Wanderfoot Part 6

"Since when?" he asked, thrilling into tenderness and some other poignant sense he had never known in all his life.

"Since the first moment, I think," she whispered laughingly--"an impetuous Irishman anxious to get into the thick of the fight!"

"How can you be sure it is n't an Irish girl?"

"Oh, I know--I know. G.o.d will give me a son, Joe."

After that, however important the matter of his private hospital, it was far more important that the arduous house-hunt should come to an end.

Besides, they were both sick to death of the whole thing. So, in a kind of despair at last they decided on a house which, though it had a very charming exterior, was inferior in many ways and less suitable to their purpose than some of those rejected earlier in the search. A five-story residence, it stood towards the Broadway end of 68th Street, and had a beautiful flight of marble steps leading up to its front door--which was something to the good; but there was a great deal in the way of alteration to be done before it was suitable for a hospital, and the cost of this had to come from Westenra's private purse. However, Val seemed to be drawn to it for some vague, mystic reason. Fortunately, Westenra could not look into her mind, or he would have discovered that she was congratulating herself on the bird songs they would hear in the early mornings from Central Park close by. That might have irritated Westenra, for, though he loved birds as much as any one, he did not allow them to sway his destiny.

Of course, being two thoroughly unpractical and inexperienced people, they were entirely at the mercy of that most astute person in the world, the American Real Estate Agent, and got the worst possible terms. The arrangement about reparations was unsatisfactory, the lease too long, the rent higher than any one else would have paid. Dimly they knew this, and dimly they knew it would always be so, and that it was a pity that one or other of them was not practical and clever in a worldly sense. Brilliant people often feel this helpless sense of foolishness, and it irritates them so much that they long to stab somebody for it (and they usually stab the person they love best, with the cruel little knives lovers keep specially for each other!). Val remembered that Westenra in the early days on the ship had told her that the happiest marriages he had known of in America were between Irish and Germans, the Teuton common sense and equability acting as ballast to Celtic flightiness. And the remembrance vexed her. She saw that as ballast she was of no more use than a red robin. She wondered if Westenra realised it, and one day when the painful affair of furnishing was going forward she could not help saying:

"Oh, Joe; if I were only a nice, stolid, lumpy German, I should know by instinct what to buy for the dining-room and kitchen."

Joe froze slightly. Prescribing wives for your compatriots is one thing; taking the same prescription is another, and as it happened he was antipathetic to Germans. Nevertheless, since Val had put the idea in his head, he did think that a little _hausfrau_ knowledge of what was fitting furniture for a doctor's dining-room and kitchen would not have been out of place in a doctor's wife, and he said somewhat dryly:

"Could n't we try and strike a note somewhere between stolid and fantastic?"

He was thinking of the furniture, but Val received the impression that her taste was being indicted. She took the little dagger to her breast with a quivering smile, and it hurt her deeply because she knew that her ideas on furnishing were indeed fantastic, though beautiful.

Unfortunately they were all she had, and she was obliged to use them, for Westenra had none at all. He only knew there was something wrong with the furnishing of the living rooms in his private sanatorium. Had he ever lived in the Bohemia of big cities he might have recognised that his drawing, dining, and reception rooms looked like a series of charmingly arranged _ateliers_. But, fortunately, he did not know it.

He only saw that the bills were amazing, and that was bad enough, for the fact that nothing but the most modern and expensive appliances and fittings would satisfy him for his operating-room had already accounted for a large outlay of money. The house needed a good deal of renovating before it could be used, and by the time they were settled in their new home there was a hole in his capital large enough to sail a ship through, and several rents and tears in the magic veil of comradeship with which the two had hoped to wrap themselves from the world.

Then began a weary search through guilds and registries and bureaus, for a staff of capable servants. This, of course, was Val's exclusive affair. Westenra neither could nor would be beguiled into it, so alone she wrestled with the problem, and made acquaintance with false references and all the guile and tricks of the servant cla.s.s. For the American domestic, who is not American at all, but of every other nationality under the sun, is truly the worst in the world. When she is honest she is a fool; when she is competent she is a knave. The mistress takes not her choice but her chance of one or the other; and in either case she pays.

