Chapter XI (3)

In other words, the human porcupine is the person considered at the beginning of this one-sided discussion who, to escape the terrible catastrophe of confronting his own inner vacuum, will make friends with the most hideous bore. This creature, however, is much more rare than the misanthropic Schopenhauer imagined. It takes a long time to find one among such folk as lumbermen, Gipsies, shirt-waist operatives, fishermen, masons, trappers, sailors, tramps, and teamsters. If the philosopher had only had the pleasure of knowing those teamsters who sent him into paroxysms of rage by cracking their whips in the alley, I am sure that he would never have spoken so harshly of their minds as he did. The fact is that porcupines are not extremely common among the very “common” people. It may be that there is something stupefying about the airs which the upper classes, the best people, breathe and put on, but the social climber is apt to find the human porcupine in increasing herds as he scales the heights. This curious fact would seem incidentally to show that our misanthropic philosopher must have moved exclusively in some of the best circles.

Now, if there is one thing above all others that the Auto-comrade cannot away with, it is the flaccid, indolent, stodgy brain of the porcupine. If people have let their minds slump down into porcupinishness, or have never taken the trouble to rescue them from that ignominious condition--well, the Auto-comrade is no snob; when all’s said, he is a rather democratic sort of chap, though he has to draw the line somewhere, you know, and he really must beg to be excused from rubbing shoulders with such intellectual rabble, for instance, as blocks upper Fifth Avenue on Sunday noons. He prefers instead the rabble which, on all other noons of the week, blocks the lower end of that variegated thoroughfare.

Such exclusiveness lays the Auto-comrade open, of course, to the charge of inhospitality. But “is not he hospitable,” asks Thoreau, “who entertains good thoughts?” Personally, I think he is. And I believe that this sort of hospitality does more to make the world worth living in than much conventional hugging to your bosom of porcupines whose language you do not speak, yet with whom it is embarrassing to keep silence.

If the Auto-comrade mislikes the porcupine, however, the feeling is returned with exorbitant interest. The alleged failings of auto-comradeship have always drawn grins, fleers, nudges, and jokes from the auto-comradeless. It is time the latter should know that the joke is really on him; for he is the most forlorn of mankind. The other is never at a loss. He is invulnerable, being one whom “destiny may not surprise nor death dismay.” But the porcupine is liable at any moment to be deserted by associates who are bored by his sharp, hollow quills. He finds himself the victim of a paradox which decrees that the hermit shall “find his crowds in solitude” and never be alone; but that the flocker shall every now and then be cast into inner darkness, where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

The laugh is on the porcupine; but the laugh turns almost into a tear when one stops to realize the nature of his plight. Why, the poor wretch is actually obliged to be near some one else in order to enjoy a sense of vitality! In other words, he needs somebody else to do his living for him. He is a vicarious citizen of the world, holding his franchise only by courtesy of Tom, Dick, and Harry.

All the same, it is rather hard to pity him very profoundly while he continues to feel quite so contemptuously superior as he usually does. Why, the contempt of the average porcupine for pals of the Auto-comrade is akin to the contempt which the knights of chivalry felt for those paltry beings who were called clerks because they possessed the queer, unfashionable accomplishment of being able to read and write.

I remember that the loudest laugh achieved by a certain class-day orator at college came when he related how the literary guy and the tennis-player were walking one day in the woods, and the literary guy suddenly exclaimed: “Ah, leave me, Louis! I would be alone.” Even apart from the stilted language in which the orator clothed the thought of the literary guy, there is, to the porcupine, something irresistibly comic in such a situation. It is to him as though the literary guy had stepped up to the nearest policeman and begged for the room at Sing Sing already referred to.

Indeed, the modern porcupine is as suspicious of pals of the Auto-comrade as the porcupines of the past were of sorcerers and witches--folk, by the way, who probably consorted with spirits no more malign than Auto-comrades. “What,” asked the porcupines of one another, “can they be up to, all alone there in those solitary huts? What honest man would live like that? Ah, they must be up to no good. They must be consorting with the Evil One. Well, then, away with them to the stake and the river!”

As a matter of fact, it probably was not the Evil One that these poor folk were consorting with, but the Good One. For what is a man’s Auto-comrade, anyway, but his own soul, or the same thing by what other name soever he likes to call it with which he divides the practical, conscious part of his brain, turn and turn about, share and share alike? And what is a man’s own soul but a small stream of the infinite, eternal water of life? And what is heaven but a vast harbor where myriad streams of soul flow down, returning at last to their Source in the bliss of perfect reunion? I believe that many a Salem witch was dragged to her death from sanctuary; for church is not exclusively connected with stained glass and collection-baskets. Church is also wherever you and your Auto-comrade can elude the starched throng and fall together, if only for a moment, on your knees.

