[Illustration: Frontispiece: The girl in her Norse glow and
blondness would have been a marked figure any where.]
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
Copyright, 1917, by THE CENTURY Co.
Copyright, 1916, by THE CROWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY
Published, February, 1917
TO
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
I
"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.
[Illustration: "Oh, drat you women!" he grinned sheepishly. "Well, go
ahead One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-TEN"]
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.
"I'm fussing about the hatefulness of it," said the woman. All the
shrewdness came suddenly back to her face. "This is what I mean!"
she cried sharply. "When I stay in Paris three months, for instance,
to collect a trousseau for the daughter of a man who meant something
to me once in my youth, and receive in due time from that girl
a single page of gothic handwriting thanking me no matter how
gushingly for my 'magnificent gift,' I tell you I could fairly
kill her for her stingy receiving! Not a word from her about
hats, you understand? Not a comment on shoes! Not the vaguest,
remotest mention of chiffon veils, silk stockings, evening gowns,
street suits, mink furs, anything! Just the whole outfit, trunk
after trunk of 'em, all lumped in together and dismissed perfectly
casually under the lump word 'gift!' and it wasn't just a 'gift'
that I gave her, you understand?" said the woman with a sudden
real twinge of emotion. "Almost nobody, you know, ever gives just
a 'gift.' What I really gave her, of course, was three whole
months of my taste, time, temperament! Three whole months of my
wanting-to-give! Three whole months of a woman's dreams for a young
girl! What I really gave her, of course, was the plaudits of her
elders, the envies of all her girl chums, the new, unduplicatable
pride and dignity of a consciously perfect equipment! What I really
gave her, of course, was the light in her bridegroom's eyes when
he first saw her merge a throb of mist and pearls through the gray
gloom of the cathedral chancel! What I really gave her of course
was the----"
"Yes, but you surely know that she appreciated the gift," deprecated
the Young Doctor.
"Why, of course she appreciated the gift!" snapped the woman. "But
what I'm trying to find is some one who'd appreciate the giver!
Anybody can appreciate a gift," she added with unprecedented scorn.
"Pleased?" snapped the woman. "Why, of course, she was pleased!
The only thing I'm fussing about is that she was too stingy to
share her pleasure with me! The fire I worked so hard to light,
lit all right, but simply refused to warm me! That's it! Why! Did
she note by one single extra flourish of her pen that the lining
of her opera cloak was like the petalling of a pink Killarney rose?
Or that the texture of her traveling suit would have made a
princess strut with pride? When she lumped a dozen Paris hats into
the one word 'nice' did she dream for one single instant that she
had lulled my perfectly human hunger to know whether it was the
red one or the green one or the gold which most became her ecstatic
little face? Did it ever occur to her to tell me what her lover
said about the gay little brown leather hunting suit? Six months
hence, freezing to death in some half-heated palace on the Riviera,
is there one chance in ten thousand, do you think, that she will
write me to say, 'Oh, you darling, how did you ever happen to think
of a moleskin breakfast coat and footies?' And again!" scolded the
woman. "When a stodgy old missionary on his way back to Africa
relaxes enough on a mid-ocean moonlight night so that it's fun a
month later to send him a mule and cart just to keep his faithful,
clumsy old feet off the African sands, do you think it's fun for
him to send me eight smug laborious pages complimenting me--without
a moon in them,--on 'the great opportunities for doing good which
my enormous wealth must give me,' and commending me specially 'for
this most recent account of my stewardship which I have just
evidenced in my noble gift'?" For one single illuminating flash
humor twitched back into the woman's eyebrow. "Stewardship--bosh!"
she confided. "On a picture post card--with stubby, broken-nosed
pencil--I would so infinitely rather he had scribbled, 'Bully for
you, Old Girl! This is some mule!'"
With a little sigh of fatigue she sank back into her pillows. "'More
blessed to give than to receive?' Quite evidently!" she said.
