Like a short-necked animal elongated suddenly to the cervical
proportions of a giraffe, the Superintendent of Nurses reared up
from her stoop-shouldered desk-work and stared forth in speechless
astonishment across the top of her spectacles.
Exuberantly impertinent, ecstatically self-conscious, Rae Malgregor
repeated her demand. To her parched mouth the very taste of her own
babbling impudence refreshed her like the shock and prickle of cracked
ice.
"I tell you I want my own face again! And my own hands!" she reiterated
glibly. "I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders--and
the other human expressions!" she explained. "And the nice grubby
country hands that go with that sort of a face!"
Very accusingly she raised her finger and shook it at the
Superintendent's perfectly livid countenance.
"Oh, of course I know I wasn't very much to look at. But at least I
matched! What my hands knew, I mean, my face knew! Pies or plowing or
May-baskets, what my hands knew my face knew! That's the way hands and
faces ought to work together! But you? you with all your rules and your
bossing and your everlasting 'S--sh! S--sh!' you've snubbed all the
know-anything out of my face--and made my hands nothing but two
disconnected machines--for somebody else to run! And I hate you! You're
a Monster! You're a ----, everybody hates you!"
Mutely then she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and waited for the
Superintendent to smite her dead. The smite she felt quite sure would be
a noisy one. First of all, she reasoned it would fracture her skull.
Naturally then of course it would splinter her spine. Later in all
probability it would telescope her knee-joints. And never indeed now
that she came to think of it had the arches of her feet felt less
capable of resisting so terrible an impact. Quite unconsciously she
groped out a little with one hand to steady herself against the edge of
the desk.
But the blow when it came was nothing but a cool finger tapping her
pulse.
"There! There!" crooned the Superintendent's voice with a most amazing
tolerance.
"But I won't 'there--there'!" snapped Rae Malgregor. Her eyes were wide
open again now, and extravagantly dilated.
The cool fingers on her pulse seemed to tighten a little. "S--sh!
S--sh!" admonished the Superintendent's mumbling lips.
"But I won't 'S--sh--S--sh'!" stormed Rae Malgregor. Never before in
her three years' hospital training had she seen her arch-enemy, the
Superintendent, so utterly disarmed of irascible temper and arrogant
dignity, and the sight perplexed and maddened her at one and the same
moment. "But I won't 'S--sh--S--sh'!" Desperately she jerked her curly
blonde head in the direction of the clock on the wall. "Here it's four
o'clock now!" she cried. "And in less than four hours you're going to
try and make me graduate--and go out into the world--God knows
where--and charge innocent people twenty-five dollars a week and
washing, likelier than not, mind you, for these hands," she gestured,
"that don't co-ordinate at all with this face," she grimaced, "but with
the face of one of the House Doctors--or the Senior Surgeon--or even
you--who may be way off in Kamchatka--when I need him most!" she
finished with a confused jumble of accusation and despair.
Still with unexplainable amiability the Superintendent whirled back into
place in her pivot-chair and with her left hand which had all this time
been rummaging busily in a lower desk drawer proffered Rae Malgregor a
small fold of paper.
"Here, my dear," she said. "Here's a sedative for you. Take it at once.
It will quiet you perfectly. We all know you've had very hard luck this
past month, but you mustn't worry so about the future." The slightest
possible tinge of purely professional manner crept back into the older
woman's voice. "Certainly, Miss Malgregor, with your judgment--"
"With my judgment?" cried Rae Malgregor. The phrase was like a red rag
to her. "With my judgment? Great Heavens! That's the whole trouble! I
haven't got any judgment! I've never been allowed to have any judgment!
All I've ever been allowed to have is the judgment of some flirty young
medical student--or the House Doctor!--or the Senior Surgeon!--or you!"
Her eyes were fairly piteous with terror.
"Don't you see that my face doesn't know anything?" she faltered,
"except just to smile and smile and smile and say 'Yes, sir--No,
sir--Yes, sir'?" From curly blonde head to square-toed, commonsense
shoes her little body began to quiver suddenly like the advent of a
chill. "Oh, what am I going to do," she begged, "when I'm way off
alone--somewhere--in the mountains--or a tenement--or a palace--and
something happens--and there isn't any judgment round to tell me what
I ought to do?"
Abruptly in the doorway as though summoned by some purely casual flicker
of the Superintendent's thin fingers another nurse appeared.
"Yes, I rang," said the Superintendent. "Go and ask the Senior Surgeon
if he can come to me here a moment, immediately."
