THE LITTLE NURSE
Aggie was really frightfully upset. Aggie is rather emotional at any
time, and although she herself is a Methodist, her mother’s only sister
had been a believer in Spiritualism. (They dug her up ten years after
she died, to make room for somebody else, and Aggie’s mother said her
hair had grown to be fully ten feet long, and was curly, whereas in
life it had always been straight. We may sneer at Spiritualism all we
want, but things like that are hard to account for.)
Well, of course, Aggie declared that no human hand had strung poor
old Johnson to the chandelier by a roller towel around his neck, and
although Tish ridiculed the idea, she had to admit that the fourth
dimension had never been accounted for, and that table levitation was
an accepted fact, and even known to the ancients.
We sat there gloomily enough while Miss Lewis fixed Tish’s hair and
massaged her knee. In the middle of the massage Tommy Andrews came in,
whistling.
“Morning, Aunt Tish,” he said. “Morning, Miss Aggie, morning, Miss
Lizzie. How’s the knee? Looks as handsome as ever.”
“She’s been walking on it,” said Miss Lewis sourly, and giving the knee
an extra jab.
Tommy gave Tish a ferocious frown over his glasses.
“Humph!” he said. “I told you to keep off it! Miss Lewis, if she is
obstreperous again, just tie her down with a half-dozen roller towels.”
“Roller towels!” Tish ejaculated. “Why, it was a roller towel
that--that--”
“So you said,” Aggie said somberly, and we stared at each other, we
hardly knew why.
Tish told Tommy the whole story as he strapped her knee with adhesive
plaster. He hadn’t heard it, and he was as much puzzled as we were.
It was Aggie who remarked afterward how his face changed when Tish
mentioned Miss Blake.
“Blake!” he said, glancing up quickly, “not the little nurse with the
dark hair?”
“Yes,” Tish said.
“Damn!” said Tommy. “To have left her alone, like that!” And to Miss
Lewis: “Is she ill to-day?”
“She’s in bed, but she’s not sleeping,” said Miss Lewis, with more
feeling than I’d have expected. “I was going to ask you if you would
see her, Doctor. Since the shake-up yesterday, we have no medical
internes, and the surgical side is full up.”
“She--she didn’t ask for me!” said Tommy, with his brown eyes kindling.
But Miss Lewis shook her head.
“She’s hardly spoken at all. She just lies there with her eyes wide
open and her face white, watching the door. An hour ago one of the
nurses pushed it open quietly, for fear she was asleep. Miss Blake lay
and watched it moving, and when Linda--Miss Smith went in, she fainted
again.”
Tommy took a turn up and down the room. “She’s had a profound shock,”
he said. “I’m not afraid of it, unless--” He stopped at the window and
stood looking out.
“Unless what?” said Tish, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he stalked
over and rang the bell.
“I’ll have the hall nurse relieve you, Miss Lewis,” he said. “We can’t
leave my aunt alone, and somebody must see to Miss Blake. There’s some
natural explanation for what happened last night, and we must find it
and tell her.”
Aggie began to tell about the aunt with the hair, but before she had
even buried her, the door opened and Miss Blake herself came in.
“Did you ring?” she asked. She was dead white, lips and all, with deep
circles around her eyes, but her step was brisk and her voice cheerful.
As Tish said, if you could only have heard her and not seen her, nobody
would have believed what had happened.
Tommy gave her one look, and hauled a chair forward.
“Sit down,” he ordered. “You are not fit to be on duty.”
“Thank you, but--I am all right again,” she said, hesitating.
“Please sit down,” said Tommy, with a note in his voice which I never
heard him use to Tish. And she took the chair, glancing around at all
three of us and then at him.
“Miss Blake,” he said, “I have decided to become your medical adviser!”
“Thanks very much!” she said, with the ghost of a smile.
“On one condition,” he went off, polishing his glasses very hard with
his handkerchief. “You will have to obey orders.”
“That’s the first lesson in the training school,” she assented, the
smile deepening. “Always obey the doctor’s orders.”
“Stuff!” said Tommy sternly. “If I order you to bed this minute,
you’ll not go! The trouble is, Aunt Tish and Honorary Aunts Lizzie and
Aggie,” he said, addressing us each in turn, “the trouble is that in a
hospital medicine is a drug on the market. It’s too accessible. So are
doctors. They’re always on tap, like city water, plentiful and free and
therefore subject, like the said water, to the scorn and contumely of
the beneficiaries.”