After a long series of "weekly trials" which usually ended in a day or two with a demand for unearned wages, impudence, and vulgar insults from the "weighed and found wanting," a _menage_ was eventually established, comprising a red-haired cook, who, under a bland and benevolent exterior, was a calculating robber of the most cold-blooded description, and who, while despising her mistress for a "soft fool of a greenhorn,"

congratulated herself on the circ.u.mstance and resolved to take full advantage of it; a couple of housemaids one of whom was raw from minding goats on the Kerry hills, and the other recommended herself by a modest demand to be allowed to go to confession every Friday night. (The last had subsequently to be dismissed in spite of her holiness because, according to her story, she had been "ordered by her dochtor" to take an egg in brandy for her breakfast every morning and several times during the day, and faithfully followed the prescription except that she omitted the egg.) There was also a furnace and general utility man who fought with both cook and maids, and in the end stole Westenra's bicycle from the cellar; and a laundry woman who by arrangement "took two dollars a day," and appeared to spend most of her time seated at the kitchen table taking heavy meals as well.

Fortunately event and sequence rarely occur together, so that Val was not flooded out all at once by these disquieting things; they fell upon her from day to day like the gentle drips of water that wear away the stone. But life began to press and gibber in a strangely nightmare fashion round the vagabond journalist, and sometimes there would creep into the smoke-coloured eyes that loved so much to look upon colour and wide s.p.a.ces, and "watch the silences," an expression slightly reminiscent of a wild thing caught in a trap--a trap full of pots and pans and daily menus, and weekly bills, and fighting cooks and shirking housemaids, and domestic problems,--such a trap as almost every woman finds herself caught in when she engages upon the career of wife to a professional man, and one in which few find success unless specially endowed with an ability for management, economy, and order. Poor Val's endowments were not of this kind. Well she knew it, but would not admit the fact even to herself.

She had dreamed of a little s.p.a.ce of time between the date of their settling in with their servants about them and the opening of the hospital--a little s.p.a.ce like the clearing in the midst of a tangled forest, where she could pitch a tent and rest for awhile with the thought of her wonderful happiness that Westenra's child was to be hers.

She meant to recapture into their lives the magic air of that happy week in the Bronx woods. Once more they would adjust and gather about them the fabric of comradeship and love that was to be the veil between themselves and the world, and that somehow in the last few weeks of rushing turmoil had been mishandled and torn.

But the dream was vain. No sooner did the domestic mechanism of the house begin to work, creaking and straining like an old ship with an amateur hand at the wheel, when cases for operation were hurried in, the place was filled with nurses, other doctors and students bustled up and down the stairs, and there were endless comings and goings of patients'

friends. The strangely disquieting scent of ether came stealing down like a living presence from the upper floor into the atmosphere of home Val was trying to establish in the rooms she and her husband occupied in the big house. It seemed to her, too, that other shadows came in and lingered around; that when operations were in progress pain-troubled spirits wandered through the house, hiding in corners, waiting fearfully. In the fight against these illusions, as well as with the complicated problems of housekeeping and management, life began to resolve itself into something very like Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens."

The burden of fifty-dollar-a-week nurses, rude and arrogant and of a self-reverence amazing, who fought like cannibals with the servants, and made turmoil all round them except in the splendid silence of the sick room. The burden of telephone bells that sounded from morning till night with the injurious sayings of waiting patients. The burden of bitter cold, as the winter came on, and Val suffered as only a tropical bird or flower can suffer in a bleak climate--the grim December dawns when the quiet of three feet of snow lay on the city, unbroken save by the jingle of the bells on the milkman's sleigh, or the shriek of the first car upon the frozen metals! The burden of the elevated railway in the avenue close by; the hideous rush of it through the night, like some monstrous winged beast on a ceaseless quest for its prey--the ferocity of its approach, the sinister melancholy of its receding cry! The burden of "bathroom extensions" where the water-pipes burst every night, dislocating the business of the house for hours--of frozen cisterns, and New York plumbers! Of a cellar furnace that would not heat the house, or, acting on some aesthetic principle of its own turned the bathrooms into ovens, while the patients were in cold-storage and in the operating-room the sponges froze to the tables! The burden of snow on the sidewalk, and policemen knocking at the front door to say it must be cleared, or that some one had fallen down and broken something, and compensation would have to be paid later by the householder!