"The Senior Surgeon?" gasped Rae Malgregor. "The Senior Surgeon?" With
her hands clutching at her throat she reeled back against the wall for
support. Like a shore bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree
stripped in one second of its leafage, she stood there, utterly stricken
of temper or passion or any animating human emotion whatsoever.
"Oh, now I'm going to be expelled! Oh, now I know I'm going to
be--expelled!" she moaned listlessly.
Very vaguely into the farthest radiation of her vision she sensed the
approach of a man. Gray-haired, gray-bearded, gray-suited, grayly
dogmatic as a block of granite, the Senior Surgeon loomed up at last in
the doorway.
"I'm in a hurry," he growled. "What's the matter?"
Precipitously Rae Malgregor collapsed into the breach.
"Oh, there's--nothing at all the matter, sir," she stammered. "It's
only--it's only that I've just decided that I don't want to be a trained
nurse."
With a gesture of ill-concealed impatience the Superintendent shrugged
the absurd speech aside.
"Dr. Faber," she said, "won't you just please assure Miss Malgregor once
more that the little Italian boy's death last week was in no conceivable
way her fault,--that nobody blames her in the slightest, or holds her in
any possible way responsible."
"Why, what nonsense!" snapped the Senior Surgeon. "What--!"
"And the Portuguese woman the week before that," interrupted Rae
Malgregor dully.
"Stuff and nonsense!" said the Senior Surgeon. "It's nothing but
coincidence! Pure coincidence! It might have happened to anybody!"
"And she hasn't slept for almost a fortnight." the Superintendent
confided, "nor touched a drop of food or drink, as far as I can make
out, except just black coffee. I've been expecting this break-down for
some days."
"And-the-young-drug-store-clerk-the-week-before-that," Rae Malgregor
resumed with sing-song monotony.
Brusquely the Senior Surgeon stepped forward and taking the girl by her
shoulders, jerked her sharply round to the light, and, with firm,
authoritative fingers, rolled one of her eyelids deftly back from its
inordinately dilated pupil. Equally brusquely he turned away again.
"Nothing but moonshine!" he muttered. "Nothing in the world but too much
coffee dope taken on an empty stomach,--'empty brain,' I'd better have
said! When will you girls ever learn any sense?" With searchlight
shrewdness his eyes flashed back for an instant over the haggard gray
lines that slashed along the corners of her quivering, childish mouth. A
bit temperishly he began to put on his gloves. "Next time you set out to
have a 'brain-storm,' Miss Malgregor," he suggested satirically, "try to
have it about something more sensible than imagining that anybody is
trying to hold you personally responsible for the existence of death in
the world. Bah!" he ejaculated fiercely. "If you are going to fuss like
this over cases hopelessly moribund from the start, what in thunder are
you going to do some fine day when out of a perfectly clear and clean
sky Security itself turns septic and you lose the President of the
United States--or a mother of nine children--with a hang-nail?"
"But I wasn't fussing, sir!" protested Rae Malgregor with a timid sort
of dignity. "Why, it never had occurred to me for a moment that anybody
blamed me for--anything!" Just from sheer astonishment her hands took a
new clutch into the torn flapping corner of the motto that she still
clung desperately to even at this moment.
"For Heaven's sake stop crackling that brown paper!" stormed the Senior
Surgeon.
"But I wasn't crackling the brown paper, sir! It's crackling itself,"
persisted Rae Malgregor very softly. The great blue eyes that lifted to
his were brimming full of misery. "Oh, can't I make you understand,
sir?" she stammered. Appealingly she turned to the Superintendent. "Oh,
can't I make anybody understand? All I was trying to say,--all I was
trying to explain, was--that I _don't want to be a trained nurse--after
all_!"
"Why not?" demanded the Senior Surgeon with a rather noisy click of his
glove fasteners.
"Because--my--face--is--tired," said the girl quite simply.
The explosive wrath on the Senior Surgeon's countenance seemed to be
directed suddenly at the Superintendent.
"Is this an afternoon tea?" he asked tartly. "With six major operations
this morning and a probable meningitis diagnosis ahead of me this
afternoon I think I might be spared the babblings of an hysterical
nurse!" Casually over his shoulder he nodded at the girl. "You're a
fool!" he said, and started for the door.
Just on the threshold he turned abruptly and looked back. His forehead
was furrowed like a corduroy road and the one rampant question in his
mind at the moment seemed to be mired hopelessly between his bushy
eyebrows.