"Everywhere it's the same! People love pictures and never note
who painted them! People love stories and never remember who
wrote them! Why, in any shop in this city," she roused, "I wager
you could go in and present a hundred dollar bill to the seediest
old clerk you saw--and go back in an hour and he wouldn't know
you by sight! 'The gift without the giver is bare?'" she quoted
savagely. "Ha! What they really meant was 'The giver added to
the gift is a bore?'"
"Well, what do you propose to do about it?" quizzed the Young Doctor
a bit impatiently.
"I propose to do this about it!" said the woman. "I propose to
become a reformer!"
"A reformer?" jeered the Young Doctor.
"Well, then--an avenger! if you like the word better," conceded
the woman. "Oh, I shall keep right on buying things, of course,"
she hastened mockingly to assure him. "And giving things, of
course. One could hardly break so suddenly the habit and vice of
a life time. Only I shan't scatter my shots all over the lot any
more. But concentrate my deadliest aim on one single individual.
Indeed, I think I shall advertise," mocked the woman. "In that
amazing column of all daily papers so misleadingly labeled 'wants'
instead of able-to-haves I shall insert some sort of a statement
to the effect that:
"An eccentric middle-aged woman of fabulous wealth, lavish generosity,
and no common sense whatsoever, will receive into her 'lovely
Southern Home' one stingy receiver. Strictest reference required.
Object: Reformation or--annihilation."
"It would be interesting to see the answers you'd get!" rallied the
Young Doctor with unwonted playfulness.
Almost imperceptibly the woman twisted her eyebrows. "Oh, of
course, I admit that most of them would be from asylums," she
said. "Offering me special rates. But there's always a
chance, of course, that--that--" Straight as a pencil-ruling
both eyebrows dropped suddenly into line. "But I'm quite used
to taking chances, thank you!" she finished with exaggerated
bruskness.
"What else do you propose to take?" asked the Young Doctor a bit
dryly.
"_You!_" said the woman.
At the edge of the bureau the Young Doctor wheeled abruptly in his
tracks.
"Well, you won t!" he said. His face was quite white with anger.
"Why not?" drawled the woman. As ruthlessly as a child she seemed to
be estimating suddenly the faintly perceptible shine of the man's
shoulder seams. Only the frankness of the stare relieved it of
its insolence. "Why not?" she said. "Is your practice here so
huge that you can totally afford to ignore a salary such as I would
give you?"
"Nevertheless," winced the Young Doctor, "even _you_ cannot buy
everything!"
"Can't I?" smiled the woman. In passionate willfulness and pride
her smile straightened out again into its thin-lipped line. "But
I need you!" she asserted arrogantly. "I like you! If I had had
my choice of every practitioner in the city, I--I!" With a
precipitous whimper of nerves the tears began suddenly to stream
down her cheeks. "There is--there is something about you," she
stammered. "In a--in a trolley car accident, in a steamer panic,
out of a--out of a thousand," she sobbed, "I instinctively would
have turned to you!" As abruptly as it had come, the flood of
tears vanished from her face, leaving instead a gray-streaked
flicker of incredulity. "Why, I don't even know how I did happen
to get you!" she admitted aghast. "Out of all the doctors in the
city--it must have been intended! It must! If there's any Providence
at all it must arrange such details! How did I happen to get you?"
she demanded imperiously.
For the first time across the Young Doctor's lean, ascetic face an
expression of relaxation quickened.
"Well if you really want to know," he said. "As you were being
lifted out of your carriage at the hotel door, I was just coming
out of the Free Lunch----"
"Hunger or thirst?" scoffed the woman.
"None of your business," smiled the Young Doctor.
"Oh, and besides," rallied the woman instantly. "I thought, likely
as not, that there might be some girl. Somebody you could coach!
About my passion for shopping, I mean! I don't care who gets the
things! If there's anybody you like, she might just as well be
the one!"
"Thank you," rebristled the Young Doctor. "But I don't happen to
know any girls!"
"Good enough!" said the woman. "Then there's nothing at all to
complicate your coming!"
