Hospital Corridors

by Mary Burchell.

  For a moment, Dr. Lanyon’s strong, clever, life-saving hands seemed to come before her, and she had the fantastic impression that he might hold out one of them for an instrument and no one would be there to supply it.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said almost impatiently to Morton. “One doesn’t toss aside one’s duties and obligations like that.”

  “But, darling, you can nurse anywhere. It doesn’t have to be in Canada, where I can’t see you. It can easily be in London,” he said, half amused, half exasperated.

  “I prefer it to be in Canada,” Madeline retorted, suddenly knowing that she preferred it to be in the Dominion Hospital, and in Dr. Lanyon’s operating theatre, and in the radius of his personality and his genius. How she had supposed she could leave—

  And then, with an almost physical shock, the exact meaning of what Morton had said clicked into place.

  He had told her she could nurse in London, offering as a bait the fact that she could see him there. She could nurse in London. She could take this preposterous, unprecedented course of deserting the Dominion and flying to London, for the sole purpose of being handy if he wanted to see her. Cold, calm rage and disgust took hold of Madeline.

  “I think,” she said gently, “that you under-estimated my devotion to my work here. When you told me on the telephone that there was something you must discuss with me, was this what you had in mind, Morton—the idea that I should some how manage to free myself from my obligations at the Dominion and come back to London to nurse there?”

  “Of course. You don’t really want this separation any more than I do, do you?” He smiled at her with the glance that had once fascinated and faintly confused her. “If I cut through the tangle of formalities for you—”

  “Morton, don’t,” Madeline said quietly. “You embarrass me. I didn’t know you were so stupid.”

  “Stupid?” He flushed darkly at the word, evidently finding it disagreeably novel in application to himself.

  “Yes—stupid,” Madeline repeated. “But you’re not the only one,” she added, with a little spurt of self-disgust. “Maybe we have both rather glamorized this very nice friendship. But, now that circumstances have quite naturally ended it, let’s not give it a significance it never had.”

  “Madeline!” He was astounded and, for once, completely nonplussed. “Don’t talk in that cold, clinical way. What’s happened to you? Perhaps I sprang this on you too suddenly. But you know you love me and—”

  “No,” she said quite gently, “I do not love you, Morton. But I’ll be more honest with you than you’ve been with me. It was not until this evening that I was certain of the fact. Now it’s as certain to me as tomorrow’s dawn. You’ve been amusing and charming and great fun. I think perhaps you always are. But there’s nothing more to it than that.”

  “You mean you’re in love with that poseur Nat Lanyon,” he flung at her, and for a moment his eyes were so hard and bright that she hardly knew him.

  Then suddenly it came to her that Morton was not so stupid, after all. Out of the mud and ruins of this evening of misunderstanding and disillusionment, he had dredged the one diamond of naked truth. She loved Nat Lanyon.

  “I don’t think it’s much good our talking like this to each other,” she heard herself say very calmly. “I don’t even think there’s much point in my staying at all.” She got up and reached for her coat.

  “Madeline!” Even while he held it for her he continued to argue. “Darling, don’t be so angry and impulsive. If you’ll only listen—”

  “I’m not being impulsive.” She looked over her shoulder at him. “I’m not even very angry, Morton, for we are what we are. But you and I have said all there is to say to each other. Let’s bring down the curtain and call it a day.”

  To her own surprise, she even reached up and kissed his cheek. Then she turned and went out of the restaurant, just as the astonished waiter came hurrying up with their meal.

  For a while she walked, hardly knowing or caring where she was going. An abnormal clarity at last about her own feelings seemed to reduce her physical surroundings to something seen in a dream, and she passed the other hurrying people as though they were ghosts. For beside her there walked a reality more concrete than any actual figure. It was Nat Lanyon she loved.

  How she could have doubted it she could not imagine now. How she could have supposed that she just admired him, worried about him, found him romantically thrilling seemed inexplicable now. She loved him, and it had been sheer jealousy of Clarissa which had made her so angry yesterday.

