Leerie Part 1

Leerie.

by Ruth Sawyer.

Foreword

I like to write stories. Best of all I like to write stories about people who help the world to go round with a little more cheer and good will than is usual. You know--and I know--there are a few who put into life something more than the bare ingredients. They add a plum here--extra spice there. They bake it well--and then they trim it up like an all-the-year-round birthday cake with white frosting, angelica, and red cherries. Last of all they add the candles and light them so that it glows warmly and invitingly for all; fine to see, sweet to taste.

Of course, there are not so many people with the art or the will to do this, and, having done it, they have not always the bigness of heart to pa.s.s it round for the others to share. But I like to make it my business to find as many as I can; and when I am lucky enough to find one I pop him--or her--into a book, to have and to hold always as long as books last and memory keeps green.

Not long ago I was ill--ridiculously ill--and my doctor popped me into a sanitarium. "Here's the place," I said, "where people are needed to make the world go round cheerfully, if they are needed anywhere." And so I set about to get well and find one.

She came--before I had half finished. The first thing I noticed was the inner light in her--a light as from many candles. It shone all over her face and made the room brighter for a long time after she had left. The next thing I noticed was the way everybody watched for her to come round--everybody turning child again with nose pressed hard against the window-pane. It made me remember Stevenson's _Lamplighter_; and for many days there rang in my ears one of his bits of human understanding:

And oh! before you hurry by with ladder and with light, O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night.

Before I knew it I had all the makings of a story. I trailed it through the mud of gossip and scandal; I followed it to the highroad of adventure and on to the hills of inspiration and sacrifice. It was all there--ripe for the plucking; and with the good a.s.sistance of Hennessy I plucked it.

Before the story was half written I was well--so much for the healing grace of a story and the right person to put in it.

This much I have told that you may know that _Leerie_ is as true as all the best and finest things in the world are true. I am only the pa.s.ser-on of life as she has made it--spiced, trimmed, and lighted with many candles. So if the taste pleases, help yourself bountifully; there is enough for all. And if you must thank any one--thank _Leerie_.

RUTH SAWYER.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

LEERIE

Chapter I

THE MAN WHO FEARED SLEEP

Peter Brooks felt himself for a man given up. He had felt his physical unfitness for some time in the silent, condemning judgment masked under the too sympathetic gaze of his fellow-men; he had felt it in the over-solicitous inquiries after his health made by the staff; and there was his chief, who had fallen into the comfortable week-end habit of telling him he looked first-rate, and in the same breath begging him to take the next week off. For months past he had been conscious of the sidelong glances cast by his brother alumni at the College Club when he appeared, and the way they had of dropping into a contradictory lot of topics whenever he joined a group unexpectedly showed only too plainly that he had been the real subject under discussion. Yes, he felt that the world at large had turned its thumb down as far as he was concerned, but it had caused him surprisingly little worry until that last visit to Doctor Dempsy.

There it was as if Peter's sensibilities concerning himself had suddenly become acute. The doctor sounded too rea.s.suring even for a combined friend and physician; he protested too much that he had found nothing at all the matter with him--nothing at all. When a doctor seems so superlatively anxious to set a man right with himself, it is time to look out; therefore the casual, just-happened-to-mention-it way that he finally broached the question of a sanitarium came within an inch of knocking the last prop from under Peter's resolve not to lose his grip. For the first time he fully realized how it felt to be given up, and, characteristically, he thanked the Almighty that there was no one to whom it would really matter.

For a year he had been slowly going to pieces; for a year he had been dropping in for Dempsy to patch him up. There had been a host of miserable puny ailments which in themselves meant nothing, but combined and in a young man meant a great deal. Of late his memory had failed him outrageously; he had had frequent attacks of vertigo, and these of themselves had rendered him unreliable and unfit for newspaper work.

Irresponsible! Unfit! Peter snorted the words out honestly to himself.

Under these conditions, and with no one to care, he could see no plausible reason for trying to coax a mere existence out of life.

To those who knew him best--to Doctor Dempsy most of all--his condition seemed unexplainable. Here was a man who never drank, who never overfed, who smoked in moderation, whose life stood out conspicuously decent and clean against the possibilities of his environment. What lay back of this going to pieces? Doctor Dempsy had tried for a year to find out and had failed. To Peter, it was not unexplainable at all--he knew. Possessed of a const.i.tution above the average, he had forced it to do the work of a mind far above the average, while he had denied it one of the three necessities of life and sanity. His will and reason had been powerless to help him--and now?

Because he had hated himself for hiding this knowledge from the man who had tried to do so much for him and wanted to make amends in some way--and because it was the easiest thing, after all, to agree--he let Doctor Dempsy pick out a sanitarium, make all arrangements, buy his ticket, and see him off. He drew the line at being personally conducted, however.

Whether he went to a sanitarium or not did not matter; what mattered was how long would he stay and where would he go afterward. Or would there be an afterward? These were the questions that mulled through Peter's mind on the train, and, coupled with the memory of the worried kindliness on Doctor Dempsy's face, they were the only traveling companions Peter had.

It was not to be wondered, therefore, that as he left the car and boarded the sanitarium omnibus he felt indescribably old, weary, and finished with things.

At first he thought he was the only pa.s.senger, but as the driver leisurely gathered up his reins and gave a cluck to the horses a girl's voice rang out from the station, "Flanders--Flanders! Why, I believe you're forgetting me." And the next instant the girl herself appeared, suitcase in hand.