"Lord!" he exclaimed a bit flounderingly. "Are _you_ the nurse that
helped me last week on that fractured skull?"
"Yes, sir," said Rae Malgregor.
Jerkily the Senior Surgeon retraced his footsteps into the office and
stood facing her as though with some really terrible accusation.
"And the freak abdominal?" he quizzed sharply. "Was it _you_ who
threaded that needle for me so blamed slowly--and calmly--and surely,
while all the rest of us were jumping up and down and cursing you--for
no brighter reason than that we couldn't have threaded it ourselves if
we'd had all eternity before us and--all creation bleeding to death?"
"Y-e-s, sir," said Rae Malgregor.
Quite bluntly the Senior Surgeon reached out and lifted one of her hands
to his scowling professional scrutiny.
"Gad!" he attested. "What a hand! You're a wonder! Under proper
direction you're a wonder! It was like myself working with twenty
fingers and no thumbs! I never saw anything like it!"
Almost boyishly the embarrassed flush mounted to his cheeks as he jerked
away again. "Excuse me for not recognizing you," he apologized gruffly.
"But you girls all look so much alike!"
As though the eloquence of Heaven itself had suddenly descended upon a
person hitherto hopelessly tongue-tied, Rae Malgregor lifted an utterly
transfigured face to the Senior Surgeon's grimly astonished gaze.
"Yes! Yes, sir!" she cried joyously. "That's just exactly what the
trouble is! That's just exactly what I was trying to express, sir! My
face is all worn out trying to 'look alike'! My cheeks are almost sprung
with artificial smiles! My eyes are fairly bulging with unshed tears! My
nose aches like a toothache trying never to turn up at anything! I'm
smothered with the discipline of it! I'm choked with the affectation! I
tell you--I just can't breathe through a trained nurse's face any more!
I tell you, sir, I'm sick to death of being nothing but a type. I want
to look like _myself_! I want to see what Life could do to a silly face
like mine--if it ever got a chance! When other women are crying, I want
the fun of crying! When other women look scared to death, I want the fun
of looking scared to death!" Hysterically again with shrewish emphasis
she began to repeat: "I won't be a nurse! I tell you, I won't! I
_won't_!"
"Pray what brought you so suddenly to this remarkable decision?"
scoffed the Senior Surgeon.
"A letter from my father, sir," she confided more quietly. "A letter
about some dogs."
"Dogs?" hooted the Senior Surgeon.
"Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse. A trifle speculatively for an
instant she glanced at the Superintendent's face and then back again to
the Senior Surgeon's. "Yes, sir," she repeated with increasing
confidence. "Up in Nova Scotia my father raises hunting-dogs. Oh, no
special fancy kind, sir," she hastened in all honesty to explain. "Just
dogs, you know,--just mixed dogs,--pointers with curly tails,--and
shaggy-coated hounds,--and brindled spaniels, and all that sort of
thing,--just mongrels, you know, but very clever; and people, sir, come
all the way from Boston to buy dogs of him, and once a man came way from
London to learn the secret of his training."
"Well, what is the secret of his training?" quizzed the Senior Surgeon
with the sudden eager interest of a sportsman. "I should think it would
be pretty hard," he acknowledged, "in a mixed gang like that to decide
just which particular dog was suited to what particular game!"
"Yes, that's just it, sir," beamed the White Linen Nurse. "A dog, of
course, will chase anything that runs,--that's just dog,--but when a dog
really begins to _care_ for what he's chasing he--wags! That's hunting!
Father doesn't calculate, he says, on training a dog on anything he
doesn't wag on!"
"Yes, but what's that got to do with you?" asked the Senior Surgeon a
bit impatiently.
With ill-concealed dismay the White Linen Nurse stood staring blankly at
the Senior Surgeon's gross stupidity.
"Why, don't you see?" she faltered. "I've been chasing this nursing job
three whole years now--and there's no wag to it!"
"Oh Hell!" said the Senior Surgeon. If he hadn't said "Oh Hell!" he
would have grinned. And it hadn't been a grinning day, and he certainly
didn't intend to begin grinning at any such late hour as that in the
afternoon. With his dignity once reassured he relaxed then a trifle.
"For Heaven's sake, what _do_ you want to be?" he asked not unkindly.
With an abrupt effort at self-control Rae Malgregor jerked her head into
at least the outer semblance of a person lost in almost fathomless
thought.
