Chapter 11

"I'm sorry," said Jerry. "I--we didn't realise it had been so bad. The folks are well; but--I thought I'd better come. They're expecting you back home."

"It was nice of you to come," said the girl, avoiding his eyes. "I--I'm getting along fine."

"I guess introductions ain't necessary," put in Rose briskly. "I'm Mrs. Sweeney. She's been living with me--working for me, sewing. She's sure a fine sewer! She made this suit I'm wearing."

Poor Rose, with "custom made" on every seam of the purple! But Jerry was hardly listening. His eyes were on the girl among the pillows.

"I see," said Jerry slowly. "You haven't said yet, Elizabeth. Are you going home?"

"If--they want me."

"Of course they want you!" Again Rose: "Why shouldn't they? You've been a good girl and a credit to any family. If they say anything mean to you you let me know."

"They'll not be mean to her. I'm sure they'll want to write and thank you. If you'll just give me your address, Mrs. Sweeney----"

He had a pencil poised over a notebook. Rose hesitated. Then she gave her address on the Avenue, with something of bravado in her voice. After all, what could this country-store clerk know of the Avenue? Jerry wrote it down carefully.

"Sweeney--with an e?" he asked politely.

"With three e's," corrected Rose, and got up with dignity.

"Well, good-bye, dearie," she said. "You've got your friends now and you don't need me. I guess you've had your lesson about going to sleep with a cig--about being careless with fire. Drop me a postal when you get the time."

She shook hands with Jerry and rustled and jingled down the ward, her chin well up. At the door she encountered Old Maggie, her arms full of bandages.

"How's the Avenue?" asked Old Maggie.

Rose, however, like all good actresses, was still in the part as she made her exit. She passed Old Maggie unheeding, severe respectability in every line of her figure, every nod of her purple plumes. She was still in the part when she encountered the Probationer.

"It's going like a house afire!" she said. "He swallowed it all--hook and bait! And--oh, yes, I've got something for you." She went down into her silver bag and pulled out a roll of bills. "I've felt meaner'n a dog every time I've thought of you buying that parrot. I've got a different view of life--maybe--from yours; but I'm not taking candy from a baby."

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 muffled 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 scraps 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 apron-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 attitudes 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.

In her small domain the Nurse was queen. From her throne at the record-table, she issued proclamations of baths and fine combs, of clean bedding and trimmed nails, of tea and toast, of regular hours for the babies. From this throne, also, she directed periodic searches of the bedside stands, unearthing scraps of old toast, decaying fruit, candy, and an occasional cigarette. From the throne, too, she sent daily a blue-wrappered and pig-tailed brigade to the kitchen, armed with knives, to attack the dinner potatoes.

But on this Easter morning, the queen looked tired and worn. Her crown, a starched white cap, had slipped back on her head, and her blue-and-white dress was stained and spotted. Even her fresh apron and sleevelets did not quite conceal the damage. She had come in for a moment at the breakfast hour, and asked the Swede, Ellen Ollman, to serve the breakfast for her; and at half past eight she had appeared again for a moment, and had turned down one of the beds and put hot-water bottles in it.

The ward ate little breakfast. It was always nervous when a case was "on." Excursions down the corridor by one or another of the blue-wrappered brigade brought back bits of news:

"The doctor is smoking a cigarette in the hall;" or, "Miss Jones, the day assistant, has gone in;" and then, with bated breath, "The doctor with the red mustache has come"--by which it was known that things were going badly, the staff man having been summoned.

Suggestions of Easter began to appear even in this isolated ward, denied to all visitors except an occasional husband, who was usually regarded with a mixture of contempt and scepticism by the other women. But now the lilies came, and after them a lame young woman who played the organ in the chapel on Sundays, and who afterward went from ward to ward, singing little songs and accompanying herself on the mandolin she carried with her. The lame young woman seated herself in the throne-chair and sang an Easter anthem, and afterward limped around and placed a leaflet and a spray of lilies-of-the-valley on each bedside stand.

She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as "Liz" in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse. Elizabeth always read the tracts. She had been there four times, and knew all the nurses and nearly all the doctors. "Liz" had been known, in a shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the queen herself in regalness and authority.

The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed. "Shall I put one here?" she asked, fingering a tract.

Liz meditated majestically.

"Well, I guess I would," she said. "Not that it'll do any good."

"Why?"

Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.

