Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  Succeed she would and must. Her inborn obstinacy, her sturdy refusal to yield her ground, whatever it should be, her stubborn power of resistance, her tenacity of her chosen course, came to her aid as she drew swiftly near to the spot whereon the battle would be fought. Mentally she braced herself, holding back with all her fine, hard-tempered, native strength. No, she would not yield the life to the Enemy; no, she would not give up; no, she would not recede. Let the Enemy do his worst — she was strong against his efforts.

  At Medford, which she reached toward four in the afternoon, after an hour’s ride from the City, she found a conveyance waiting for her, and was driven rapidly through streets bordered with villas and closely shaven lawns to a fair-sized country seat on the outskirts of the town. The housekeeper met her at the door with the information that the doctor was, at the moment, in the sick-room, and had left orders that the nurse should be brought to him the moment she arrived. The housekeeper showed Lloyd the way to the second landing, knocking upon the half-open door at the end of the hall, and ushering her in without waiting for an answer.

  Lloyd took in the room at a glance — the closely drawn curtains, the screen between the bed and the windows, the doctor standing on the hearth-rug, and the fever-inflamed face of the patient on the pillow. Then all her power of self-repression could not keep her from uttering a smothered exclamation.

  For she, the woman who, with all the savage energy of him, Bennett loved, had, at peril of her life, come to nurse Bennett’s nearest friend, the man of all others dear to him — Richard Ferriss.

  VI.

  Two days after Dr. Pitts had brought Ferriss to his country house in the outskirts of Medford he had been able to diagnose his sickness as typhoid fever, and at once had set about telegraphing the fact to Bennett. Then it had occurred to him that he did not know where Bennett had gone. Bennett had omitted notifying him of his present whereabouts, and, acting upon Dr. Pitts’ advice, had hidden himself away from everybody. Neither at his club nor at his hotel, where his mail accumulated in extraordinary quantities, had any forwarding address been left. Bennett would not even know that Ferriss had been moved to Medford. So much the worse. It could not be helped. There was nothing for the doctor to do but to leave Bennett in ignorance and go ahead and fight for the life of Ferriss as best he could. Pitts arranged for a brother physician to take over his practice, and devoted himself entirely to Ferriss. And Ferriss sickened and sickened, and went steadily from bad to worse. The fever advanced regularly to a certain stage, a stage of imminent danger, and there paused. Rarely had Pitts been called upon to fight a more virulent form of the disease.

  What made matters worse was that Ferriss hung on for so long a time without change one way or another. Pitts had long since been convinced of ulceration in the membrane of the intestines, but it astonished him that this symptom persisted so long without signs either of progressing or diminishing. The course of the disease was unusually slow. The first nurse had already had time to sicken and die; a second had been infected, and yet Ferriss “hung on,” neither sinking nor improving, yet at every hour lying perilously near death. It was not often that death and life locked horns for so long, not often that the chance was so even. Many was the hour, many was the moment, when a hair would have turned the balance, and yet the balance was preserved.

  At her abrupt recognition of Ferriss, in this patient whom she had been summoned to nurse, and whose hold upon life was so pitifully weak, Lloyd’s heart gave a great leap and then sank ominously in her breast. Her first emotion was one of boundless self-reproach. Why had she not known of this? Why had she not questioned Bennett more closely as to his friend’s sickness? Might she not have expected something like this? Was not typhoid the one evil to be feared and foreseen after experiences such as Ferriss had undergone — the fatigue and privations of the march over the ice, and the subsequent months aboard the steam whaler, with its bad food, its dirt, and its inevitable overcrowding?

