Part 1

Chapter 13,847 wordsPublic domain

THE STINGY RECEIVER

BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

AUTHOR OF "MOLLY MAKE BELIEVE," "THE WHITE LINEN NURSE," ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

FANNY MUNSELL

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

1917

Published, February, 1917

KATHERINE K. ABBOTT

A GENEROUS GIVER

THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY

DEDICATED

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The girl in her Norse glow and blondness would have been a marked figure any where . . . Frontispiece

"Oh, drat you women!" he grinned sheepishly. "Well, go ahead! One--two--three--four--five--six--seven--eight--nine--TEN!". . . 9

By craning his neck around the corner of the piano, he noted with increasing astonishment that the rivulet sprang from the black ferule of an umbrella . . . 87

"Excuse me, Miss Kjelland," he said; "but this is not a picnic--it is a clinic" . . .99

As coolly as if she had been appraising a new dog or pussy, Mrs. Tome Gallien narrowed her eyes to both the vision and the announcement . . . 127

THE STINGY RECEIVER

"If I were fifty years old," said the Young Doctor quite bluntly, "and found myself suddenly stripped of practically all my motor powers except my pocketbook and my sense of humor; and was told that I could make one wish----"

"But I am fifty years old," admitted the Sick Woman. "And I do find myself stripped of practically all my motor powers, except my pocketbook and my sense of humor!"

"Then for Heaven's sake--wish!" snapped the Young Doctor.

"Oh, my goodness!" mocked the Sick Woman. "You're not by any chance a--a fairy god-doctor, are you?"

"Fairy god-doctor?" bristled the young man. "The phrase is an unfamiliar one to me," he confided with some hauteur.

Quizzically then for a moment among her hotel pillows the woman lay staring out through the open window into the indefinite slate-roofed vista of Beyond--and Beyond--and Beyond. Then so furtively that the whites of her eyes showed suddenly like a snarling dog's she glanced back at the Young Doctor's grimly inscrutable face.

"You're quite sure that it isn't a will you want me to make? Not a wish?" she asked.

"Quite sure," said the Young Doctor, without emotion.

As two antagonists searching desperately for some weak spot in each other's mental armor, the patient's eyes narrowed to the doctor's, the doctor's to the patient's.

It was the patient who fled first from the probe.

"How many years can you give me?" she surrendered dully.

"I can't give you any! I can't afford it!" slapped the Young Doctor's brisk, cool voice.

"How many years can you sell me, then?" roused the woman with the first faint red flare of vigor across her cheek bones.

"Oh, I don't know," admitted the Young Doctor. Sagging back a little wearily against the edge of the bureau, with his long arms folded loosely across his breast he stood staring tensely down through the woman's question into the actual case itself. "Oh, I don't know," he admitted. "Oh, of course, if you had some one brand-new interest to revitalize you? If the matter of congenial climate could be properly adjusted? With all your abundant financial resources? And all the extra serenities and safeguards that financial resources can wrap a sick person in? Oh, I suppose one could almost positively guarantee you--guarantee you,--oh, years and years," he finished a trifle vaguely.

"Only that?" winced the woman. "Years and years?" she quoted mockingly. "It isn't enough! Not nearly enough!" she flared with sudden passion.

"Even so," smiled the Young Doctor. "That is a more definite estimate than I could, equally honestly, make for the youngest, friskiest child who prances to work or play every day through the tortuous traffic of our city streets."

"Oh," said the woman with a flicker of humor in her tears.

"Oh," smiled the doctor without an atom of humor in the smile.

With her handsome gray head cocked ever so slightly to one side, the woman's eyes seemed rather oddly intent on the Young Doctor for an instant.

"How--how thin you are--and how hungry-looking," she commented suddenly with quite irrelevant impudence.

"Thank you," bowed the Young Doctor.

"Ha!" chuckled the woman. "And I? 'How satiate-looking she is!' Is that what you'd like to say?"