Like the girl you left behind you, your Auto-comrade has much to gain by contrast with your flesh-and-blood associates, especially if this contrast is suddenly brought home to you after a too long separation from him. I shall never forget the thrill that was mine early one morning after two months of close, uninterrupted communion with one of my best and dearest friends. At the very instant when the turn of the road cut off that friend’s departing hand-wave, I was aware of a welcoming, almost boisterous shout from the hills of dream, and, turning quickly, beheld my long-lost Auto-comrade rushing eagerly down the slopes toward me.

Few joys may compare with the joy of such a sudden, unexpected reunion. It is like “the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land.” No, this simile is too disloyal to my friend. Well, then, it is like a beaker full of the warm South when you are leaving a good beer country and are trying to reconcile yourself to ditch-water for the next few weeks. At any rate, similes or not, there were we two together again at last. What a week of weeks we spent, pacing back and forth on the veranda of our log cabin, where we overlooked the pleasant sinuosities of the Sebois and gazed out together over golden beech and ghostly birch and blood-red maple banners to the purple mountains of the Aroostook. And how we did take stock of the immediate past, chuckling to find that it had not been a quarter so bad as I had stupidly supposed. What gilded forest trails were those which we blazed into the glamourous land of to-morrow! And every other moment these recreative labors would be interrupted while I pressed between the pages of a note-book some butterfly or sunset leaf or quadruply fortunate clover which my Auto-comrade found and turned over to me. Between two of those pages, by the way, I afterward found the argument of this paper.

Then, when the first effervescence of our meeting had lost a little of its first, fine, carbonated sting, what Elysian hours we spent over the correspondence of those other two friends, Goethe and Schiller! Passage after passage we would turn back to re-read and muse over. These we would discuss without any of the rancor or dogmatic insistence or one-eyed stubbornness that usually accompany the clash of mental steel on mental steel from a different mill. And without making any one else lose the thread or grow short-breathed or accuse us passionately of reading ahead, we would, on the slightest provocation, out-Fletcher Fletcher chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy. And we would underline and bracket and side-line and overline the ragged little paper volume, and scribble up and down its margins, and dream over its foot-notes, to our hearts’ content.

Such experiences, though, are all too rare with me. Why? Because my Auto-comrade is a rather particular person and will not associate with me unless I toe his mark.

“Come,” I propose to him, “let us go on a journey.”

“Hold hard,” says he, and looks me over appraisingly. “You know the rule of the Auto-comrades’ Union. We are supposed to associate with none but fairly able persons. Are you a fairly able person?”

If it turns out that I am not, he goes on a rampage, and begins to talk like an athletic trainer. The first thing he demands is that his would-be associate shall keep on hand a jolly good store of surplus vitality. You are expected to supply him exuberance somewhat as you supply gasolene to your motor.

Now, of course, there are in the world not a few invalids and other persons of low physical vitality whose Auto-comrades happen to have sufficient gasolene to keep them both running, if only on short rations. Most of these cases, however, are pathological. They have hot boxes at both ends of the machine, and their progress is destined all too soon to cease and determine. The rest of these cases are the rare exceptions which prove the rule. For unexuberant yet unpathological pals of the Auto-comrade are as rare as harmonious households in which the efforts of a devoted and blissful wife support an able-bodied husband.

The rule is that you have got to earn exuberance for two. “Learn to eat balanced rations right,” thunders the Auto-comrade, laying down the law; “exercise, perspire, breathe, bathe, sleep out of doors, and sleep enough, rule your liver with a rod of iron, don’t take drugs or nervines, cure sickness beforehand, do an adult’s work in the world, have at least as much fun as you ought to have.”

“That,” he goes on, “is the way to develop enough physical exuberance so that you will be enabled to overcome your present sad addiction to mob intoxication. And, provided your mind is not in as bad condition as your body, this physical over-plus will transmute some of itself into a spiritual exuberance. This will enable you to have more fun with your mind than an enthusiastic kitten has with its tail. It will enable you to look before and after, and purr over what is, as well as to discern, with pleasurable longing, what is not, and set forth confidently to capture it.”