  And while she had been idling in the country, this man, whom she had known since her girlhood better and longer than any of her few acquaintances, had been struck down, and day by day had weakened and sickened and wasted, until now, at any hour, at any moment, the life might be snuffed out like the fight of a spent candle. What a miserable incompetent had she been! That day in the park when she had come upon him, so weak and broken and far spent, why had she not, with all her training and experience, known that even then the flame was flickering down to the socket, that a link in the silver chain was weakening? Now, perhaps, it was too late. But quick her original obstinacy rose up in protest. No! she would not yield the life. No, no, no; again and a thousand times no! He belonged to her. Others she had saved, others far less dear to her than Ferriss. Her last patient — the little girl — she had caught back from death at the eleventh hour, and of all men would she not save Ferriss? In such sickness as this it was the nurse and not the doctor who must be depended upon. And, once again, never so strong, never so fine, never so glorious, her splendid independence, her pride in her own strength, her indomitable self-reliance leaped in her breast, leaped and stood firm, hard as tempered steel, head to the Enemy, daring the assault, defiant, immovable, unshaken in its resolve, unconquerable in the steadfast tenacity of its purpose.

  The story that Ferriss had told to Bennett, that uncalled-for and inexplicable falsehood, was a thing forgotten. Death stood at the bed-head, and in that room the little things of life had no place. The king was holding court, and the swarm of small, everyday issues, like a crowd of petty courtiers, were not admitted to his presence. Ferriss’ life was in danger. Lloyd saw no more than that. At once she set about the work.

  In a few rapid sentences exchanged in low voices between her and the doctor Lloyd made herself acquainted with the case.

  “We’ve been using the ice-pack and wet-pack to bring down the temperature in place of the cold bath,” the doctor explained. “I’m afraid of pericarditis.”

  “Quinine?” inquired Lloyd.

  “From twenty to forty grains in the morning and evening. Here’s the temperature chart for the last week. If we reach this point in axilla again—” he indicated one hundred and two degrees with a thumb-nail— “we’ll have to risk the cold bath, but only in that case.”

  “And the tympanites?”

  Dr. Pitts put his chin in the air.

  “Grave — there’s an intestinal ulcer, no doubt of it, and if it perforates — well, we can send for the undertaker then.”

  “Has he had hemorrhages?”

  “Two in the first week, but not profuse — he seemed to rally fairly well afterward. We have been injecting ether in case of anemia. Really, Miss Searight, the case is interesting, but wicked, wicked as original sin. Killed off my first nurse out of hand — good little boy, conscientious enough; took no care of himself; ate his meals in the sick-room against my wishes; off he went — dicrotic pulse, diarrhea, vomiting, hospital, thrombosis of pulmonary artery, pouf, requiescat.”

  “And Miss Wakeley?”

  “Knocked under yesterday, and she was fairly saturated with creolin night and morning. I don’t know how it happened.... Well, God for us all. Here he is — that’s the point for us.” He glanced toward the bed, and for the third time Lloyd looked at the patient.

  Ferriss was in a quiet delirium, and, at intervals, from behind his lips, dry and brown and fissured, there came the sounds of low and indistinct muttering. Barring a certain prominence of the cheek-bones, his face was not very wasted, but its skin was a strange, dusky pallor. The cold pack was about his head like a sort of caricatured crown.

  “Well,” repeated Pitts in a moment, “I’ve been waiting for you to come to get a little rest. Was up all last night. Suppose you take over charge.”

  Lloyd nodded her head, removing her hat and gloves, making herself ready. Pitts gave her some final directions, and left her alone in the sick-room. For the moment there was nothing to do for the patient. Lloyd put on her hospital slippers and moved sil
ently about the room, preparing for the night, and making some few changes in the matter of light and ventilation. Then for a while the medicine occupied her attention, and she was at some pains to carefully sort out the antiseptic and disinfectants from the drugs themselves. These latter she arranged on a table by themselves — studying the labels — assuring herself of their uses. Quinine for the regular morning and evening doses, sulphonal and trional for insomnia, ether for injections in case of anemia after hemorrhage, morphine for delirium, citrite of caffeine for weakness of the heart, tincture of valerian for the tympanites, bismuth to relieve nausea and vomiting, and the crushed ice wrapped in flannel cloths for the cold pack in the event of hyperpyrexia.