"You are perfectly welcome to look any way you wish," said the Young Doctor with distinct coldness.

Indifferently then for a moment both doctor and patient seemed to relax into the centric personal hush of the sick-room itself, with its far outlying murmur of thudding feet, its occasional sharp, self-conscious click of remote elevator machinery.

Then the doctor snatched out his watch.

"Well, what is it you want me to do first?" roused the Sick Woman instantly.

"Make your wish!" said the doctor.

"Yes, I know," parried the woman. "But what do you want me to wish? What kind of a wish, I mean, do you want me to make?"

As though personally affronted by the question, the Young Doctor stepped suddenly forward.

"What kind of a wish do I want you to make?" he demanded. "Why, what kind of a wish should I want you to make except an honest wish? Not the second-hand, sanctimonious, reconsidered sort of wish that you think you ought to make. But the first glad, self-concerned, self-revitalizing whim that gushes up into your mind when anybody springs the word 'wish' at you!"

"Oh!" brightened the woman. "That ought to be easy enough." The sudden smile flooding into the very faintly distorted facial muscles gave a certain shrewd, waggish sort of humor to the assertion. "Why not?" she persisted speculatively. "Long life and happiness having been logically eliminated from my impulses, and both faith and fact having reasonably convinced me that all my loved ones are perfectly well provided for in either this world or the next, why shouldn't I wish for the one thing that will add most to my own personal diversion? Oh, very well," she began to consider. Whitely her eyelids drooped down across her turbid eyes. "Now you count ten, Doctor," she murmured quite casually. "And when you say ten I'll tell you the wish."

"This isn't a game, Mrs. Gallien!" bristled the Young Doctor.

Very languidly the woman opened her eyes wide.

"Oh, isn't it?" she asked. "Then I won't wish, thank you."

"What are you talking about?" scolded the Young Doctor.

"About getting well," conceded the woman. Languidly the white eyelids closed again. "And if getting well isn't a game--I won't get well, either," affirmed the woman.

With a gasp of irritation the Young Doctor snatched up his hat and left the room.

But outside the door, neither up the hall nor down the hall, nor across the hall, was the nurse waiting where he had told her to wait.

With an audible imprecation he stalked back into the sick-room and threw himself down into the first chair he could reach.

"Oh, drat you women!" he grinned sheepishly. "Well, go ahead! One--two--three--four--five--six--seven--eight--nine--ten!"

As automatically almost as a mechanical doll the Sick Woman opened her eyes.

"Oh, all right!" she smiled. "Now I will tell you the wish. But first I must tell you that the thing I hate most in the world is an empty twilight. And the thing I love best is a crowded shop. Oh, the joy of shopping!" she quickened. "The fun, the fury of it! Buy, buy, buy, while the light lasts and the money shines! But as for the empty twilight?" she wilted again. "I wish--" her voice caught suddenly, "I wish that the last mail of the day may never leave me utterly letterless. And that I may always be expecting a package by express!"

"Do you really mean it?" asked the Young Doctor without the slightest trace of perturbance.

"Why, of course I mean it!" smiled the woman. "But do you dream for a moment that you can guarantee that?"

"I can at least prescribe it," said the Young Doctor.

"You have more subtlety than I thought," drawled the woman.

"You have more simplicity than I had dared to hope," bowed the Young Doctor.

Again, in shrewd half-mocking appraisement, the two measured each other.

Then with a great, busy frown the Young Doctor turned to his notebook.

"Let me see," he estimated. "It was four weeks ago yesterday--that you fell on the street."

"Was it?" said the woman indifferently.

"Mrs. Gallien," asked the Young Doctor with some abruptness, "just exactly where is your home?"

"I have no home," said the woman.

"Yes, but you must live somewhere," bristled the Young Doctor.

"Only in my pocketbook and my sense of humor," quoted the woman with frank mockery.

"But why make such a mystery about your domicile?" persisted the Young Doctor.

"That's just it," said the woman. "I haven't any domicile to make a mystery of! It's seventeen years since I've lived in what you call a domicile.