The burden of a beloved man who, when things went wrong in office or operating-room, came roaring like a tiger in pain to his mate. For alas! Garrett Westenra was no Angel in the House! That was one of the strangest of all burdens to be borne, for Val always wanted to laugh at it, and yet she knew it was no laughing matter. Westenra at work and Westenra at play were two very different persons.

Val had been aware from the moment of their return to New York of a great nervous change in her husband's mentality. It seemed to her that as soon as they got into their new home he became all nerves and torment, and difficult and exigeant as a child. It had not taken her long to find that he possessed all the easily roused devils of the easy-going Irishman. At first she was amazed by this discovery, then confused, but in the end she loved him the better for it. Only it always seemed to her madly funny that a man with such width and height of mind should be no better than a cross-grained baby about some of the ordinary vexing trifles of everyday life. It was hard to believe that a medical scientist of the first water could fall into a state of fury over a wrongly entered telephone message, a mislaid stethoscope, or because a careless housemaid had misplaced something in his office; that a man who had nothing small or mean about him should swear vividly over the fact that some one had put a used tampon into his waste-paper basket instead of burning it or thrown a burnt-out match into his fireplace.

There was a dumb-waiter that travelled on a rope up and down between Val's sitting-room on the first floor and a little surgery at the back of Westenra's consulting-room, and never a day pa.s.sed but that rope was rattled violently for Val to come to her little opening and receive some furious complaint concerning a negligent maid or a stupid nurse. Many a time and oft Westenra's special swear--a peculiar combination of his own--rang up the shaft.

"h.e.l.l's blood and blazes! What has that girl from the Kerry hills done with my stethoscope? How dare she touch it? She must have touched it--it's not on my desk.--Where are those No. 1 bandages?--Who has moved my note-book?--Will you find out from Nurse Soames why there are no tampons made?--h.e.l.l's bells!--Is this a doctor's house?--What kind of a doctor's house?"

The dumb-waiter travelled no farther than Val's room, and she issued orders that no one was to answer the rattle of the rope but herself.

She realised that it was Westenra's safety-valve in moments of intense irritation. It gave her a spasm of painful merriment, even in the midst of her greatest weariness and worries, to hear her signal to come to the shaft and receive the storm. Later, when the stress of the day was over, she might laugh at him, and he, first furious, then ashamed, would finally laugh himself and beg her pardon like a generous and hot-tempered boy. But at the time she always gravely listened, and without comment put the trouble right as swiftly as she could. She realised only too clearly that the hospital was on his nerves as well as her own, and that his irritation came from a multiplicity of cares pressing on him, rather than from the one small incident that caused the explosion. Indeed, life was pressing hard on Westenra. He was working like a dog, and the dollars were rustling in, but the sound of their rustling gave him no great joy. His heart was elsewhere, in other work which must stand still, or perhaps, which was worse, be done by some one else. The hospital hemmed him in it too. He, quite as much as Val, felt caged. His work, his private life, all his interests for the moment seemed narrowly centralised into one street, one house, an affair of grubbing within four walls. Something in him rebelled at that, and not less because he himself had so arranged it. It irked him terribly to be mixed up with the machinery of this hospital, and his reserved nature chafed under the lack of privacy in the place that should have been his home. There were nurses everywhere. Val and he were never together for five minutes without being intruded upon by some one wanting something. Val had no control over the nurses; they did and said what they chose, having fear of no one but the doctor. He knew she had trouble with them every day, but he would not go into the matter.