  Later in the evening she took the temperature in the armpit, noted the condition of the pulse, and managed to get Ferriss — still in his quiet, muttering delirium — to drink a glass of peptonised milk. She administered the quinine, reading the label, as was her custom, three times, once as she took it up, again as she measured the dose, and a last time as she returned the bottle to its place. Everything she did, every minute change in Ferriss’s condition, she entered upon a chart, so that in the morning when Dr. Pitts should relieve her he could grasp the situation at a glance.

  The night passed without any but the expected variations of the pulse and temperature, though toward daylight Lloyd could fancy that Ferriss, for a few moments, came out of his delirium and was conscious of his surroundings. For a few seconds his eyes seemed to regain something of their intelligence, and his glance moved curiously about the room. But Lloyd, sitting near the foot-board of the bed, turned her head from him. It was not expedient that Ferriss should recognise her now.

  Lloyd could not but commend the wisdom of bringing Ferriss to Dr. Pitts’s own house in so quiet a place as Medford. The doctor risked nothing. He was without a family, the only other occupants of the house being the housekeeper and cook. On more than one occasion, when an interesting case needed constant watching, Pitts had used his house as a sanatorium. Quiet as the little village itself was, the house was removed some little distance from its outskirts. The air was fine and pure. The stillness, the calm, the unbroken repose, was almost Sabbath-like. In the early watches of the night, just at the turn of the dawn, Lloyd heard the faint rumble of a passing train at the station nearly five miles away. For hours that and the prolonged stridulating of the crickets were the only sounds. Then at last, while it was yet dark, a faint chittering of waking birds began from under the eaves and from the apple-trees in the yard about the house. Lloyd went to the window, and, drawing aside the curtains, stood there for a moment looking out. She could see part of the road leading to the town, and, in the distance, the edge of the town itself, a few well-kept country residences of suburban dwellers of the City, and, farther on, a large, rectangular, brick building with cupola and flagstaff, perhaps the public school or the bank or the Odd Fellows’ Hall. Nearer by were fields and corners of pasture land, with here and there the formless shapes of drowsing cows. One of these, as Lloyd watched, changed position, and she could almost hear the long, deep breath that accompanied the motion. Far off, miles upon miles, so it seemed, a rooster was crowing at exact intervals. All at once, and close at hand, another answered — a gay, brisk carillon that woke the echoes in an instant. For the first time Lloyd noticed a pale, dim belt of light low in the east.

  Toward eight o’clock in the morning the doctor came to relieve her, and while he was examining the charts and she was making her report for the night the housekeeper announced breakfast.

  “Go down to your breakfast, Miss Searight,” said the doctor. “I’ll stay here the while. The housekeeper will show you to your room.”

  But before breakfasting Lloyd went to the room the housekeeper had set apart for her — a different one than had been occupied by either of the previous nurses — changed her dress, and bathed her face and hands in a disinfecting solution. When she came out of her room the doctor met her in the hall; his hat and stick were in his hand. “He has gone to sleep,” he informed her, “and is resting quietly. I am going to get a mouthful of fresh air along the road. The housekeeper is with him. If he wakes she’ll call you. I will not be gone fifteen minutes. I’ve not been out of the house for five days, and there’s no danger.”

  Breakfast had been laid in what the doctor spoke of as the glass-room. This was an enclosed veranda, one side being of glass and opening by French windows directly upon a little lawn that sloped away under the apple-trees to the road. It was a charming apartment, an idea of a sister of Dr. Pitts, who at one time had spent two years at Medford. Lloyd breakfasted here alone, and it was here that Bennett found her.