But if, by any chance, you have allowed your mind to get into the sort of condition which the old-fashioned German scholar used to allow his body to get into, it develops that the Auto-comrade hates a flabby brain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it clear that he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet mastered the vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also, he demands of his companion the knack of calm, consecutive thought. This is one reason why so many more Auto-comrades are to be found in crow’s-nests, Gipsy-vans, and shirt-waist factories than on upper Fifth Avenue. For, watching the stars and the sea from a swaying masthead, taking light-heartedly to the open road, or even operating a rather unwholesome sewing-machine all day in silence, is better for consecutiveness of mind than a never-ending round of offices, clubs, servants, committee meetings, teas, dinners, and receptions, to each of which one is a little late.

No matter what the ignorant or the envious may say, there is nothing really unsocial in a moderate indulgence in the art of auto-comradeship. A few weeks of it bring you back a fresher, keener appreciator of your other friends and of humanity in general than you were before setting forth. In the continuous performance of the psalm of life such contrasts as this of solos and choruses have a reciprocal advantage.

But auto-comradeship must not be overdone, as it was overdone by the medieval monks. Its delights are too delicious, its particular vintage of the wine of experience too rich, for long-continued consumption. Consecutive thought, though it is one of man’s greatest pleasures, is at the same time almost the most arduous labor that he can perform. And after a long spell of it, both the Auto-comrade and his companion become exhausted and, perforce, less comradely.

Besides the incidental exhaustion, there is another reason why this beatific association must have its time-limit; for, unfortunately, one’s Auto-comrade is always of the same sex as oneself, and in youth, at least, if the presence of the complementary part of creation is long denied, there comes a time when this denial surges higher and higher in subconsciousness, then breaks into consciousness, and keeps on surging until it deluges all the tranquillities, zests, surprises, and excitements of auto-comradeship, and makes them of no effect.

This is, perhaps, a wise provision for the salvation of the human digestion. For, otherwise, many a man, having tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of auto-comradeship, might thereupon be tempted to retire to his hermit’s den hard by and endeavor to sustain himself for life on apple-sauce.

Most of us, however, long before such extremes have been reached, are sure to rush back to our kind for the simple reason that we are enjoying auto-comradeship so much that we want some one else to enjoy it with.

THE WHITE LINEN NURSE

HOW RAE MALGREGOR UNDERTOOK GENERAL HEARTWORK FOR A FAMILY OF TWO

BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

Author of “Molly Make-Believe,” etc.

IN THREE PARTS: PART THREE

WITH PICTURES BY HERMAN PFEIFER

SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING INSTALMENTS

On the day of her graduation from the training-school, the White
Linen Nurse was overcome by hysteria. For weeks she had been
working too hard, and two or three cases with which she had been
connected having gone wrong, she had racked herself with an absurd
sense of responsibility. Now, in her distracted state, the visible
sign of her self-contempt was the perfectly controlled expression
of her trained-nurse face.

From a scene in her room with her two room-mates, in which
confidences are exchanged, she rushed to the office of the
Superintendent of Nurses, and hysterically demanded her own face.
The Senior Surgeon was sent for, and after tartly telling the girl
she was a fool, finally took her with him and his little crippled
daughter for a thirty-mile trip into the country, where he had been
summoned on a difficult case.

On their return, the Senior Surgeon lost control of the machine on
a steep hill, and the three were thrown out.

On recovering consciousness, the White Linen Nurse and the Child
find the Senior Surgeon pinned under their motor-car, and after
receiving instructions as to its management, the Nurse runs the car
into a brook, and the Senior Surgeon becomes aware for the first
time that the car is afire. Momentarily unnerved by the thought of
the peril in which he has been, the Senior Surgeon clings to the
White Linen Nurse, and finally proposes that, since she has decided
to give up professional nursing, she take up General Heartwork
for him and his daughter. The proposal is in fact a proposal of
marriage, and after a frank discussion of the situation (which is
one of the most significant and powerful pieces of work of the
author), the White Linen Nurse accepts.

In the course of the discussion the Senior Surgeon confesses an
inherited tendency for drink, and adds that he leaves liquor alone
for eleven months in the year, but always goes off to Canada every
June for a hunting-trip, on which he drinks heavily. She insists
that he go this year and that they marry before his departure, and
not on his return, as he wishes. She wins her way, and the Senior
Surgeon goes alone. Disquieting letters from her recall him before
the end of the month.