"But I'm not coming!" stared the Young Doctor. The pupils of his
eyes were dilated like a deer's jacked suddenly with an infuriating
light.
"But you are coming," said the woman without a flicker of emotion.
"Day after tomorrow it is. At three-thirty from the Pennsylvania
Station."
"I'm not!" said the Young Doctor.
"You are!" said the woman.
When it comes right down to the matter of statistics, just how many
times in your life you've had your own way and just how many times
you haven't, Mrs. Tome Gallien was not exaggerating when she boasted
to the Young Doctor that she was quite in the habit of having her
own way. She certainly was! In the majority of incidents she had,
indeed, always had her own way. And in the majority of incidents
she had her own way now. That is to say, that the South Carolina
train did leave the Pennsylvania Station at just exactly the time
she said it would. And Martha the deaf was on that train. And she,
herself, was on that train.
But the Young Doctor was not.
"Not much! _Not much!_" was the way the Young Doctor said it, if you
really want to know.
But he said very little else that afternoon. To be perfectly frank
his luncheon had been very poor, and his breakfast, before that,
and his dinner, before that. Further reiteration would be purely
monotonous. Moreover, on this particular February day the weather
was extravagantly Northern, his office, as cold and dark and bleak
as some untenanted back alley, and his general professional prospects
as dull as, if not indeed duller than, the last puff of ashes in
his pipe. Yet even so he counted his situation ecstasy compared to
the thought of being dragged South by the wrapper-strings of a
gray-haired invalid-woman as headstrong as she was body-weak. "Not
much!" Long after there was no tugging warm taste left in his pipe
he was still tugging at the phrase. "Not much!"
But Mrs. Tome Gallien on her fine train scudding South was even more
chary of words than he when it came to her own comment on his
defection.
"Idjot!" she telegraphed back from Washington.
The operator who repeated the message over the telephone was frankly
apologetic.
"Yes, Doctor," explained the metallic voice. "That's just exactly
the way we received it. It isn't even 'idiot'" argued the voice.
"Because we wired back for verification. 'I-d-j-o-t!' That's what
it is. Maybe it's a--a code word," condoned the voice amiably.
It certainly was a "code" word. And the message that it sought to
convey was plainly this:
"How any young struggling practitioner in a strange city, with not
only his future to make but even his present, how such a one has
got the nerve, the nerve, I say, to refuse a regular salaried
position and all expenses, all expenses, mind you, in a salubrious
climate, and with a lady,--well, with a lady whom other men
infinitely wiser and more sophisticated than he have not found
utterly devoid perhaps of interest and charm?"
Talk about being packed "cram-jam?" Surely no week-end suitcase
could ever have bulged more with significance than did this one
tiny telegram "Idjot!" And equally surely its context "dressed"
the Young Doctor's mind quite completely for almost a week.
But the great square white envelope that arrived in due time from
Mrs. Tome Gallien had nothing in it at all except a check. No
reproaches, I mean, no upbraidings, no convalescent rhapsodies of
gratitude even. Just a plain straightforward unsentimental black
and white check covering so many professional visits at so much
a visit. A man might have sent it. A perfectly well man, I mean.
"And so the episode ends," mused the Young Doctor with distinct
satisfaction.
But it didn't end so, of course. Women like Mrs. Tome Gallien were
not created to end things but to start 'em. Of such is the kingdom
of Leaven.
It was on the following Thursday that the grand piano arrived at the
Young Doctor's office.
Now the Young Doctor's office might easily have accommodated more
patients than it did. But piano movers are almost always so fat.
Puffing, blowing, swearing, tugging,--the whole dingy room seemed
suddenly packed with brawn.
"But it isn't my piano!" protested the Young Doctor from every
chair, desk, table, of his ultimate retreat. "It _isn't_ my piano!"
he yelled from the doorway. "It isn't my piano!" he scolded through
the window.
But it was his piano, of course! The piano movers swore that it was.