"Why I'm sure I don't know, sir," she acknowledged worriedly. "But it
would be a great pity, I suppose, to waste all the grand training that's
gone into my hands." With sudden conviction her limp shoulders stiffened
a trifle. "My oldest sister," she stammered, "bosses the laundry in one
of the big hotels in Halifax, and my youngest sister teaches school in
Moncton. But I'm so strong, you know, and I like to move things round
so,--and everything,--maybe--I could get a position somewhere as general
housework girl."
With a roar of amusement as astonishing to himself as to his listeners,
the Senior Surgeon's chin jerked suddenly upward.
"You're crazy as a loon!" he confided cordially. "Great Scott! If you
can work up a condition like this on coffee,--what would you do on," he
hesitated grimly, "malted milk?" As unheralded as his amusement, gross
irritability overtook him again. "Will--you--stop--rattling that brown
paper?" he thundered at her.
Innocently as a child she rebuffed the accusation and ignored the
temper.
"But I'm not rattling it, sir!" she protested. "I'm simply trying to
hide what's on the other side of it."
"What is on the other side of it?" demanded the Senior Surgeon bluntly.
With unquestioning docility the girl turned the paper around.
From behind her desk the austere Superintendent twisted her
neck most informally to decipher the scrawling hieroglyphics.
"_Don't--Ever--Be_--_bumptious_!" she read forth jerkily with a
questioning, incredulous sort of emphasis.
"Don't ever be bumptious?" squinted the Senior Surgeon perplexedly
through his glasses.
"Yes," said Rae Malgregor very timidly. "It's my--motto."
"Your motto?" sniffed the Superintendent.
"Your motto?" chuckled the Senior Surgeon.
"Yes, my motto," repeated Rae Malgregor with the slightest perceptible
tinge of resentment. "And it's a perfectly good motto, too! Only, of
course, it hasn't got any style to it. That's why I didn't want the
girls to see it," she confided a bit drearily. Then palpably before
their eyes they saw her spirit leap into ineffable pride. "My Father
gave it to me," she announced briskly. "And my Father said that, when
I came home in June, if I could honestly say that I'd never once been
bumptious--all my three years here,--he'd give me a--heifer! And--"
"Well I guess you've lost your heifer!" said the Senior Surgeon bluntly.
"Lost my heifer?" gasped the girl. Big-eyed and incredulous she stood
for an instant staring back and forth from the Superintendent's face to
the Senior Surgeon's. "You mean?" she stammered, "you mean--that
I've--been--bumptious--just now? You mean--that after all these years
of--meachin' meekness--I've lost--?"
Plainly even to the Senior Surgeon and the Superintendent the bones in
her knees weakened suddenly like knots of tissue paper. No power on
earth could have made her break discipline by taking a chair while the
Senior Surgeon stood, so she sank limply down to the floor instead, with
two great solemn tears welling slowly through the fingers with which she
tried vainly to cover her face.
"And the heifer was brown, with one white ear; it was awful cunning,"
she confided mumblingly. "And it ate from my hand--all warm and sticky,
like--loving sandpaper." There was no protest in her voice, nor any
whine of complaint, but merely the abject submission to Fate of one who
from earliest infancy had seen other crops blighted by other frosts.
Then tremulously with the air of one who, just as a matter of spiritual
tidiness, would purge her soul of all sad secrets, she lifted her
entrancing, tear-flushed face from her strong, sturdy, utterly
unemotional fingers and stared with amazing blueness, amazing blandness
into the Senior Surgeon's scowling scrutiny.
"And I'd named her--for you!" she said. "I'd named her--Patience--for
you!"
Instantly then she scrambled to her knees to try and assuage by some
miraculous apology the horrible shock which she read in the Senior
Surgeon's face.
"Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn't scientific!" she pleaded
desperately. "Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn't scientific at all! But
up where I live, you know, instead of praying for anybody, we--we name a
young animal--for the virtue that that person--seems to need the most.
And if you tend the young animal carefully--and train it right--!
Why--it's just a superstition, of course, but--Oh, sir!" she floundered
hopelessly, "the virtue you needed most in your business was what I
meant! Oh, really, sir, I never thought of criticizing your character!"
Gruffly the Senior Surgeon laughed. Embarrassment was in the laugh, and
anger, and a fierce, fiery sort of resentment against both the
embarrassment and the anger,--but no possible trace of amusement.
Impatiently he glanced up at the fast speeding clock.