"Where have you lived?" demanded the Young Doctor.

"Oh, on steamers mostly," conceded the woman. Very faintly the pallid nostrils dilated. "I've been to Australia five times," she acknowledged. "And China twice. And Japan,--" she quickened. "All the little vague outlying islands, all the great jostling eager seaports! By steam, by paddle wheels, by lax, loose-flapping rainbow-colored sails!" In sudden listlessness she turned her cheek to the pillow again. "Wherever the sea is salt," she murmured. "Wherever the sea is salt! Hunting, always and forever hunting,--yes, that's it,--always and forever hunting for lights and laughter and----"

"Pardon me," said the Young Doctor, quite abruptly. "But is your husband living?"

"No," said the woman. "He died two years ago."

Inquisitively for a moment the Young Doctor studied the nerve-ravaged face before him.

"Pardon me," he stammered. "But--but was it a great shock to you?"

"It was a great relief," said the woman, without emotion. "He had been hopelessly insane for seventeen years."

"Oh!" jumped the Young Doctor, as though the thought fairly tortured his senses.

"Oh!" speculated the woman quizzically, with the merciful outer callousness which the brain provides for those who are obliged to carry some one scorching thought for an indeterminate period of years.

As though in sheer nervous outlet the Young Doctor began almost at once to pace the room.

"Seeing that there are no--no personal ties, apparently, to hold you here--or drive you there," he said, "the matter of congenial climate ought to be one that we can easily arrange."

With half ironic amusement the Sick Woman lay and watched his worried, fluctuating face.

"The question of climate is all arranged!" she said. "The speed that was stripped from my body last week, has at least been put back into my brain. Just where I am going, just whom I am going to take with me, just what I am going to do to amuse me, every last infinitesimal detail of all the rest of my life," she smiled, "I have planned it all out while you have been dawdling there between the wardrobe and the bureau."

"Dawdling?" snapped the Young Doctor. Quite abruptly he stopped his nervous pacing. "Well, where is it that you want to go?" he asked.

Musingly the woman's eyes stared off again into the window-framed vista of the city roofs.

"On an island," she said. "Off the coast of South Carolina there is a house. It is really rather a dreadful old place. I have not seen it since I was a girl. It was old then. It must be almost a wreck now. And the island is not very large. And there is no other house on the island. Just this great rambling deserted shack. And six battered old live-oak trees half strangled with dangly gray moss. And there are blue jays always in the gray moss, and cardinal birds, and unestimable squirrels. And there is a bedroom in the house forty feet long. And in that bedroom there is a four-poster seven feet wide, and most weirdly devised of old ships' figureheads, a smirking, faded siren at one corner, a broken-nosed sailor at another,--I forget the others--but altogether in memory I see it as a rather unusually broad and amusing shelf to be laid aside on. And there, in the middle of that great ship-figured bed, in the middle of that great dingy sunken-cabin sort of room with its every ancient windowpane blearing grayly into the sea, through deck-like porches so broad, so dark, so glowering that no streak of cloud or sky will ever reach my eyes again, nor any strip of gray-brown earth--I shall lie, I say, in unutterable peace and tranquillity as other ghosts have lain before me, 'forty fathoms deep' below all their troubles. And always as I lie thus, there will be the sigh of the surf in my ears. And the swell of the tide in my eyes. Eternally across my windows fin-like wings shall soar and pass and gray mosses float and flare."

"Cheerful!" snapped the Young Doctor.

"Yes. Isn't it?" beamed the woman.

With a gasp of surprise the Young Doctor turned and stared at her.

"Why, I really believe that you think so!" he stammered.

"Why, of course I think so!" said the Woman. "Why not?" she queried. "A dimming candle glows brightest in a dark room!" Not a trace of morbidness was in her voice, not a flicker of sentimentality. "And besides," she smiled. "It is also my desire to remove myself as far as possible from the main thoroughfares of life."