It was not his province to wrangle with women; he had told her so from the first when she came to him for advice. She must manage that part of the scheme by herself, he said; he had his own share of trouble and could not undertake hers as well. She had recoiled wonderingly before his unsympathetic att.i.tude, but never again worried him about anything in the house. But he was aware that she was having a stiff time, and from his heart he pitied her. But what was to be done? They were in it now for loss or gain. His fortune was pledged to this thing and they had got to do or die by it. And he did not mean it to be die! Westenra was no quitter. It hurt Val to see the way he worked. She had never realised before what a dog's life is a doctor's. Her husband was at every one's beck and call but her own, and never could be sure of a peaceful hour to himself.

In her own way she worked even harder than he, and it was a heart-breaking thought that with it all she was not making a success of the place. Though money was coming in fast, it flowed out still faster through her incompetent fingers. The problem of how to make things pay was a black beast which she fought by day and wrestled with in nightly dreams, and the more she fought and wrestled the more it grinned and dug its malignant claws into her heart. Even courage and ardour cannot overcome inexperience and triumph over disability. Despair came often to sit with her and whispered that this was not her place, and _here_ would never be laurels for her. But she did not want laurels for herself--only for Westenra; and the more despair filled her the more she loved her big difficult Irishman, whose nerves and torment and prevision for the rottenness of life's rewards nearly drove her crazy.

Bills were another burden heavy in the bearing. Like all good men, Westenra was "tight with money." He never said a word when Val with heaving heart produced her weekly pile, large as a roll of drugget, but what he left unsaid during the short interval between sighting the sum total and producing his cheque-book would have filled a library.

They were always double what they should have been, those bills, and triple what they would have been with an experienced woman at the head of things: he knew it and she knew it; and they thought of the stolid, lumpy German, and sometimes they spoke of her and of red robins that were no good as ballast! And she felt as if she were drawing his heart's blood, and so did he. Not that he was mean--far from it; only he realised that his was not the money-making head, and he suffered from the fear all brain-workers know--that their money-making capacity may give out at any time.

"Simple people like you and me can never make fortunes, Val," he would say sadly, "the only thing for us is to hang on tight to what we have come by so hardly." But when he adjured her earnestly to "try and economise," her face became as haggard as if he had thrust a dagger into her, so that he made haste to add:

"I know you do, darling. It is only that I 've got into the habit of saying it--forgive me!"

She forgave him gladly, and lay awake more than ever thinking out impractical plans for economising. She hated to take the dollars that he had sweated for as only doctors and treadmill prisoners can sweat, to bestow them on insolent cooks who stole, housemaids who drank and shirked their duties, tradesmen who took advantage of her "English accent" to charge her twice as much as they would charge other people.

When she found that almost every good American housekeeper defeats the dishonesty of servants by doing her own marketing, she shouldered the business too, and made acquaintance with Baumgarten's Market, a huge place where everything save groceries could be obtained for household consumption. Some of the darkest hours of her life were spent at Baumgarten's. It was there, sitting upon a high chair before the meat and poultry counter awaiting her turn to be served, that she most keenly realised her defeat. All around her, good American wives were examining the grain of beef and the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of chickens. Poor Val could never understand how they extracted information from the process. She herself always got the toughest meat and the oldest birds for the highest prices. She knew nothing of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of chickens and never would know anything. She, who could write a mile long pa.s.sage from the cla.s.sics and never forget a poet's inspired word, found it impossible to remember from day to day the price of sugar, and how much she ought to pay for b.u.t.ter. Information like that simply pa.s.sed through her head like an express train through a tunnel. She never got the bargains other women got. She was the victim of every sharper, and was "done" on every side. On a desert island she would have been a treasure. In a civilised city, battling with extraordinary conditions on a professional man's income, she was a failure, and the knowledge deepened day by day and was bitter as gall. She fought on with the courage of the desperate and the doomed, but despair was in her heart and her eyes, and sometimes Westenra saw it there, and thought she hated this life to which he had brought her. He saw that she was a round peg in a square hole, and the last woman in the world for the practical life she pursued with the ardour of a doomed squirrel. The knowledge never interfered with his affection for her, but it sometimes interfered with his nerves. It was a bad dream from which they only woke up at night, for then together for a few hours a natural reaction from the strain of the day took place, and they would laugh like two children over the cares and problems of the day. The night nurses, pa.s.sing up- and down-stairs, often wondered what it was the doctor and his wife found so amusing when they were shut up in their rooms together. The fact was that in the practical affairs of life they were no more than children, either of them, for all their brains and experience. It is often so with gifted people. Of course, Westenra knew his business as a doctor--none better, but the business of being a practical and responsible husband and head of a household was a sealed book to him, just as the problem of how to become the successful manageress of a private nursing home was one that Val would never solve.