Nobody looks very well in the dawn. Certainly the Senior Surgeon didn’t. Heavily, as a man wading through a bog of dreams, he stumbled out of his cabin into the morning. Under his drowsy, brooding eyes appalling shadows circled. Behind his sunburn, deeper than his tan, something sinister and uncanny lurked wanly like the pallor of a soul. Yet the Senior Surgeon had been most blamelessly abed and asleep since griddle-cake-time the previous evening.

Only the mountains and the forest and the lake had been out all night. For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil, the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day’s breeze. Blue with cold, a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine-tree lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. As monotonous as a sob, the waiting birch canoe _slosh-sloshed_ against the beach.

There was no romantic smell of red roses in this June landscape; just tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched for a whole year with a tinful of wet coffee-grounds.

Gliding out cautiously into the lake as though the mere splash of a paddle might shatter the whole glassy surface, the Indian guide propounded the question that was uppermost in his mind.

“Cutting your trip a bit short this year, ain’t you, Boss?” he quizzed tersely.

Out from his muffling Mackinaw collar the Senior Surgeon parried the question with an amazingly novel sense of embarrassment.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered with studied lightness. “There are one or two things at home that are bothering me a little.”

“A woman, eh?” said the Indian guide, laconically.

“A _woman_?” thundered the Senior Surgeon. “A--woman? Oh, ye gods, no! It’s wall-paper.”

Then suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of his passionate refutation the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing, boisterously, hilariously, like a crazy school-boy. Bluntly from an overhanging ledge of rock the echo of his laugh came mocking back at him. Down from some unvisioned mountain fastness the echo of that echo came wafting faintly to him.

The Senior Surgeon’s laugh was made of teeth and tongue and palate and a purely convulsive physical impulse; but the echo’s laugh was a fantasy of mist and dawn and inestimable balsam-scented spaces, where little green ferns and little brown beasties and soft-breasted birdlings frolicked eternally in pristine sweetness.

Seven miles farther down the lake, at the beginning of the rapids, the Indian guide spoke again. Racking the canoe between two rocks, paddling, panting, pushing, sweating, the Indian guide lifted his voice high, piercing, above the swirling roar of waters.

“Eh, Boss,” he shouted, “I ain’t never heard you laugh before!”

Neither man spoke again more than once or twice during the long, strenuous hours that were left to them. The Indian guide was very busy in his stolid mind trying to figure out just how many rows of potatoes could be planted fruitfully between his front door and his cowshed. I don’t know what the Senior Surgeon was trying to figure out.

It was just four days later, from a rolling, musty-cushioned hack, that the Senior Surgeon disembarked at his own front gate.

Even though a man likes home no better than he likes--tea, few men would deny the soothing effect of home at the end of a long, fussy railroad journey. Five o’clock, also, of a late June afternoon is a peculiarly wonderful time to be arriving home, especially if that home has a garden about it, so that you are thereby not rushed precipitously upon the house itself, as upon a cup without a saucer, but can toy visually with the whole effect before you quench your thirst with the actual draft.

Very, very deliberately, with his clumsy rod-case in one hand, and his heavy grip in the other, the Senior Surgeon started up the long, broad gravel path to the house. For a man walking as slow as he was, his heart was beating most extraordinarily fast. He was not accustomed to heart-palpitation. The symptom worried him a trifle. Incidentally, also, his lungs felt strangely stifled with the scent of June. Close at his right, an effulgent white-and-gold syringa-bush flaunted its cloying sweetness into his senses. Close at his left, a riotous bloom of phlox clamored red-blue-purple-lavender-pink into his dazzled vision. Multicolored pansies tiptoed velvet-footed across the grass. In soft, murky mystery a flame-tinted smoke-tree loomed up here and there like a faintly rouged ghost. Over everything, under everything, through everything, lurked a certain strange, novel, vibrating consciousness of occupancy--bees in the rose-bushes, bobolinks in the trees, a woman’s work-basket in the curve of the hammock, a doll’s tea-set sprawling cheerfully in the middle of the broad gravel path.

It was not until the Senior Surgeon had actually stepped into the tiny cream-pitcher that he noticed the presence of the doll’s tea-set. It was what the Senior Surgeon said as he stepped out of the cream-pitcher that summoned the amazing apparition from a ragged, green hole in the privet hedge. Startlingly white, startlingly professional,--dress, cap, apron, and all,--a miniature white linen nurse sprang suddenly out at him like a tricky dwarf in a moving-picture show. Just at that particular moment the Senior Surgeon’s nerves were in no condition to wrestle with apparitions. Simultaneously, as the clumsy rod-case dropped from his hand, the expression of enthusiasm dropped from the face of the miniature white linen nurse.