  Nat Lanyon, whose hand had caught her and upheld her—literally—the first time she had seen him, and whose influence had been her subtle protection during those early weeks at the Dominion. Nat Lanyon, whose brilliance and tenderness, whose strength and genius, performed near miracles day by day under her very eyes. And she had thought that Morton—Morton, that charming man of straw—was of greater importance to her.

  “But in the final analysis I chose Dr. Lanyon,” she thought defensively. “When it was really a choice between them, I refused to break my promise to him. At least I had the instinct for that.”

  Only then she remembered the fiasco which had resulted, and the dust and ashes of yesterday’s expedition settled on her afresh. She had gone, setting his possible need above Morton’s desire, as now she would have done without hesitation and in full knowledge of her real feelings. But he had not needed her. He had found Clarissa charming. And she herself had been—superfluous.

  Suddenly she found that she was crying. Not the hot, hurt, impatient tears of yesterday. But cold, slow tears which had something of despair and resignation in them. She loved Nat Lanyon, and he thought her of less than no importance. She had wasted the days and weeks which had been bestowed upon her—when she had been, in some delightful way, almost his protégée. Now Clarissa had come back into his life, and the niche which perhaps she might have made for herself was gone.

  Madeline found that, without even noticing what she was doing, she had paused at a tramway stop, waiting for a street-car that would take her to the hospital. Until now no one had joined her. But at this moment, she saw a small group of people approaching, and in confusion and shame she turned away. She would walk further and conquer her absurd emotions. Then, when she was sensible and composed again—

  A car drew up abruptly at the kerb, making her jump. “Madeline,” said the one voice in the world which she most wanted to hear, “do you need a lift to the hospital?”

  “N-no.” She turned her startled, tearful gaze upon him. But he evidently attached to her refusal exactly as much value as it merited. For, leaning forward to open the door of the car, he said,

  “Get in. I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

  She hesitated, but there was something about him which was difficult to gainsay, and after a moment she obediently slipped into the seat beside him. He shut the door again and suddenly the self-contained intimacy of a small space enfolded them.

  “Do you want to go anywhere special?” he enquired.

  “No.” She shook her head.

  “Shall I drive around a bit?”

  “P-please.”

  “Then don’t cry any more. You may not know it yet, but he isn’t worth it.”

  “He?” said Madeline, and for a moment the inconsiderable shadow of Morton drifted across her recollection. “You don’t suppose I was crying about Morton, do you?” she exclaimed indignantly.

  He shot her a surprised glance.

  “I—did suppose so. I thought you’d just come from your momentous interview with him.”

  “Oh—yes, I have. But there was nothing to that. He’s what you always said—a philanderer. A—a charming man of straw. He’s going back to London on Thursday,” she added indifferently, forgetting that Dr. Lanyon was already aware of that. “It doesn’t matter.”

  And in those three words the immensity of Morton’s unimportance stood revealed to them both
.

  There was a curious little silence. Then Dr. Lanyon said, as though he were choosing his words very carefully, “Then why, Madeline, were you crying when I found you just now?”

  No answer.

  “General disillusionment with life?” he enquired, the faintest note of amusement creeping into his voice.

  It was that note of amusement which did it, recalling, as it did, her jealous anguish of the previous day.

  “No, damn you,” she said with a deep sob. “It was you—yesterday—saying I mustn’t let you down—playing on my sympathies—making me quarrel with Morton when it seemed so desperately important—and then treating me like—like a not very useful car gadget. If you love Clarissa—”

  “But I don’t love Clarissa,” he said, and drew the car to a stop in a quiet side street. “I don’t love Clarissa any more than you love that insufferable charmer, Morton Sanders. I love you, my darling, and have loved you ever since you came pelting over to my office to ask for protection from Miss Ardingley. Why—”

  “Dr. Lanyon!” she exclaimed, dropping her hands and staring at him in incredulous joy.

  “My name is Nat,” he said, and took her in his arms and kissed her all over her face.

  “I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!” She was clinging to him and returning his kisses, between laughter and tears. “It couldn’t have been as early as that. Why did you hint all that nonsense about danger from Clarissa and your feelings for her, if you say you were in love with me?”

  “How else do you suppose I could make sure of your company on a dozen occasions?” he retorted amusedly.