The piano warerooms telephoned that it was. . . Worst of all, the
piano itself on one plump ankle flaunted a tag which proclaimed
that it was. And the proclamation was most distinctly in Mrs. Tome
Gallien's handwriting.
"For Dr. Sam Kendrue," it said. "As a slight token of my appreciation
and esteem."
"'Appreciation?'" groaned the Young Doctor. "'Esteem?'" In the first
venom of his emotion he sat right down and wrote Mrs. Gallien just
exactly what he thought of her. And of it. "It" being of course the
piano.
"Whatever in the world," he demanded, "would I do with a piano? Oh,
of course it's very kind of you and all that," he conceded with
crass sarcasm. "But I have no possible floor space, you understand,
beyond my office and the very meager bedroom adjoining it. And
with a quarter of a ton's worth of wood and wire plunked down thus
in the exact center of my office it leaves me, I assure you, an
extraordinarily limited amount of elbow-space unless it be a sort
of running track that still survives around the extreme edges of
the room. And moreover the piano is of rosewood, as you doubtless
already know, and all inlaid with cherubim and seraphim snarled up
in wreaths of lavender roses. Now Botany I admit, is distinctly out
of my line. But the cherubim and seraphim are certainly very weird
anatomically.
"And not knowing one note from another,--as indeed I remember telling
you quite plainly at an earlier date, well,--excuse me if I seem
harsh," he exploded all over again, "but whatever in the world
would I do with a piano?"
As ingenuously insolent as a child's retort came Mrs. Tome Gallien's
almost immediate reply.
"Yes! What would you do? That's just exactly it! I thought I'd get
a rise out of you!" said Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Across my dulled
horizon a whole heap of most diverting speculations have suddenly
begun to flash and brighten. 'Whatever in the world' _would_ you
do with a piano?"
"I can at least return it to the warerooms," wrote the Young Doctor
with significant brevity.
"Oh, no, you can't!" telegraphed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Apropos slight
defect and large mark-down merchandise rated non-returnable."
While he was yet fuming over this message Mrs. Tome Gallien's special
delivery letter overtook her telegram.
"Don't struggle," urged Mrs. Tome Gallien. "After all, my dear young
antagonist, when it comes right down to brass tacks, it isn't so
much a question of just what you are going to do with the piano as
it is of--just what the piano is going to do with you. Because of
course, do something it certainly will! And the madder you get of
course the more it will do! And the madder you get of course the
sooner it will do it! And----
"Oh, lying here flat on my back in all this damp, salty, sea-green
stillness,--tides coming, tides going,--sands shifting,--sea-weeds
floating,--my whole wild heedless Past resolves itself into one
single illuminating conviction. It's the giving people appropriate
gifts that stultifies their characters so, pampering their vanities,
and clogging alike both their impulses and their ink! Yes, sir!
"Why, goodness, Man! If I had crocheted you slippers would it have
joggled you one iota out of the rut of your daily life? Or would
even the latest design in operating tables have quickened one single
heart-beat of your snug, self-sufficient young body? Or for forty
stethoscopes do you imagine for one tiny instant that you would
have written me twice in five days?
"But if one can only make a person mad instead of glad! Now that's
the real kindness! So invigorating! So educative! So poignantly
reconstructive! Because if there's one shining mark in the world
that Adventure loves it's a--shining mad person. Even you, for
instance! Having made no place in your particular rut for 'quarter
of a ton of wood and wire' the advent of such a weightage is just
plain naturally bound to crowd you out of your rut. And whoever
side-steps his rut for even an instant? Well, truly, I think you
deserved just a wee bit of crowding.
"So Heigho, Cross Laddie! And rustle round as fast as you can to get
yourself a new necktie or a hair-cut or a shine! 'Cause something
certainly is going to happen to you! Happen right off, I mean! Even
now perhaps! Even----"
With a grunt of disgust the Young Doctor jumped up and began to pace
his office,--what was left of his office, I mean, around the extreme
edges of the room. And the faster he paced the madder he grew.