"She's not getting on very well," she said; "and, even if she gets through, she won't read the tract. She held her fingers in her ears last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here. She's young. Says she hopes she and the kid'll both die."

The mandolin-player was not unversed in the psychology of the ward.

"Then she--isn't married?" she asked, and because she was young, she flushed painfully.

Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her eyes.

"Well, no," she admitted; "I guess that's what's worrying her. She's a fool, she is. She can put the kid in a home. That's what I do. Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble? Wouldn't he be always throwing it up to her?"

The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy of life.

"Have--have you a baby here?" she asked timidly.

"Have I!" said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed. She turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red atom, so like the others that only mother love could have distinguished it.

"This is mine," she said airily. "Funny little mutt, isn't he?"

The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.

"He--he's very little," she said.

"Little!" said Liz. "He holds the record here for the last six months--eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived. The little devil!"

She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil's sleeping form. The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing to say.

"Does--does he look like his father?" she asked timidly. But apparently Liz did not hear. She had moved down the ward. The mandolin-player heard only a snicker from Annie Petowski's bed, and, vaguely uncomfortable, she moved toward the door.

Liz was turning down the cover of the empty bed, and the Nurse, with tired but shining eyes, was wheeling in the operating table.

The mandolin-player stepped aside to let the table pass. From the blankets she had a glimpse of a young face, bloodless and wan--of hurt, defiant blue eyes. She had never before seen life so naked, so relentless. She shrank back against the wall, a little sick. Then she gathered up her tracts and her mandolin, and limped down the hall.

The door of the mysterious room was open, and from it came a shrill, high wail, a rising and falling note of distress--the voice of a new soul in protest. She went past with averted face.

Back in the ward Liz leaned over the table and, picking the girl up bodily, deposited her tenderly in the warm bed. Then she stood back and smiled down at her, with her hands on her hips.

"Well," she said kindly, "it's over, and here you are! But it's no picnic, is it?"

The girl on the bed turned her head away. The coarsening of her features in the last month or two had changed to an almost bloodless refinement. With her bright hair, she looked as if she had been through the furnace of pain and had come out pure gold. But her eyes were hard.

"Go away," she said petulantly.

Liz leaned down and pulled the blanket over her shoulders.

"You sleep now," she said soothingly. "When you wake up you can have a cup of tea."

The girl threw the cover off and looked up despairingly into Liz's face.

"I don't want to sleep," she said. "My God, Liz, it's going to live and so am I!"

II

Now, the Nurse had been up all night, and at noon, after she had oiled the new baby and washed out his eyes and given him a teaspoonful of warm water, she placed Liz in charge of the ward, and went to her room to put on a fresh uniform. The first thing she did, when she got there, was to go to the mirror, with the picture of her mother tucked in its frame, and survey herself. When she saw her cap and the untidiness of her hair and her white collar all spotted, she frowned.

Then she took the violets out of her belt and put them carefully in a glass of water, and feeling rather silly, she leaned over and kissed them. After that she felt better.

She bathed her face in hot water and then in cold, which brought her colour back, and she put on everything fresh, so that she rustled with each step, which is proper for trained nurses; and finally she tucked the violets back where they belonged, and put on a new cap, which is also proper for trained nurses on gala occasions.

If she had not gone back to the mirror to see that the general effect was as crisp as it should be, things would have been different for Liz, and for the new mother back in the ward. But she did go back; and there, lying on the floor in front of the bureau, all folded together, was a piece of white paper exactly as if it has been tucked in her belt with the violets.

She opened it rather shakily, and it was a leaf from the ward order-book, for at the top it said:

Annie Petowski--may sit up for one hour.

And below that:

Goldstein baby--bran baths.

And below that:

I love you. E.J.

"E.J." was the Junior Medical.

So the Nurse went back to the ward, and sat down, palpitating, in the throne-chair by the table, and spread her crisp skirts, and found where the page had been torn out of the order-book.

And as the smiles of sovereigns are hailed with delight by their courts, so the ward brightened until it seemed to gleam that Easter afternoon. And a sort of miracle happened: none of the babies had colic, and the mothers mostly slept. Also, one of the ladies of the House Committee looked in at the door and said:

"How beautiful you are here, and how peaceful! Your ward is always a sort of benediction."

The lady of the House Committee looked across and saw the new mother, with the sunshine on her yellow braids, and her face refined from the furnace of pain.

"What a sweet young mother!" she said, and rustled out, leaving an odor of peau d'Espagne.

