Love Stories Part 30

"Twenty enough?"

"I don't think it's money," said the Nurse, "although she needs that too; she hasn't any clothes for the baby. But--she's awfully despondent--almost desperate. Have you any idea who the child's father is?"

Rosie considered, lighting a new cigarette with one hand and balancing the telephone with the other.

"She left me a year ago," she said. "Oh, yes; I know now. What time is it?"

"Two o'clock."

"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Rosie. "I'll get the fellow on the wire and see what he's willing to do. Maybe he'll give her a dollar or two a week."

"Do you think you could bring him to see her?"

"Say, what do you think I am--a missionary?" The Nurse was wise, so she kept silent. "Well, I'll tell you what I will do. If I can bring him, I will. How's that yellow-haired she-devil you've got over there? I've got that fixed all right. She pulled a razor on me first--I've got witnesses. Well, if I can get Al, I'll do it. So long."

It did not occur to the Nurse to deprecate having used an evil medium toward a righteous end. She took life much as she found it.

And so she tiptoed past the chapel again, where a faint odour of peau d'Espagne came stealing out into the hall, and where the children from the children's ward, in roller-chairs and on crutches, were singing with all their shrill young voices, earnest eyes uplifted.

The white Easter lilies on the altar sent their fragrance out over the gathering, over the nurses, young and placid, over the hopeless and the hopeful, over the faces where death had pa.s.sed and left its inevitable stamp, over bodies freshly risen on this Easter Sunday to new hope and new life--over the Junior Medical, waiting with the ma.n.u.script of "The Palms" rolled in his hand and his heart singing a hymn of happiness.

The Nurse went up to her ward, and put a screen around Claribel, and, with all her woman's art, tidied the immaculate white bed and loosened the uncompromising yellow braids, so that the soft hair fell across Claribel's bloodless forehead and softened the defiance in her blue eyes. She brought the pink hyacinth in its pot, too, and placed it on the bedside table. Then she stood off and looked at her work. It was good.

Claribel submitted weakly. She had stopped staring at the wall, and had taken to watching the open window opposite with strange intentness. Only when the Nurse gave a final pat to the bedspread she spoke.

"Was it a boy--or a girl?" she asked.

"Girl," said the nurse briskly. "A little beauty, perfect in every way."

"A girl--to grow up and go through this h.e.l.l!" she muttered, and her eyes wandered back to the window.

But the Nurse was wise with the acc.u.mulated wisdom of a s.e.x that has had to match strength with wile for ages, and she was not yet ready.

She went into the little room where eleven miracles lay in eleven cribs, and, although they all looked exactly alike, she selected Claribel's without hesitation, and carried it to the mysterious room down the hall--which was no longer a torture-chamber, but a resplendently white place, all gla.s.s and tile and sunlight, and where she did certain things that are not prescribed in the hospital rules.

First of all, she opened a cupboard and took out a baby dress of lace and insertion,--and everybody knows that such a dress is used only when a hospital infant is baptised,--and she clothed Claribel's baby in linen and fine raiment, and because they are very, very red when they are so new, she dusted it with a bit of talc.u.m--to break the shock, as you may say. It was very probable that Al had never seen so new a baby, and it was useless to spoil the joy of parenthood unnecessarily. For it really was a fine child, and eventually it would be white and beautiful.

The baby smelled of violet, for the christening-robe was kept in a sachet.

Finally she gave it another teaspoonful of warm water and put it back in its crib. And then she rustled starchily back to the throne-chair by the record-table, and opened her Bible at the place where it said that Annie Petowski might sit up, and the Goldstein baby--bran baths, and the other thing written just below.

III

The music poured up the well of the staircase; softened by distance, the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty ba.s.ses of the medical staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty.

Liz sat on the top step of the stairs, with her baby in her arms; and, as the song went on, Liz's eyes fell to her child and stayed there.

At three o'clock the elevator-man brought Rosie Davis along the hall--Rosie, whose costume betrayed haste, and whose figure, under a gaudy motor-coat, gave more than a suggestion of being unsupported and wrapper-clad. She carried a clinking silver chatelaine, however, and at the door she opened it and took out a quarter, extending it with a regal gesture to the elevator-man.

"Here, old sport," she said, "go and blow yourself to a drink. It's Easter."

Such munificence appalled the ward.

Rosie was not alone. Behind her, uncomfortable and sullen, was Al.

The ward, turning from the episode of the quarter, fixed on him curious and hostile eyes; and Al, glancing around the ward from the doorway, felt their hostility, and plucked Rosie's arm.

"Gee, Rose, I'm not going in there," he said. But Rosie pulled him in and presented him to the Nurse.

Behind the screen, Claribel, shut off from her view of the open window, had taken to staring at the ceiling again.

When the singing came up the staircase from the chapel, she had moaned and put her fingers in her ears.

"Well, I found him," said Rosie cheerfully. "Had the deuce of a time locating him." And the Nurse, apprising in one glance his stocky figure and heavy shoulders, his ill-at-ease arrogance, his weak, and just now sullen but not bad-tempered face, smiled at him.

"We have a little girl here who will be glad to see you," she said, and took him to the screen. "Just five minutes, and you must do the talking."

Al hesitated between the visible antagonism of the ward and the mystery of the white screen. A vision of Claribel as he had seen her last, swollen with grief and despair, distorted of figure and accusing of voice, held him back. A faint t.i.tter of derision went through the room. He turned on Rosie's comfortable back a look of black hate and fury. Then the Nurse gave him a gentle shove, and he was looking at Claribel--a white, Madonna-faced Claribel, lying now with closed eyes, her long lashes sweeping her cheek.

The girl did not open her eyes at his entrance. He put his hat awkwardly on the foot of the bed, and, tiptoeing around, sat on the edge of the stiff chair.

"Well, how are you, kid?" he asked, with affected ease.

She opened her eyes and stared at him. Then she made a little clutch at her throat, as if she were smothering.

"How did you--how did you know I was here?"

"Saw it in the paper, in the society column." She winced at that, and some fleeting sense of what was fitting came to his aid. "How are you?" he asked more gently. He had expected a flood of reproaches, and he was magnanimous in his relief.

"I've been pretty bad; I'm better."

"Oh, you'll be around soon, and going to dances again. The Maginnis Social Club's having a dance Sat.u.r.day night in Mason's Hall."

The girl did not reply. She was wrestling with a problem that is as old as the ages, although she did not know it--why this tragedy of hers should not be his. She lay with her hands crossed quietly on her breast and one of the loosened yellow braids was near his hand.

He picked it up and ran it through his fingers.

"Hasn't hurt your looks any," he said awkwardly. "You're looking pretty good."

With a jerk of her head she pulled the braid out of his fingers.

"Don't," she said and fell to staring at the ceiling, where she had written her problem.

"How's the--how's the kid?"--after a moment.

"I don't know--or care."

There was nothing strange to Al in this frame of mind. Neither did he know or care.

"What are you goin' to do with it?"

"Kill it!"