  The one public carriage of Medford, a sort of four-seated carryall, that met all the trains at the depot, had driven to the gate at the foot of the yard, and had pulled up, the horses reeking and blowing. Even before it had stopped, a tall, square-shouldered man had alighted, but it was not until he was half-way up the gravel walk that Lloyd had recognised him. Bennett caught sight of her at the same moment, and strode swiftly across the lawn and came into the breakfast-room by one of the open French windows. At once the room seemed to shrink in size; his first step upon the floor — a step that was almost a stamp, so eager it was, so masterful and resolute — set the panes of glass jarring in their frames. Never had Bennett seemed more out of place than in this almost dainty breakfast-room, with its small, feminine appurtenances, its fragile glassware, its pots of flowers and growing plants. The incongruous surroundings emphasized his every roughness, his every angularity. Against its background of delicate, mild tints his figure loomed suddenly colossal; the great span of his chest and shoulders seemed never so huge. His face; the great, brutal jaw, with its aggressive, bullying, forward thrust; the close-gripped lips, the contracted forehead, the small eyes, marred with the sharply defined cast, appeared never so harsh, never so massive, never so significant of the resistless, crude force of the man, his energy, his overpowering determination. As he towered there before her, one hand gripped upon a chair-back, it seemed to her that the hand had but to close to crush the little varnished woodwork to a splinter, and when he spoke Lloyd could imagine that the fine, frail china of the table vibrated to the deep-pitched bass of his voice.

  Lloyd had only to look at him once to know that Bennett was at the moment aroused and agitated to an extraordinary degree. His face was congested and flaming. Under his frown his eyes seemed flashing veritable sparks; his teeth were set; in his temple a vein stood prominent and throbbing. But Lloyd was not surprised. Bennett had, no doubt, heard of Ferriss’s desperate illness. Small wonder he was excited when the life of his dearest friend was threatened. Lloyd could ignore her own quarrel with Bennett at such a moment.

  “I am so sorry,” she began, “that you could not have known sooner. But you remember you left no address. There was—”

  “What are you doing here?” he broke in abruptly. “What is the use — why—” he paused for a moment to steady his voice— “you can’t stay here,” he went on. “Don’t you know the risk you are running? You can’t stay here another moment.”

  “That,” answered Lloyd, smiling, “is a matter that is interesting chiefly to me. I suppose you know that, Mr. Bennett.”

  “I know that you are risking your life and—”

  “And that, too, is my affair.”

  “I have made it mine,” he responded quickly. “Oh,” he exclaimed sharply, striking the back of the chair with his open palm, “why must we always be at cross-purposes with each other? I’m not good at talking. What is the use of tangling ourselves with phrases? I love you, and I’ve come out here to ask you, to beg you, you understand, to leave this house, where you are foolishly risking your life. You must do it,” he went on rapidly. “I love you too well. Your life is too much to me to allow you to hazard it senselessly, foolishly. There are other women, other nurses, who can take your place. But you are not going to stay here.”

  Lloyd felt her indignation r
ising.

  “This is my profession,” she answered, trying to keep back her anger. “I am here because it is my duty to be here.” Then suddenly, as his extraordinary effrontery dawned upon her, she exclaimed, rising to her feet: “Do I need to explain to you what I do? I am here because I choose to be here. That is enough. I don’t care to go any further with such a discussion as this.”

  “You will not leave here, then?”

  “No.”

  Bennett hesitated an instant, searching for his words, then:

  “I do not know how to ask favours. I’ve had little experience in that sort of thing. You must know how hard it is for me, and you must understand to what lengths I am driven then, when I entreat you, when I beg of you, as humbly as it is possible for me to do so, to leave this house, now — at once. There is a train to the City within the hour; some one else can take your place before noon. We can telegraph; will you go?”

  “You are absurd.”

  “Lloyd, can’t you see; don’t you understand? It’s as though I saw you rushing toward a precipice with your eyes shut.”

  “My place is here. I shall not leave.”

  But Bennett’s next move surprised her. His eagerness, his agitation left him upon the instant He took out his watch.

  “I was wrong,” he said quietly. “The next train will not go for an hour and a quarter. There is more time than I supposed.” Then, with as much gentleness as he could command, he added: “Lloyd, you are going to take that train?”

  “Now, you are becoming a little more than absurd,” she answered. “I don’t know, Mr. Bennett, whether or not you intend to be offensive, but I think you are succeeding rather well. You came to this house uninvited; you invade a gentleman’s private residence, and you attempt to meddle and to interfere with me in the practice of my profession. If you think you can impress me with heroics and declamation, please correct yourself at once. You have only succeeded in making yourself a little vulgar.”