But if she could not defeat the cares that the day brought, she could at least be extremely humorous over her mistakes and failures, and the valiant spirit of her that was ready to get up from one day's knock-out blows and face the same round next morning, could not but appeal to the chivalry in Westenra, as well as awaken his own sense of humour.

CHAPTER VI

KISSES AND CROSSES

"For 'Im and 'E and 'It (An' Two an' One makes Three)."

KIPLING.

Acquaintance with a further element in her husband's life to which she had so far been a stranger was reserved for Val when at Easter his adopted child, Haidee Halston, came home to 68th Street. Westenra, it is true, had told her all the circ.u.mstances, and no one was better qualified than Val to appreciate that sense of responsibility towards the helpless and unprotected which had prompted him to take upon himself the entire support and education of a friend's child. Westenra and Pat Halston had been friends from boyhood. The same county in Ireland had been their birthplace, they were at Carlow College together, and, sailing for America within a year of each other, met again in New York, and graduated together from Columbia University, where they obtained their medical degree. Later, launched upon the same profession but inspired by very different ambitions, the paths of the two friends had diverged somewhat. Halston, greatly gifted and of a magnetic personality, aimed for a fashionable practice that would bring him social success as well as a fortune with which to pursue further aims--in fact, like many another he meant medicine to serve him only as a step to the more lucrative and exciting profession of politics, wherefore he followed it only when it led him into the highways of the rich and influential. Westenra, on the other hand, inspired by a racial thirst for knowledge, as well as for eminence in his profession, did not disdain the by-ways, even when they led him into the lowest slums of New York. It was natural, in the circ.u.mstances, that the two men should see little of each other, but the bond of boyhood held good, and when "Death and Dismay" all too swiftly and unforeseen came to Halston, it was to Westenra that he turned at the last. Poor Halston had, unfortunately, put a spoke into his own wheel of ambition by marrying a lovely, but very flighty English girl, who came to America as a governess in the family of one of his fashionable patients. Halston adored his pretty wife, but she made ducks and drakes with his money and brought him to the verge of bankruptcy through her extravagance. When death by septic poisoning swooped suddenly down on him, she was within a short period of giving birth to their only child, and the thought of this darkened the dying man's vision until Westenra, with a firm hand on his friend's, gave his promise that the welfare of Mrs. Halston and her child would be his most sacred task. Within a few weeks Mrs. Halston joined her husband in the great beyond, and Westenra found himself the sole guardian of the little baby girl fancifully called by its dying mother--Haidee. That was ten years before, and now Haidee was a beautiful, arrogant slip of a girl with deep dark eyes, a deep dark cave or two in her soul, and the manners of a cowboy. The school at which she had been educated for several years, to the extreme detriment of Westenra's banking account, was one of those highly modern inst.i.tutions where at the most expensive rates girls are encouraged to "develop their individuality," and Haidee, a hoyden by nature, had developed hers along the cowboy-brigand line. Her idea of argument with servants or other children was to push them down-stairs or administer a hack on the shins with one of her extremely useful-looking feet.

These unsatisfactory reports had for a long time troubled the peace of Westenra, whose sense of responsibility to Pat Halston's child was perhaps a slightly exaggerated one. A vague idea had occurred to him of sending her to a convent to see what the gentle influence of nuns could do for her, but Haidee jibbed like a mule at the mention of nuns, and declared darkly that if he sent her to a convent _he would see_.

