“Pem, you’re too darned good!” said Nickie.
“I don’t call it being good,” replied Miss Pembroke. “I call it simply
being self-respecting.”
This was the sort of thing her friends found objectionable, and Nickie
began to object now.
“Lord!” said she. “Don’t we work hard enough to deserve a little fun now
and then? It won’t hurt your precious self-respect to speak to a man now
and then, will it? I can’t--”
“Oh, that’s all nonsense!” interrupted Miss Pembroke. “I see enough of
men, and I put up with enough from them. When I’m off duty, I don’t have
to put up with anything, and I _won’t_!”
“Nobody wants you to. The boys who are coming this evening are awfully
nice boys. If you’d just come in and speak to them--”
Miss Pembroke closed her book sharply.
“Nickie,” she said, “I’m very fond of you; but I don’t like your
friends--not any of them--and I wish you’d let me alone.”
“Certainly,” replied Nickie, in a haughty and offended tone.
She turned all her attention upon the process of manicuring, but neither
the haughtiness nor the silence reassured Miss Pembroke, who knew that
they wouldn’t last. It was hardly worth while to open her book again,
for Nickie would be sure to interrupt.
“It’s getting to be too much of a good thing,” she reflected. “I needed
a good rest after that last case, but I’ll never get it while Nickie’s
here. This whole thing was a mistake. I ought to have taken a room
somewhere by myself, where I couldn’t be bothered.”
This was by no means the first time she had regretted her present
domestic arrangements. It was all Nickie’s fault, of course. Nickie had
told her what a fine thing it would be to join with three other graduate
nurses in taking a flat.
“A nice little home of our own,” Nickie had said, “where we can rest
when we want to, and entertain our friends, and keep all our things. The
other girls are simply great. You’ll like them.”
Miss Pembroke had said that five girls were too many.
“But we’ll never all be home at the same time,” Nickie had assured her.
“Lots of times you and I will have the place to ourselves.”
In the course of a year this had happened only once. When Nickie was at
home, Pem was off on a case. When Pem came home, instead of finding her
faithful Nickie, one of the other girls would be there, or sometimes
two of them; and Pem didn’t like them. She didn’t like their “parties,”
or their conversation, or their cheerful, careless style of
housekeeping.
She herself was never careless, and, though she was even-tempered and
polite, she wasn’t often cheerful. As a nurse, she was matchless.
Doctors wanted to send her to their most troublesome and exacting
patients, because not only was she quick, capable, and intelligent, but
she could hold her tongue and keep her temper, and she had a cool, quiet
way with her that kept her patients in good order.
But this cool, quiet way of which doctors so highly approved was not at
all pleasing to her housemates. Even Nickie thought it deplorable.
“Pem,” she had said to her once, “you could be young and beautiful, if
you’d only learn how!”
There was truth in that observation. Miss Pembroke had both youth and
beauty, and somehow managed to disguise them, so that they often went
unnoticed. People would say that she was “impressive,” or “dignified,”
or something of that sort, because they never saw her off guard, as
Nickie saw her now. She was a tall, slender, dark-haired girl, with an
austere, fine-bred face--not the sort of face one would turn to look
after in the street, but a face which patients--above all, male
patients--found very, very hard to forget. Her slender hands were
clasped about one knee, and her clear amber eyes were staring
thoughtfully before her. She was, thought Nickie, engaged in daydreams
of some mysterious and enchanting kind unknown to more ordinary girls.
But in reality--
“Nickie’s getting coarse,” Miss Pembroke was reflecting.
There was no coarseness to be seen in Miss Nicholson’s rosy, jolly face,
nor to be observed in her manners and conversation. Indeed, no one but
Miss Pembroke had yet seen any trace of it; but Pem was by nature
critical, and just at this moment she was jaded and dispirited after six
weeks of a ferocious typhoid patient, who had fallen in love with her in
a very trying and ill-tempered way. Moreover, she was mortally weary of
Nickie’s persistence.
“I’m sick and tired of men,” she thought. “All Nickie ever thinks of is
men, and going to parties, and having what she calls a good time.”
Now this was not quite doing justice to Nickie. When she was not
working, she was undeniably very fond of playing; but when you consider
how very short and infrequent were her play times, and how very hard and
exhausting was her work; when you consider that this lively,
warm-hearted young creature had to witness every sort of human agony and
wretchedness; when you bear in mind the tremendous responsibilities she
so faithfully accepted; her generous readiness to do more than she
needed to do, her charity, her sympathy, her sturdy courage--when you
think of all this, it is not difficult to forgive her for being somewhat
frivolous during her little hours of freedom.
There were weeks at a time when men, parties, and having a good time
gave her mighty little concern. Just now, however, her mind was entirely
given to such matters; and, as Pem expected, she couldn’t help trying
again to persuade her friend.
“Oh, Pem!” she said coaxingly. “Just this once! Come in and speak to the
boys, and if you don’t like them--”
“No!” said Pem.
But she did, and, by doing so, she changed the course of three lives.
She had no intention of seeing Nickie’s friends. In fact, she came
nearer to quarreling with Nickie than she had ever yet come, and she
retired to her own room with flushed cheeks and a frown on her calm
brow. She was not in the habit of losing her temper, and this unusual
annoyance disturbed her. She was restless, and couldn’t settle down to
read or sew.
Her neat little room seemed all at once too neat and too little, and she
wanted to get out of it. It was a clear, fine night. A walk, even a
solitary and aimless one, wouldn’t be bad. She had put on her hat and
coat, and was just about to open her door, when--when Nickie’s party
arrived.
Impossible to go out now! In order to reach the front door, she would
have to pass by the sitting room, and Nickie would see her and stop her.
“Nickie has absolutely no pride!” she thought, angrier than ever. “Even
after what I said to her, she’d try to drag me in there!”
She took off her hat and flung it on the bed.
“I’ll read,” she decided.
She couldn’t read. The party disturbed her too much. They were laughing
and talking, and presently some one began to play the piano and sing.
It was an idiotic song, but it was delivered in a hearty, boyish voice
that was somehow very touching.
There was violent applause when the singer finished, and after a few
minutes he began again.
Pem came nearer to the door, her face grown very pale. “Keep the Home
Fires Burning!” Some one else sang that--one night in Montreal--the
night before the troop ship went out--a boy in a lieutenant’s uniform.
Pem snapped the light and stood listening in the dark, her hands
clenched, her eyes closed.
“So turn the dark clouds inside out,
Till the boys come home.”
“Oh, God!” whispered Pem; for that boy would never come home, and the
Pem who had listened to his gallant young voice was gone, too.
The singing stopped, only not for Pem. It went on sounding in her ears.
The voice that she would never hear again and the living voice mingled
together until she could bear it no longer. She must go in and see this
other one--see with her own eyes that he was a stranger, in no way
like--any one else.