, “Ah, he’ll not be a don for long.” She loved action above all things.
On another day Paine said, “A man, name of Maxwell, just phoned and said he had to see you at once. I said he couldn’t come, of course.”
“Maxwell? Are you sure?” Laskell said. “Was it Maxim?”
“Yes, Maxim, that’s right. He said it was important, but when I asked if he wanted me to give you a message, he said no.”
If Arthur Croom was the man of the near future, Gifford Maxim was the man of the far future, the bloody, moral, apocalyptic future that was sure to come. Once Laskell’s sense of the contradiction between his two friends had been puzzling and intense. But now it was possible to hold Gifford Maxim and Arthur Croom in his mind with no awareness of contradiction at all. He was able to see them both as equally, right was perhaps not the word, but valid or necessary. They contradicted each other, the administrator and the revolutionary, and perhaps, eventually, one would kill the other. Yet now Laskell saw how they complemented each other to make up the world of politics.
The Middle of the Journey Page 9