The driver grinned down a sheepish apology and Peter turned to hold the door open. She stood framed in the doorway for a moment while she lifted in her case, and for that moment Peter had conflicting impressions. He was conscious of a modest, nun-like appearance of clothes; the traveling-suit was gray, and the small gray hat had an encircling breast of white feathers. The lips had a quiet, demure curve; but the chin was determined, almost aggressive, while the gray eyes positively emitted sparks. The girl was not beautiful, she was luminous--and all the gray clothing in the world could not quench her. Peter found himself instantly wondering how anything so vitally alive and fresh to look at could be headed for a sanitarium with broken-down hulks like himself.

She caught Peter's eye upon her and smiled. "If Flanders will hurry we'll be there in time to see Hennessy feeding the swans," she announced.

There was no response. Peter had suddenly lost the knack of it, along with other things. He could only look bewildered and a trifle more tired. But the girl must have understood it was only a temporary lack, for she did not draw in like a snail and dismiss Peter from her conscious horizon. She smiled again.

"I see. Newcomer?" And, nodding an affirmative to herself, she went sociably on: "Hennessy and the swans are symbolical. Couldn't tell you why--not in a thousand years--but you'll feel it for yourself after you've been here long enough. Hennessy hasn't changed in fifteen years--maybe longer for those who can reckon longer. Same old blue jumper, same old tawny corduroys; if he ever had a new pair he's kept them to himself. And the swans have changed less than Hennessy. If anything gets on your nerves here--treatment, doctors, nurses, anything--go and watch Hennessy. He's the one sure, universal cure."

The bus swung round the corner and brought the ivy-covered building into sight. The girl's face grew lighter and lighter; in the shadow of the bus it seemed to Peter actually to shine. "Dear old San," she said under her breath. "Heigh-ho! it's good to get back!"

Before Peter could fathom any reason for this unaccountable rejoicing, the bus had stopped and the girl and suitcase had vanished. Wearily he came back to his own reason for being there, and docilely he allowed the porter to shoulder his luggage and conduct him within.

Three days pa.s.sed--three days in which Peter thought little and felt much.

He had been pa.s.sed about among the staff of doctors very much like a delectable dish, and sampled by all. Half a dozen had taken him in hand.

He had been apportioned a treatment, a diet, a bath hour, and a nurse.

Looking back on those three days--and looking forward to a continuous protraction of the same--he could see less reason than ever for coaxing an existence out of life. Life meant to him work--efficient, telling work--and companionship--sharing with a congenial soul recreation, opinions, and meals--and some day, love. Well--what of these was left him?

It was then that he remembered the gray girl's advice in the omnibus and went out to find Hennessy and the swans.

His nurse was at supper, so he was mercifully free; moreover it was the emptiest time of day for out-of-doors. A few straggling patients were knocking prescribed golf-b.a.l.l.s about the links, and a scattering of nurses were hurrying in with their wheel-chairs. Half-way between the links and the last building was the pond, shaded by pines and flanked by a miniature rustic rest-house, and thither Peter went. On a willow stump emerging from the pond he found Hennessy, as wrinkled as a b.u.t.ternut, with a thatch of gray hair, a mouth shirred into a small, open ellipse, and eyes full of irrepressible twinkles. He was seated tailor fashion on the stump, a tin platter of bread across his knees and the swans circling about him. He looked every whit as Irish as his name, and he was scolding and blarneying the birds by turn.

"Go-wan, there, ye feathered heathen! Can't ye be lettin' them that has good manners get a morsel once in a while? Faith, ye'll be havin' old Doc Willum afther ye with his stomach cure if ye don't watch out." He looked over his shoulder and caught Peter's gaze. "Sure, birds or humans, they all have to be coaxed or scolded into keepin' healthy, I'm thinkin', and Hennessy's head nurse to the swans," he ended, with a chuckle.

But there was something quite different on Peter's mind. "Has one of the patients--a young person in gray--been here lately? I mean have you seen her about any time?"

Hennessy shook a puzzled head. "A young gray patient, ye say? Sure there might be a hundred--that's not over-distinguishin'. I leave it to ye, sir, just a gray patient is not over-distinguishin'."

Peter reflected. "It was a quiet, cloister kind of gray, but her eyes were not--cloistered. They were the shiningest--"

A chuckle from Hennessy brought him to an abrupt finish. "Eyes? Gray?

Patient? Ha, ha! Did ye hear that, Brian Boru?" and he flicked his cap at a gray swan. "Sure, misther, that's no patient. 'Tis Leerie--herself."

"Leerie?" The name sounded absurd to Peter, and slightly reminiscent of something, he could not tell what.

"Aye, Leerie. Real name, Sheila O'Leary--as good a name as Hennessy. But they named her Leerie her probation year. In course she's Irish an' not Scotch, an' I never heard tell of a la.s.s afore that went 'round a-lightin' street lamps, but for all that the name fits. Ye mind grown-ups an' childher alike watch for her to come 'round."

"A nurse," repeated Peter, dully.

"Aye. An' she come back three days since, Heaven be praised! afther bein'

gone three years."

"Three years," repeated Peter again. "Why was she gone three years?"

Hennessy eyed him narrowly for a moment. "A lot of blitherin' fools sent her away, that's what, an' she not much more than graduated. Suspension, they called it."