"I don't see why!" protested the Young Doctor.

"This is the 'why,'" said the woman. "Just as I fell that day," she smiled. "In my last conscious moment, I mean,--a hurrying child stumbled and stepped on me." Once again the smile twisted ever so slightly to one side. "And never any more while I live," said the woman, "do I care to repeat the sensation of being an impediment to traffic." Very idly for a moment she seemed to focus her entire interest on the flapping window curtain. "And I shall name my house--name my house--" she mused. With sudden impetuous conviction every lax muscle of her face tightened into action. "Once--once in New England," she hurried, "I saw a scarlet-gold tulip named 'Glare of the Garden'! For absolute antithesis I shall call my house 'Gloom of the Sea!'"

"Do you wish to take your present young nurse with you?" asked the doctor a bit abruptly.

The crooked smile on the woman's face straightened instantly into thin-lipped positiveness.

"I do not!" said the woman. "I detest novices! Their professional affectations drive me mad! I am born, weaned, educated, courted, married, widowed,--crippled, in the moppish time it takes them to wash my face, to straighten the simplest fork on my breakfast tray! Every gesture of their bodies, every impulse of their minds, fairly creak with the laborious, studied arrogance of an immature nature thrust suddenly into authority! If I've got to have personal service all the rest of my days for goodness' sake give me a big, experienced nature reduced by some untoward reason to the utmost terms of simplicity!" As quickly as it had come, the irritation vanished from her face. "There is a chambermaid here in this hotel--I love her!" said the woman. "She was a hospital superintendent somewhere, once, until her deafness smashed it." As ingenuously as a child's the tired, worldly-wise eyes lifted to the Young Doctor's face. "I like deaf people," said the woman. "They never chatter, I have noticed. Nor insist upon reading the newspapers to you. Being themselves protected from every vocal noise that does not directly concern them, they seem instinctively to accord you the same sacristy. And besides," smiled the woman, "this ex-superintendent's hair is as gray as mine. And I adore women whose hair is just exactly as gray as mine. And also," smiled the woman, "her name happens to be 'Martha'--and I have always craved the personal devotion of someone named 'Martha'. And I shall pay her an extra hundred dollars a month," smiled the woman, "to call me 'Elizabeth'. Never in my life," said the woman, "have I ever had any food cooked for my first name. Martha will do everything for me, you understand?" she added quickly.

"Yes, but how do you know that she'll go with you?" asked the Young Doctor dryly.

"How do I know that she'll go with me?" flared the woman. The imperious consciousness of money was in the flare, but also the subtler surety of a temperamental conviction. "Why, of course she'll go!" said the woman. As definitely as though she had assumed that sunshine would be sunshine, she dismissed the whole topic from their conversation.

"Oh, all right," smiled the Young Doctor a bit ironically. "I am to infer then that climate, locality, care, companionship, everything has been arranged except your wish for a chronic Package by Express?"

"Oh, that is all arranged too!" boasted the woman.

"I don't see it," said the Young Doctor.

"I saw it," said the woman, "while you were straightening your necktie! Oh, of course, the shops can never happen again." She winced with real emotion. "All the gay, covetous fingering of silk or bronze, the shrewd explorative sallies through aisles of treasure and tiers of tantalization! But just the package part?" She rallied instantly. "Oh, the package part I assure you is perfectly easy, as long as memory lasts and imagination holds. With a check book on one side of me and a few dollars worth of postage stamps on the other, all I'll have to do," she laughed, "is just to lie there on my back and study the advertising pages of all the magazines. Every fascinating gown that cries for help from a fashion catalogue! Every irresistible lawn mower that brags of its prowess from the columns of an agricultural journal! Ten cent packages of floral miracles, or ten dollar lotions from the beauty shops! Certainly never again till the end of time ought there to dawn a day when I haven't a reasonable right to expect that something will arrive!