“Oh, dear! oh, dear! oh, dear! have _you_ come home!” wailed the familiar, shrill little voice.

Sheepishly the Senior Surgeon picked up his rod-case. The noises in his head were crashing like cracked bells. Desperately, with a boisterous irritability, he sought to cover also the lurching _pound, pound, pound_ of his heart.

“What in hell are you rigged out like that for?” he demanded stormily.

With equal storminess the Little Girl protested the question.

“Peach said I could,” she attested passionately. “Peach said I could, she did! She did! I tell you, I didn’t want her to marry us that day. I was afraid, I was. I cried, I did. I had a convulsion; they thought it was stockings. So Peach said, if it would make me feel any gooderer, I could be the cruel new stepmother, and _she’d_ be the unloved offspring, with her hair braided all yellow fluffikins down her back.”

“Where _is_--Miss Malgregor?” asked the Senior Surgeon, sharply.

Irrelevantly the Little Girl sank down on the gravel walk and began to gather up her scattered dishes.

“And it’s fun to go to bed now,” she confided amiably, “’cause every night I put Peach to bed at eight o’clock, and she’s so naughty always I have to stay with her. And then all of a sudden it’s morning--like going through a black room without knowing it.”

“I said, where _is_ Miss Malgregor?” repeated the Senior Surgeon, with increasing sharpness.

Thriftily the Little Girl bent down to lap a bubble of cream from the broken pitcher.

“Oh, she’s out in the summer-house with the Wall-Paper Man,” she mumbled indifferently.

Altogether jerkily the Senior Surgeon started up the walk for his own perfectly formal and respectable brownstone mansion. Deep down in his lurching heart he felt a sudden most inordinate desire to reach that brownstone mansion just as quickly as possible, but abruptly even to himself he swerved off instead at the yellow sassafras-tree and plunged quite wildly through a mass of broken sods toward the rickety, no-account, cedar summer-house.

Startled by the crackle and thud of his approach, the two young figures in the summer-house jumped precipitously to their feet, and, limply untwining their arms from each other’s necks, stood surveying the Senior Surgeon in unspeakable consternation,--the White Linen Nurse and a blue-overalled lad most unconscionably mated in radiant youth and agonized confusion.

“Oh, my Lord, sir!” gasped the White Linen Nurse--“oh, my Lord, sir! I wasn’t looking for _you_ for another week!”

“Evidently not,” said the Senior Surgeon, incisively. “This is the second time this evening that I’ve been led to infer that my home-coming was distinctly inopportune.”

Very slowly, very methodically, he put down first his precious rod-case and then his grip. His brain seemed fairly foaming with blood and confusion. Along the swelling veins of his arms a dozen primitive instincts went surging to his fists.

Then quite brazenly before his eyes the White Linen Nurse reached out and took the lad’s hand again.

“Oh, forgive me, Dr. Faber!” she faltered. “This is my brother.”

“Your _brother_? What? Eh?” choked the Senior Surgeon. Bluntly he reached out and crushed the young fellow’s fingers in his own. “Glad to see you, son,” he muttered, with a sickish sort of grin, and, turning abruptly, picked up his baggage again and started for the big house.

Half a step behind him his bride followed softly.

At the edge of the piazza he turned for an instant and eyed her a bit quizzically. With her big, credulous blue eyes, and her great mop of yellow hair braided childishly down her back, she looked inestimably more juvenile and innocent than his own little shrewd-faced six-year-old, whom he had just left domestically ensconced in the middle of the broad gravel path.

“For Heaven’s sake, Miss Malgregor,” he asked--“for Heaven’s sake, why didn’t you tell me that the Wall-Paper Man was your brother?”

Very contritely the White Linen Nurse’s chin went burrowing down into the soft collar of her dress, and as bashfully as a child one finger came stealing up to the edge of her red, red lips.

“I was afraid you’d think I was--cheeky, having any of my family come and live with us so soon,” she murmured almost inaudibly.

“Well, what did you think I’d think you were if he wasn’t your brother?” asked the Senior Surgeon, sardonically.

“Very economical, I hoped,” beamed the White Linen Nurse.

“All the same,” snapped the Senior Surgeon, with an irrelevance surprising even to himself--“all the same, do you think it sounds quite right and proper for a child to call her stepmother ’Peach’?”

Again the White Linen Nurse’s chin went burrowing down into the soft collar of her dress.

“I don’t suppose it _is_ usual,” she admitted reluctantly. “The children next door, I notice, call theirs ’Crosspatch.’”