  “But when you had my company, what did you do with it?” she cried reproachfully. “You hardly looked at me yesterday. You laughed and talked to her.”

  “There wasn’t much else I could do when you had told me you were having a vital meeting with Morton tonight, so that he could tell you something special which would make even his departure bearable.”

  “O-oh! I forgot.” She leaned against him, ineffably soothed by his nearness, but disturbed by a sudden thought. “Nat—you do know he’s of no importance at all now, don’t you?”

  “I gathered that.”

  “I mean—you won’t ever think that I loved you on the rebound, as a sort of second best?”

  “If you will never suppose that I loved you as a second best to Clarissa,” he replied with a smile. “But tell me, how and when did you know you loved me?”

  “Less than an hour ago—when Morton accused me of it.”

  “Morton did? Morton Sanders put your feelings into words for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come, the fellow has his uses,” declared Dr. Lanyon, in high good humour. “Let’s remember him kindly—if we have to remember him at all.”

  Madeline laughed and rather shyly hugged him.

  “Nat, I hope Clarissa won’t be shocked and hurt. You see—’

  “Clarissa won’t mind in the least,” he asserted confidently. “Except that I believe”—he smiled reflectively—“that she’ll accept me willingly as a brother-in-law.”

  The dizzy implications of that silenced Madeline for a moment, but her misgivings returned.

  “I don’t think,” she said diffidently, “that brothers-in-law mean much to Clarissa.”

  “I don’t think anything means much to Clarissa at the moment, except that Gerald has returned to her,” replied Nat Lanyon.

  “Gerald!” Madeline sat up and stared at him in astonishment “Did you say Gerald? What do you mean?”

  “But didn’t you know? Oh, perhaps you might not. I think he’d only just arrived.” Nat Lanyon roused himself to think of affairs other than his own. “I called in at the hotel this evening, hoping to be handy if there were any news of the one member of the family who really interested me.” He touched her cheek lightly. “Gerald had arrived by air, having, I suppose, decided that after all he couldn’t go on without his Clarissa.”

  “You mean—? Are you telling me that they’re reconciled?” A most wonderful warmth and joy were beginning to flood her heart.

  “Well, it looked extraordinarily like that to me.” Nat smiled at her. “I offered my good wishes, felt intensely superfluous, and decided to withdraw. I was driving slowly homeward, when I saw you weeping by a lamp-post.”

  “Nat! What a way to describe me! And, anyway, who had made me cry?”

  He took her in his arms again then and looked at her with that calm reassurance that made people place their lives in his hand.

  “You shall never shed another tear on my account,” he said quietly, “so long as we both shall live.” And, with a long sigh of complete and utter satisfaction, Madeline kissed him as she knew now she had longed for weeks to kiss him.

  They drove slowly homeward after that, but by such a roundabout way that presently they found themselves at the highest point of Westmount, with all Montreal lying below, strung out like a vast panorama of light and shadow. It was too dark now to see much but the outlines, but street-lamps drew in shining dotted lines the principal design of the city.

  “Stop here for a while, Nat,” she said softly. “I want to look at my little bit of Canada.”

  He stopped immediately, humouring her, and together they looked out over the darkening city.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said half to herself. “It’s beautiful, and now it’s my home.”

  “It’s only one corner of your home, my darling,” he assured her. “All the years and all the miles are there for us both. From ocean to ocean it will all be your home. Together we’ll watch the sunrise in the Rockies, the water come swirling down Kicking Horse River, and the mists clearing from the Valley of the Ten Peaks. You haven’t seen more than the smallest beginning of it yet.”

  “I know. It’s so vast one can’t quite imagine it even now.” She smiled slowly. Then musingly she said, “Canada. They call it the land of the future, don’t they?”

  “They do. And perhaps they’re right.” He smiled too then. “At any rate, it’s the land of our future.”

  Then he started the car once more, and they drove at their own pace back to the hospital, secure in the knowledge that tonight, not only Canada, but all the world was theirs.

  Mary Burchell has written more than seventy Harlequin Romances since Hospital Corridors was first released in 1958. Her novels celebrate a zest for living, a sincere concern for people and a wonderful winning way with a happy ending.