"And I shall have a wrangle boat, of course," babbled the woman impishly. "What is it? Oh, 'motor boat' you call it? Oh, any old kind of an engine,--I don't care, so long as it serves its purpose of keeping a man and a boy busy all day long quarreling as they always do just how to run it. And once a day, every late afternoon, I shall send the wrangle boat to the mainland--way--way out beyond the sky line of my piazza. And the instant that boat swings back into vision again, just between the droop of the roof and the lift of the railing, they will hoist a flag if there is anything for me. And if there isn't--if there isn't?" Across her whimsical prophecy indescribable irritation settled suddenly. "And if there isn't anything, they need never return!" snapped the woman.

"Oh, of course, that's all right at first," mocked the Young Doctor. "But in your original description of your island I remember no mention of large storehouses or empty warerooms. After a while you know, with things arriving every day or so. And the house, I infer, except for the one big room you speak of, sustains no special acreage."

"Stupid!" rallied the woman.

"Oh, I see," puzzled the Young Doctor. "You--you mean that you're going to give the things away? Hordes of young nieces, and poor relations and all that sort of thing? Why--why, of course!"

"Oh, no!" said the woman. With suddenly narrowing eyes her whole face turned incalculably shrewd and cold. "Oh, no! I am all through giving anything away!" Defiantly for an instant she challenged the Young Doctor's silence, then sank back with frank indifference into her pillows again. "Worldly as I am," she smiled very faintly, "and worldly as my father and mother were before me, and their father and mother, doubtless, before them, there is one little prayer that I shall never forget,--and I found it, if the fact interests you, inscribed painstakingly in faded violet ink in the back of my grandfather's first check book, before, evidently, either wealth or worldliness had quite begun to set in. And this is the little prayer:

"If fortune and finance should so ordain that I may never be any kind of a giver, Heaven grant that at least I may not be a stingy receiver but share unstintedly with such benefactor as may favor me the exceeding happiness which his benefaction has most surely conferred upon me!"

Once more the faint smile twisted into cynicism. "That's it," said the woman. "I'm tired of _stingy receivers_!"

"I--I'm afraid I don't get you," said the Young Doctor.

"Don't you ever get anything?" snapped the woman explosively.

It was the Young Doctor's turn to flare now. "Oh, yes," he said. "Sometimes I get awfully tired of the vagaries of women!"

Out of her nerves rather than her mirth the woman burst out laughing.

"You are so young!" she said.

"Not as juvenile as your vagaries," protested the Young Doctor.

"But my vagaries are not juvenile!" insisted the woman. "They are as old and ingrained as time itself. For seventeen years," quickened the woman, "I have been 'gathering gifts' from all over the world, ripping things out of impersonal wholesale, as it were, to apply them as best I might to this person's, or the other's, individual need. Say, if you want to, that I have had nothing else to do on my travels except to spend money, yet the fact remains that as far as my own personal satisfactions are concerned in the matter of giving, I have been pouring presents for seventeen years into a bottomless pit. Never once, I mean," smiled the woman, "never once, yearning over the abyss as the gift went down, have I ever heard the entrancing thud that a gift ought to make when it lands on real appreciation. Never!"

"Well, you are a cynic!" conceded the Young Doctor.

"I admit it," said the woman. "Yet even a cynic may be fair-minded." For the first time in her tired, sophisticated face, shrewdness and irony were equally routed by sheer perplexity. "I've thought it all out as decently as I could from the other person's point of view," she puzzled. "I see his side, I think. I have no legal, constitutional right, of course, to demand a person's gratitude for any gift which is purely voluntary on my part. Lots of people in all probability would infinitely rather not have a gift than be obliged thereby to write a 'Thank you' for it. Against such a person's wish and inclination, I mean, I've no right to pry 'Thank you's' out of him, even with gold-mounted golf sticks or first editions. I've no right to be a highwayman, I mean. Even if I'm literally dying for a 'Thank you' I've no more right, I mean, to hold up a person with a gift than I'd have to hold him up with a gun."

"Then what are you fussing about?" asked the Young Doctor.