“Indeed, Doctor,” Miss Blake began, but he interrupted her.
“Now, Miss Blake,” he said, “at your earnest solicitation I am about to
undertake your case, and the first condition is--”
“Obedience?” She shot a glance at him from under her long, dark
lashes, and Aggie raised her eyebrows across the bed at me.
“Exactly,” he said. “The three aunts, actual and honorary, are
witnesses. You have promised obedience. The first condition is--you are
to leave the hospital immediately and go to a place I know just out of
town, a nice place, with a dog and kittens--no, Aunt Tish, _not_ a cat
and kittens, a--”
But Miss Blake stood up suddenly, she was paler than before.
“Not _that_!” she said almost wildly.
Tommy came over and put his hand on her shoulder. “We can dispose of
the animals,” he said gently. “Can’t you see yourself, little girl,
that you are about at the end of your string? Quiet nights, sleep,
fresh milk--you won’t know yourself in a week.”
“I can not go,” she said, and stood looking straight ahead with such
misery in her face that Aggie’s eyes filled up.
“You can take your vacation,” Tommy persisted, gently. “I’ll take you
out myself in my machine.”
“I don’t want to go, Doctor; I--I can’t be spared just now. _Don’t_
send me away! Don’t!”
She began to cry, wildly, hysterically, with her shoulders quivering
and her whole body tense. I was considerably upset, and Tommy looked
dumbfounded. After all, it was Miss Lewis who knew what to do. She is
a large woman, and she simply took the little nurse into her arms and
petted her into quiet. Finally, she coaxed her into the hall, and as
the door closed behind them, the four of us sat silent.
Aggie was sniveling, and wiping her eyes, and Tish turned on her in a
rage.
“What in the name of sense are you bleating about?” she demanded.
“The child’s in trouble,” said Aggie. “I--I never _could_ see anybody
cry, and you know it, Tish.”
“I know something else, too,” said Tish grimly, sliding her feet out of
bed carefully and reaching for her cane. “That young woman knows more
than she’s telling, Tommy Andrews. We’re not through with this yet.”
Now Tommy will always have his joke with Tish, and they differ on a
good many subjects, politics, for one thing, and religion, Tommy not
believing very much in a future existence, and maintaining that no
medical man ought to--it made them more saving of life in this. But he
has a great respect for Tish’s opinion.
“You may be right,” he said. “There must be some reason--, but whatever
it is--it’s not to her discredit. I’ll swear to that.”
“Listen to the boy!” Tish sneered, picking up the traveling clock and
putting it back on the bedside table again. “That’s what a pretty face
will do. Suppose it had been Lewis, who stood there, crying into a
starched apron and saying she couldn’t leave--don’t, don’t ask her?”
“Why should she leave when she has _you_, dear Aunt Letitia?” asked
Tommy, and Tish reached for the clock again.
Well, we talked the thing over, but we couldn’t come to any conclusion.
There didn’t seem to be any matter of doubt that Johnson, having died
peaceably and in order, had been carried to the mortuary and laid on
the table, there to await the final preparations for burial. And the
fact was incontestable that shortly after, the said Johnson, as Tommy
put it, was hanging by the neck to the chandelier in a room fifty feet
away and down eight steps. We all agreed up to that point. As Tommy
said, the question then became simply, did he do it himself or was it
done for him?
Aggie was confident that he had done it himself.
“Why not?” she demanded. “Isn’t it the constant endeavor of the people
who have--passed over, to come back and prove their continued existence
on a spirit plane? Shall I ever forget that the third night after Mr.
Wiggins died--” Aggie was once engaged to a roofer, who ‘passed over’
by falling off a roof--“can I ever forget that a light like a flame of
a candle rose in one corner of the bedroom, crossed the ceiling and
disappeared in my sewing basket, where I kept Mr. Wiggins’ photograph?
Why should not Mr. Johnson, before deserting the earth plane for the
spirit world, have come back and _proved_ his continued existence? Why?”
Tommy lighted a cigarette and puffed at it. “Well,” he said, “I should
call it indecent of him if he did, and bad taste, too. Maybe he didn’t
think much of his body, but it had lasted pretty well and carried him
around a good many years. And to have his spirit cast off its outer
garment and hang it to a chandelier--it was heartless! Heartless!”