Love Stories Part 27

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 m.u.f.fled 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 ap.r.o.n-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 att.i.tudes 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.