With a gesture of impatience, the Senior Surgeon proceeded on up the steps, yanked open the old-fashioned shuttered door, and burst quite breathlessly and unprepared upon his most amazingly reconstructed house. All in one single second chintzes, muslins, pale blond maples, riotous canary-birds stormed revolutionarily upon his outraged eyes. Reeling back utterly aghast before the sight, he stood there staring dumbly for an instant at what he considered, and rightly too, the absolute wreck of his black-walnut home.

“It looks like--hell!” he muttered feebly.

“Yes, _isn’t_ it sweet?” conceded the White Linen Nurse, with unmistakable joyousness. “And your library--” Triumphantly she threw back the door to his grim workshop.

“Good God!” stammered the Senior Surgeon, “you’ve made it pink!”

Rapturously the White Linen Nurse began to clasp and unclasp her hands.

“I knew you’d love it,” she said.

Half dazed with bewilderment, the Senior Surgeon started to brush an imaginary haze from his eyes, but paused midway in the gesture, and pointed back instead to a dapper little hall-table that seemed to be exhausting its entire blond strength in holding up a slender green vase with a single pink rose in it. Like a caged animal buffeting for escape against each successive bar that incased it, the man’s frenzied irritation hurled itself hopefully against this one more chance for explosive exit.

“What--have--you--done--with the big--black--escritoire that stood--_there_?” he demanded accusingly.

“Escritoire? Escritoire?” worried the White Linen Nurse. “Why--why, I’m afraid I must have mislaid it.”

“Mislaid it?” thundered the Senior Surgeon. “Mislaid it? It weighed three hundred pounds!”

“Oh, it did?” questioned the White Linen Nurse, with great blue-eyed interest. Still mulling apparently over the fascinating weight of the escritoire, she climbed up suddenly into a chair, and with the fluffy, broom-shaped end of her extraordinarily long braid of hair went angling wildly off into space after an illusive cobweb.

Faster and faster the Senior Surgeon’s temper began to search for a new point of exit.

“What do you suppose the servants think of you?” he stormed, “running round like that, with your hair in a pigtail, like a kid?”

“Servants?” cooed the White Linen Nurse. “Servants?” Very quietly she jumped down from the chair and came and stood looking up into the Senior Surgeon’s hectic face. “Why, there aren’t any servants,” she explained patiently. “I’ve dismissed every one of them. We’re doing our own work now.”

“Doing ’our own work?’” gasped the Senior Surgeon.

Worriedly the White Linen Nurse stepped back a little.

“Why, wasn’t that right?” she pleaded. “Wasn’t it _right_? Why, I thought people always did their own work when they were first married.” With sudden apprehensiveness she glanced round over her shoulder at the hall clock, and, darting out through a side door, returned almost instantly with a fierce-looking knife.

“‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?’ HE FAIRLY SCREAMED AT HER. ‘JUST KEEPING YOU COMPANY, SIR,’ YAWNED THE WHITE LINEN NURSE”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER]

“I’m so late now, and everything,” she confided, “could you peel the potatoes for me?”

“No, I couldn’t,” said the Senior Surgeon, shortly. Equally shortly he turned on his heel, and, reaching out once more for his rod-case and grip, went on up the stairs to his own room.

One of the pleasantest things about arriving home very late in the afternoon is the excuse it gives you for loafing in your own room while other people are getting supper. No existent domestic sound in the whole twenty-four hours is as soothing at the end of a long journey as the sound of _other_ people getting supper.

Stretched out at full length in a big easy-chair by his bedroom window, with his favorite pipe bubbling rhythmically between his gleaming white teeth, the Senior Surgeon studied his new “solid-gold bed” and his new sage-green wall-paper and his new dust-colored rug, to the faint, far-away accompaniment of soft-thudding feet and a girl’s laugh and a child’s prattle and the _tink, tink, tinkle_ of glass, china, silver,--all scurrying consciously to the service of one man, and that man himself.

Very, very slowly, in that special half-hour an inscrutable little smile printed itself experimentally across the right-hand corner of the Senior Surgeon’s upper lip.

While that smile was still in its infancy, he jumped up suddenly and forced his way across the hall to his dead wife’s room,--the one ghost-room of his house and his life,--and there, with his hand on the turning door-knob, tense with reluctance, goose-fleshed with strain, his breath gasped out of him whether or no with the one word, “Alice!”

And, behold! there was no room there!