When he spoke to Val of his worries on the subject she said, ready at once to embrace any project or protege of his without thought of the fresh tasks entailed:

"Oh, why not have her here for awhile, Joe? A little home life will tame her down, I expect. Look how it has tamed even such a wild a.s.s of the desert as I," she added, with a gay smile in which there was more than a touch of wistfulness. But Westenra said a trifle abruptly that he did not fancy somehow it would be a good plan.

"You have enough worries already," he added, but not quite quickly enough to prevent Val from perceiving that there was some other reason, though she was far from guessing what that reason might be.

In the end, however, by the gift of circ.u.mstance, Haidee came to 68th Street after all. For at the expiration of the Easter term the school authorities wrote a brief but eloquent letter to the effect that they wished to be relieved of the care of Westenra's ward. If it did not exactly amount to an expulsion, it certainly could not be looked upon as a certificate of good conduct for presentation at her next school, and for the moment all thought of the convent had to be dismissed. So Haidee came home from New Jersey, bag and baggage, and utterly unashamed of her peccadilloes. Val, with a heart open for anything or any one loved by Westenra, was eager to mother the motherless creature of whom she had heard so much. But Haidee was apparently not in search of a mother, and received her advances coldly and in a keep-off-the-gra.s.s manner that only an American-bred child would have the _sang-froid_ to use. More than a hint of hostility, too, was to be found in the deep-set eyes, when they watched Val and Westenra together. The fact was that to find her guardian installed in a house with "a strange woman" had given the girl a great shock. Westenra, following his usual habit of reserve, had prepared her for nothing of the kind when he said, on his return journey from New Jersey:

"I am married now, Haidee."

She never dreamed that such a thing would make any difference to her absolute monopoly of her beloved guardian, and indeed, because Val was generous and he was kind, it would have made but little, if she had not instantly determined to be as obnoxious and tiresome as she could be, in the hope that Val would get tired of her and go away.

From the first she n.o.bly contributed her share towards the business of making life at No. 700 more unlivable than it was already. She fought with the servants, got into the way of the nurses, and disturbed the patients with her noise. A day-school was found for her near at hand, and that kept her energies employed for a certain number of hours, but her new teachers were soon on the war-path after her, and she arrived home daily, fl.u.s.tered with combat, and bringing long accounts of their tyranny and brutality! When it was time for her to go to school in the mornings the house had to be hunted for her from top to bottom by Val or a housemaid. She hated to go to bed, and there was a scene every night before she could be induced to do so; then, on being left alone, she would invariably hop out again, turn up the lights, and amuse herself in some illicit fashion, such as hanging out of the window and dropping things on the heads of patients coming up the front-door steps. Yet in the mornings it almost needed a charge of dynamite to dislocate her from her blankets. She had a rooted aversion to taking baths, and would never brush her teeth unless some one stood over her and saw it done. In fact, she had all the faults and naughtinesses of an ordinary child strongly accentuated, and a sense of perversity extraordinarily developed. Withal she was as clever as paint, and grew prettier every day. What vexed Val most was that everlastingly she broke in upon Westenra, claiming his attention for her troubles, her lessons, her amus.e.m.e.nts, unless Val were on the alert to prevent it. She would wait outside his office door and slip in "between patients" to relate some woe, and Westenra would listen patiently and in the end the trouble evaporated into smiles and laughter. But this wasted his time and told upon his temper in some later affair of the day, or brought him up to bed a little more tired than usual.

Presently, too, Haidee's jealousy of Val's place in Westenra's life began to take a more active form, and if it had not been for her disarming innocence of mind where worldly matters were concerned, Val would have almost come to dislike her. Instead of which she felt pity for the child who, in her adoration for Westenra, resented being ousted from the central position in his life. Haidee could not or would not understand why a mere wife should have first claim. She considered that she herself possessed it, because she had been first in Westenra's life.

One night Val, going to her husband's room to see that everything was prepared for him to go straight to rest as soon as he got in from a late consultation, found Haidee in her nightgown, curled up and scowling, on Westenra's bed.

"Haidee! What on earth--? I thought you were in bed and asleep long ago."