"Oh, the fantasia of women!" he stormed. "The--the exaggeration!"
He was perfectly right--Mrs. Tome Gallien was often fantastic, and
certainly quite exaggerative anent the present situation.
The threatened "adventure" did not happen at once! It didn't happen
indeed for at least two hours!
Yet the fact remains, of course, that the big piano was at
the bottom of the adventure. Science no doubt would have
refuted the connection. But Fancy is no such fool. Surely if
there hadn't been a big piano the Young Doctor would never
have worked himself up into such a bad temper on that particular
afternoon. And if he hadn't worked himself up into such a bad
temper he never would have flounced himself out into the dreary
February streets to try and "walk it off." And if he hadn't tried
so hard to "walk it off" he never would have developed such a
perfectly ravenous hunger. And if he hadn't developed such
a perfectly ravenous hunger he never would have bolted at just
exactly six o'clock for the brightest lighted restaurant in
sight. And it was on the street right in front of the brightest
lighted restaurant that the adventure happened.
Even Fancy, though, would never have boasted that it was
anything except a very little adventure. Skies didn't fall, I
mean, nor walls topple, nor bags of gold roll gaily to the
Young Doctor's feet. Just a car stopped,--a great plain,
clumsy everyday electric car, and from the front platform of
it a girl with a suitcase in one hand, a hat box in the
other, and goodness-knows-what tucked under one elbow, jumped
down into the mud.
Even so the adventure would never have started if the
goodness-knows-what hadn't slipped suddenly from the girl's elbow
and exploded all over the street into a goodness-knows-how-many!
It would have been funny of course if it hadn't been so clumsy.
But even while deprecating the digital clumsiness of women, the
Young Doctor leaped instinctively to the rescue. There were
certainly enough things that needed rescuing! Toys they proved to
be. And such a scattering! A brown plush coon under the wheels
of a stalled automobile! A flamboyant red-paper rose bush trampled
to pulp beneath a cart horse's hoofs! A tin steam engine cackling
across a hobbly brick sidewalk! A green-feathered parrot disappearing
all too quickly in a fox terrier's mouth! A doll here! A paint
box there! And the girl herself standing perfectly helpless in
the midst of it all blushing twenty shades of pink and still
hanging desperately tight to the leather suitcase in one hand
and the big hat box in the other.
"And it isn't at all that I am so--so stupid!" she kept
explaining hectically. "But it is that when an accident
occurs so in English I cannot think in English what to do! If
I put down my suitcase!" she screamed, "a dog will bite it!
And if I drop my box a trample might get it!"
It was not until the Young Doctor had succeeded in
reassembling owner and articles on the safe edge of the
curbing that he noticed for the first time how tall the girl
was and how shiningly blonde. "Altogether too tall and too
blonde to behave like such an idiot!" he argued perfectly
illogically. With a last flare of courtesy he sought to end
the incident. "Were you going to take another car?" He
gestured toward her crowded hands.
"Oh, no," said the girl with a wave of her hat box. "I was
going to that restaurant over there."
"Why so was I," said the Young Doctor very formally. "So if
you wish I will take your suitcase for you. That will at
least help a little."
Without further parleying they crossed the snowy street and
still all a-blow and a-glow with the wintry night bore down
upon the snug little restaurant like two young guests of the
north wind. In fact as well as effect the room was brightly
crowded and seemed to flare up like a furnace blast into
their own chilled faces. A trifle dazzled by the glare
perhaps they faltered suddenly in their tracks. For one
single conspicuous instant,--blonde as the moon, swarth as a
pine tree's shadow,--they stood staring helplessly here,
there, everywhere into a blur of frankly upturned faces. Then
without an atom's warning a lone woman at the small table
just in front of them jumped to her feet.
"Why, of course, you poor dears!" she beamed. "You want to
get seats together!" And fled, still beaming, to the one
remaining vacant seat at a far table in the corner.