Lurching back from the threshold as from the brink of an elevator-well, the Senior Surgeon found himself staring foolishly into a most sumptuous linen-closet, tiered like an Aztec cliff with home after home for pleasant, prosy blankets and gaily fringed towels and cheerful white sheets reeking most conscientiously of cedar and lavender. Tiptoeing cautiously into the mystery, he sensed at one astonished, grateful glance how the change of a partition, the readjustment of a proportion, had purged like a draft of fresh air the stale gloom of an ill-favored memory. Yet so inevitable did it suddenly seem for a linen-closet to be built right there, so inevitable did it suddenly seem for the child’s meager playroom to be enlarged just there, that to save his soul he could not estimate whether the happy plan had originated in a purely practical brain or a purely compassionate heart.

Half proud of the brain, half touched by the heart, he passed on exploringly through the new playroom out into the hall again.

Quite distinctly now through the aperture of the back stairs the kitchen voices came wafting up to him.

“Oh, dear! oh, dear!” wailed his Little Girl’s peevish voice, “now that--that man’s come back again, I suppose we’ll have to eat in the dining-room all the time!”

“‘That man’ happens to be your darling father,” admonished the White Linen Nurse’s laughing voice.

“Even so,” wailed the Little Girl, “I love you best.”

“Even so,” laughed the White Linen Nurse, “I love _you_ best.”

“Just the same,” cried the Little Girl, shrilly--“just the same, let’s put the cream-pitcher ’way up high somewhere, so he can’t step in it.”

As though from a head tilted suddenly backward the White Linen Nurse’s laugh rang out in joyous abandon.

Impulsively the Senior Surgeon started to grin; then equally impulsively the grin soured on his lips. So they thought he was clumsy? Eh? Resentfully he stared down at his hands, those wonderfully dexterous, yes, ambidexterous, hands that were the aching envy of all his colleagues. Interruptingly as he stared, the voice of the young Wall-Paper Man rose buoyantly from the lower hallway.

“Supper’s all ready, sir!” came the clear, cordial summons.

For some inexplainable reason, at that particular moment almost nothing in the world could have irritated the Senior Surgeon more keenly than to be invited to his own supper, in his own house, by a stranger. Fuming with a new sense of injury and injustice, he started heavily down the stairs to the dining-room.

Standing patiently behind the Senior Surgeon’s chair with a laudable desire to assist his carving in any possible emergency that might occur, the White Linen Nurse experienced her first direct marital rebuff.

“What do you think this is, an autopsy?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, tartly. “For Heaven’s sake, go and sit down!”

Quite meekly the White Linen Nurse subsided into her place.

The meal that ensued could hardly have been called a success, though the room was entrancing, the cloth snow-white, the silver radiant, the guinea-chicken beyond reproach.

Swept and garnished to an alarming degree, the young Wall-Paper Man presided over the gravy and did his uttermost, innocent country-best to make the Senior Surgeon feel perfectly at home.

Conscientiously, as in the presence of a distinguished stranger, the Little Crippled Girl most palpably from time to time repressed her insatiable desire to build a towering pyramid out of all the salt-and pepper-shakers she could reach.

Once when the young Wall-Paper Man forgot himself to the extent of putting his knife in his mouth, the White Linen Nurse jarred the whole table with the violence of her warning kick.

Once when the Little Crippled Girl piped out impulsively, “Say, Peach, what was the name of that bantam your father used to fight against the minister’s bantam?” the White Linen Nurse choked piteously over her food.

Twice some one spoke about this year’s weather. Twice some one volunteered an illuminating remark about last year’s weather. Except for these four diversions, restraint indescribable hung like a horrid pall over the feast.

Next to feeling unwelcome in your friend’s house, nothing certainly is more wretchedly disconcerting than to feel unwelcome in your own house. Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to grab up all the knives within reach and ram them successively into his own mouth, just to prove to the young Wall-Paper Man what a--what a devil of a good fellow he was himself. Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to tell the White Linen Nurse about the pet bantam of his own boyhood days, that he bet a dollar could lick any bantam her father ever dreamed of owning. Grimly the Senior Surgeon longed to talk dolls, dishes, kittens, yes, even cream-pitchers, to his little daughter; to talk anything, in fact, to _any one_; to talk, sing, shout _anything_ that would make him, at least for the time being, one at heart, one at head, one at table, with this astonishingly offish bunch of youngsters: but grimly instead, out of his frazzled nerves, out of his innate spiritual bashfulness, he merely roared forth, “Where are the potatoes?”