The girl lay much as Liz had left her. Except her eyes, there was nothing in her face to show that despair had given place to wild mutiny. But Liz knew; Liz had gone through it all when "the first one" came; and so, from the end of the ward, she rocked and watched.

The odor of peau d'Espagne was still in the air, eclipsing the Easter lilies, when Liz got up and sauntered down to the girl's bed.

"How are you now, dearie?" she asked, and, reaching under the blankets, brought out the tiny pearl-handled knife with which the girl had been wont to clean her finger-nails. The girl eyed her savagely, but said nothing; nor did she resist when Liz brought out her hands and examined the wrists. The left had a small cut on it.

"Now listen to me," said Liz. "None of that, do you hear? You ain't the only one that's laid here and wanted to end it all. And what happened? Inside of a month they're well and strong again, and they put the kid somewhere, and the folks that know what's happened get used to it, and the ones that don't know don't need to know. Don't be a fool!"

She carried the knife off, but the girl made no protest. There were other ways.

The Nurse was very tired, for she had been up almost all night. She sat at the record-table with her Bible open, and, in the intervals of taking temperatures, she read it. But mostly she read about Annie Petowski being allowed to sit up, and the Goldstein baby having bran baths, and the other thing written below!

At two o'clock came the Junior Medical, in a frock-coat and grey trousers. He expected to sing "The Palms" at the Easter service downstairs in the chapel that afternoon, and, according to precedent, the one who sings "The Palms" on Easter in the chapel must always wear a frock-coat.

Very conscious, because all the ward was staring at his gorgeousness, he went over to the bed where the new mother lay. Then he came back and stood by the table, looking at a record.

"Have you taken her temperature?" he said, businesslike and erect.

"Ninety-eight."

"Her pulse is strong?"

"Yes; she's resting quietly."

"Good.--And--did you get my note?"

This, much as if he had said, "Did you find my scarf-pin?" or anything merely casual; for Liz was hovering near.

"Yes." The nurse's red lips were trembling, but she smiled up at him. Liz came nearer. She was only wishing him Godspeed with his wooing, but it made him uncomfortable.

"Watch her closely," he said, "she's pretty weak and despondent." And he looked at Liz.

"Elizabeth," said the Nurse, "won't you sit by Claribel and fan her?"

Claribel was the new mother. Claribel is, of course, no name for a mother, but she had been named when she was very small.

Liz went away and sat by the girl's bed, and said a little prayer to the effect that they were both so damned good to everybody, she hoped they'd hit it off. But perhaps the prayer of the wicked availeth nothing.

"You know I meant that," he said, from behind a record. "I--I love you with all my heart--and if only you----"

The nurse shook down a thermometer and examined it closely. "I love you, too!" she said. And, walking shakily to one of the beds, she put the thermometer upside down in Maggie McNamara's mouth.

The Junior Medical went away with his shoulders erect in his frock-coat, and his heavy brown hair, which would never part properly and had to be persuaded with brilliantine, bristling with happiness.

And the Nurse-Queen, looking over her kingdom for somebody to lavish her new joy on, saw Claribel lying in bed, looking at the ceiling and reading there all the tragedy of her broken life, all her despair.

So she rustled out to the baby-room, where the new baby had never batted an eye since her bath and was lying on her back with both fists clenched on her breast, and she did something that no trained nurse is ever supposed to do.

She lifted the baby, asleep and all, and carried her to her mother.

But Claribel's face only darkened when she saw her.

"Take the brat away," she said, and went on reading tragedies on the ceiling.

Liz came and proffered her the little mite with every art she knew. She showed her the wrinkled bits of feet, the tiny, ridiculous hands, and how long the hair grew on the back of her head. But when Liz put the baby on her arm, she shuddered and turned her head away. So finally Liz took it back to the other room, and left it there, still sleeping.

The fine edge of the Nurse's joy was dulled. It is a characteristic of great happiness to wish all to be well with the world; and here before her was dry-eyed despair. It was Liz who finally decided her.

"I guess I'll sit up with her to-night," she said, approaching the table with the peculiar gait engendered of heel-less hospital carpet-slippers and Mother Hubbard wrappers. "I don't like the way she watches the ceiling."

"What do you mean, Elizabeth?" asked the Nurse.

"Time I had the twins--that's before your time," said Liz--"we had one like that. She went out the window head first the night after the baby came, and took the kid with her."