"What was your father's name?"
Bubbles shook his head.
The surgeon considered for a moment. "Well," he said, at length, and
once more smiling, "put your clothes on, and then go to Miss Ferris and
promise her that you won't smoke any more. What asylum did you say your
mother was in?"
"Ottawan."
"Do you ever see her?"
"No, sir. She don't like to see me."
"What is her name, Bubbles?"
"Jenny Ward."
Dr. Ferris ordered a car, and in less than two hours he was talking
with the superintendent of Ottawan about the patient, Jenny Ward.
"The boy," he was saying, "is a protégé of my daughter's. She means to
educate him, and we are naturally interested in his antecedents. I
wonder if she has any lucid recollection of the father?"
"When she first came she seemed to have lucid moments. Even now she
never makes trouble for any one, except that sometimes she wakes in the
night screaming. She has been very pretty."
"H'm!" said Dr. Ferris. "You think she couldn't tell me anything about
the boy's father?"
"I know she couldn't. When she was examined after being committed, it
was found that her tongue had been cut out."
The woman, upon being visited, proved a meek, gentle, pathetic creature,
eager to please. As the superintendent reported, she had been very
pretty. She would have been pretty still, but for her utterly
vacant look.
The doctor questioned her, but she made no effort, it seemed, even to
understand the questions. Given a pencil and paper she seemed to take
pleasure in making dots, dashes, and scrawls; but she made no mark that
in any way represented a letter of the alphabet. Confronted with a
printed page, she thrust it aside.
"Very likely she never could read or write," said the superintendent;
"usually when you give 'em a pencil they make letters by an act of
muscular memory."
In the corridor outside the woman's room, they encountered one of those
nurses who are used in managing the violent insane. He was a huge
fellow, with a dark, strong, and somewhat forbidding face. He nodded to
the superintendent and passed. Dr. Ferris looked after him down the
corridor, had a sudden thought, and communicated it to his host in a
quick undertone.
"I say, Gyles! Look here a moment"
The huge nurse turned on his heel, and came towering back to them.
"Have you ever assisted in looking after the woman Jenny Ward?" and he
pointed toward the door of her room.
"No, sir."
"Dr. Ferris wishes to try an experiment."
"Yes, sir."
"He wishes you to throw open the door of her room, and to enter
quickly--upon your knees."
"On my knees?"
"Yes."
"All right, sir." The man shrugged his big shoulders, and, his face
sullen and annoyed, knelt at the door of Jenny Ward's room, unlocked it,
flung it open, and entered quickly.
Over his head the doctors saw an expression of fear, almost unearthly,
come over the woman's face. And she filled her room and the corridor
without with a hoarse and horrible screaming.
Instantly the big nurse rose to his feet, and came out of the room. His
face was passionately angry. And he said:
"It's a shame to frighten her like that."
The superintendent's eyes fell before the glare in those of the
employee, and he murmured something about "necessary experiment--had
to be done."