"Good Lord!" he exclaimed, "I'm an hour late now!" Scowling like a
pirate he clicked the cover of his watch open and shut for an uncertain
instant. Then suddenly he laughed again, and there was nothing
whatsoever in his laugh this time except just amusement.
"See here, Miss--Bossy Tamer," he said. "If the Superintendent is
willing, go get your hat and coat, and I'll take you out on that
meningitis case with me. It's a thirty mile run if it's a block, and I
guess if you sit on the front seat it will blow the cobwebs out of your
brain--if anything will," he finished not unkindly.
Like a white hen sensing the approach of some utterly unseen danger the
Superintendent seemed to bristle suddenly in every direction.
"It's a bit--irregular," she protested in her most even tone.
"Bah! So are some of the most useful of the French verbs!" snapped the
Senior Surgeon. In the midst of authority his voice could be inestimably
soft and reassuring, but sometimes on the brink of asserting said
authority he had a tone that was distinctly unpleasant.
"Oh, very well," conceded the Superintendent with some waspishness.
Hazily for an instant Rae Malgregor stood staring into the
Superintendent's uncordial face. "I'd--I'd apologize," she faltered,
"but I--don't even know what I said. It just blew up!"
Perfectly coldly and perfectly civilly the Superintendent received the
overture. "It was quite evident, Miss Malgregor, that you were not
altogether responsible at the moment," she conceded in common justice.
Heavily then, like a person walking in her sleep the girl trailed out of
the room to get her coat and hat.
Slamming one desk-drawer after another the Superintendent drowned the
sluggish sound of her retreating footsteps.
"There goes my best nurse!" she said grimly. "My very best nurse! Oh no,
not the most brilliant one, I didn't mean that, but the most reliable!
The most nearly perfect human machine that it has ever been my privilege
to see turned out,--the one girl that week in, week out, month after
month, and year after year, has always done what she's told,--when she
was told,--and the exact way she was told,--without questioning
anything, without protesting anything, without supplementing anything
with some disastrous original conviction of her own--_and look at her
now_!" Tragically the Superintendent rubbed her hand across her worried
brow. "Coffee, you said it was?" she asked skeptically. "Are there any
special antidotes for coffee?"
With a queer little quirk to his mouth the gruff Senior Surgeon jerked
his glance back from the open window where with the gleam of a slim
torn-boyish ankle the frisky young Spring went scurrying through the
tree-tops.
"What's that you asked?" he quizzed sharply. "Any antidotes for coffee?
Yes. Dozens of them. But none for Spring."
"Spring?" sniffed the Superintendent. A little shiveringly she reached
out and gathered a white knitted shawl around her shoulders. "Spring? I
don't see what Spring's got to do with Rae Malgregor or any other young
outlaw in my graduating class. If graduation came in November it would
be just the same! They're a set of ingrates, every one of them!"
Vehemently she turned aside to her card-index of names and slapped the
cards through one by one without finding one single soothing exception.
"Yes, sir, a set of ingrates!" she repeated accusingly. "Spend your life
trying to teach them what to do and how to do it! Cram ideas into those
that haven't got any, and yank ideas out of those who have got too many!
Refine them, toughen them, scold them, coax them, everlastingly drill
and discipline them! And then, just as you get them to a place where
they move like clock-work, and you actually believe you can trust them,
then graduation day comes round, and they think they're all safe,--and
every single individual member of the class breaks out and runs a-muck
with the one dare-devil deed she's been itching to do every day the past
three years! Why this very morning I caught the President of the Senior
Class with a breakfast tray in her hands--stealing the cherry out of her
patient's grape fruit. And three of the girls reported for duty as bold
as brass with their hair frizzed tight as a nigger doll's. And the girl
who's going into a convent next week was trying on the laundryman's
derby hat as I came up from lunch. And now, now--" the Superintendent's
voice went suddenly a little hoarse, "and now--here's Miss
Malgregor--intriguing--to get an automobile ride with--_you!_"
"Eh?" cried the Senior Surgeon with a jump. "What? Is this an Insane
Asylum? Is it a Nervine?" Madly he started for the door. "Order a ton of
bromides!" he called back over his shoulder. "Order a car-load of them!
Saturate the whole place with them! Drown the whole damned place!"
Half way down the lower hall, all his nerves on edge, all his unwonted
boyish impulsiveness quenched noxiously like a candle flame, he met and
passed Rae Malgregor without a sign of recognition.
"God! How I hate women!" he kept mumbling to himself as he struggled
clumsily all alone into the torn sleeve lining of his thousand dollar
mink coat.