A graven image could scarcely have helped grinning at the
absurdity of the incident. And the Young Doctor was by no
means a graven image. As for the girl, she giggled out right,
and with an impulse scarcely American pulled out the Young
Doctor's chair for him before she, herself, darted down into
the more crumpled place which the other woman had just
vacated. "After all," she conceded shruggingly, "it is not of
such a consequence!" Only the flaming color in her cheeks
belied her nonchalance.
With his left hand reaching for the menu and his right hand
exploring his pockets, the Young Doctor sought to show that
he also was perfectly nonchalant.
"It--it's been a--a very cold day, hasn't it?" he essayed
experimentally.
From her own frowning contemplation of the card before her
the girl lifted her amazingly blue eyes.
"No-o," she said. "I think the chicken soup would be more of
a taste than the bouillon."
"What I remarked," persisted the Young Doctor, "was that the
weather--the weather--" With his right hand still in his
pocket, a most curious expression of shock passed suddenly
over his face. His pocketbook was gone! Quite desperately he
studied the distance to the telephone booth, the quickest
path to the door,--any direction, any excuse that would
snatch him soonest out of the horrid predicament of finding
himself penniless at a perfectly strange restaurant in the
company of a perfectly strange girl. Yet if he did bolt thus
without explanation, as was certainly his most immediate
impulse, what possible inference could the girl draw, except
something crudely harsh and derogatory to her own frankly
guileless personality. With a quite unwonted flush at his
cheek bones he decided to make explanations. "Excuse me," he
grinned with a sharp edging back of his chair, "but it will
not be my pleasure after all to--to sample the chicken soup
with you. Some mutt back there--while I was picking up those
cursed toys--" Quite frantically again he began to rummage
through all his pockets. "Some mutt has pinched my pocketbook,"
he finished perfectly simply.
"What?" cried the girl. "What?" With her eyes still staring
blue and wide, she reached out a slim, strong detaining hand
to his sleeve. "You mean that you cannot thus have any
supper?" she frowned. "And the night also so dark and so
cold? Why, what nonsense!" she beamed suddenly. "I have
moneys to drown! No? Is it 'to burn' that you say?" she
corrected herself. And thrust her own purse at him. Chucklingly
like a child she began to rock herself to and fro. "Certainly
it is all of a very great fatedness!" she reveled. "First you
pick up my shoppings for me! And now it is that I pick up your
supper for you! What? No?" she stammered as the Young Doctor
quite curtly refused the purse and rose very definitely to his
feet. Across the translucent blondness of her upturned face
astonishment, incredulity, glowered suddenly like a dark shadow.
"What? No? Is it then so correct?" she protested. "Is it kind?
Is it senselike? That for so small a trifle you should--'snub'
is it that you say, a stranger in a strange land? Certainly it
was not of my boldness," she quickened. "But of the boldness of
that demented woman yonder, that I sit here!" Then as suddenly as
it had come all the shadow vanished from her face leaving
just laughter again and a vaguely provocative sort of
challenge. "Oh, go if it seems most best to be of such a
silliness!" she said. "But if you go I shall certainly laugh!
Laugh with loudness, I mean! Right out! And like this, with
the handles of my knife and fork," she threatened to illustrate,
"I will beat upon the table while I laugh! Bah!" she gesticulated
encouragingly towards the deserted chair, "What is the price of
a supper between two gentlemans?"
"Oh, of course, if you feel like that!" conceded the Young
Doctor as he slipped back into his seat. "Quite frankly," he
admitted, "I should hate to be even the innocent cause of
your beating upon the table with the handles of your knife
and fork. So if you really and truly think I look honest," he
confided with an exaggerated resumption of interest in the
bill of fare. "Let me see. Sixty cents, is it? And the tip?
And two cents for a postage stamp? Yes, I surely ought to be
able to return that much by at least noon to-morrow." Without
a flicker of expression he lifted his dark eyes to hers.
Without a flicker of expression she resumed the conversation
at the exact point apparently where she had been most reluctant
to leave it off.