“Potatoes?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “Potatoes? Oh, potatoes?” she finished more blithely. “Why, yes, of course. Don’t you remember you didn’t have time to peel them for me? I was _so_ disappointed!”

“You were so disappointed?” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “You? You?”

Janglingly the Little Crippled Girl knelt right up in her chair and shook her tiny fist right in her father’s face.

“Now, Lendicott Faber,” she screamed, “don’t you start in sassing my darling little Peach!”

“Peach?” snorted the Senior Surgeon. With almost supernatural calm he put down his knife and fork and eyed his offspring with an expression of absolutely inflexible purpose. “Don’t you ever,” he warned her--“ever, ever, let me hear you call--this woman ‘Peach’ again!”

A trifle faint-heartedly the Little Crippled Girl reached up and straightened her absurdly diminutive little white cap, and pursed her little mouth as nearly as possible into an expression of ineffable peace.

“Why, Lendicott Faber!” she persisted heroically.

“Lendicott!” exclaimed the Senior Surgeon. “What are _you_ ‘Lendicotting’ _me_ for?”

Hilariously with her own knife and fork the Little Crippled Girl began to beat upon the table.

“Why, you dear silly!” she cried--“why, if I’m the new marma, I’ve _got_ to call you Lendicott, and Peach has _got_ to call you Fat Father.”

Frenziedly the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair and jumped to his feet. The expression on his face was neither smile nor frown, nor war nor peace, nor any other human expression that had ever puckered there before.

“God!” he said, “this gives me the willies!” and strode tempestuously from the room.

Out in his own workshop, fortunately, whatever the grotesque new pinkness, whatever the grotesque new perkiness, his great free walking-spaces had not been interfered with. Slamming his door triumphantly behind him, he resumed once more the monotonous pace, pace, pace that for eighteen years had characterized his first night’s return to civilization.

Sharply around the corner of his battered old desk the little path started, wanly along the edge of his dingy book-shelves the little path furrowed, wistfully at the deep bay-window, where his favorite lilac-bush budded whitely for his departure, and rusted brownly for his return, the little path faltered, and went on again, on and on and on, into the alcove where his instruments glistened, up to the fireplace, where his college trophy-cups tarnished. Listlessly the Senior Surgeon began anew his yearly vigil. Up and down, up and down, round and round, on and on and on, through interminable ducks to unattainable dawns, a glutted, bacchanalian soul sweating its own way back to sanctity and leanness. Nerves always were in that vigil--raw, rattling nerves clamoring vociferously to be repacked in their sedatives. Thirst also was in that vigil; no mere whimpering tickle of the palate, but a drought of the tissues, a consuming fire of the bones. Hurt pride was also there, and festering humiliation.

But more rasping, this particular night, than nerves, more poignant than thirst, more dangerously excitative even than remorse, hunger rioted in him--hunger, the one worst enemy of the Senior Surgeon’s cause, the simple, silly, no-account, gnawing, drink-provocative hunger of an empty stomach. And one other hunger was also there--a sudden fierce new lust for life and living, a passion bare of love, yet pure of wantonness, a passion primitive, protective, inexorably proprietary, engendered strangely in that one mad, suspicious moment at the edge of the summer-house when every outraged male instinct in him had leaped to prove that, love or no love, the woman was his.

Up and down, up and down, round and round, eight o’clock found the Senior Surgeon still pacing.

At half-past eight the young Wall-Paper Man came to say good-by to him.

“As long as sister won’t be alone any more, I guess I’ll be moving on,” beamed the Wall-Paper Man. “There’s a dance at home Saturday night, and I’ve got a girl of my own,” he confided genially.

“Come again,” urged the Senior Surgeon. “Come again when you can stay longer.” With one honest prayer in stock, and at least two purely automatic social speeches of this sort, no man needs to flounder altogether hopelessly for words in any ordinary emergency of life. With no more mental interruption than the two-minute break in time, the Senior Surgeon then resumed his bitter-thoughted pacing.

At nine o’clock, however, patrolling his long, rangy book-shelves, he sensed with a very different feeling through his heavy oak door the soft, whirring swish of skirts and the breathy twitter of muffled voices. Faintly to his acute ears came the sound of his little daughter’s temperish protest, “I won’t! I won’t!” and the White Linen Nurse’s fervid pleading, “Oh, you must! you must!” and the Little Girl’s mumbled ultimatum, “Well, I won’t unless _you_ do.”

Irascibly he crossed the room and yanked the door open abruptly upon their surprise and confusion. His nerves were very sore.

“What in thunder do you want?” he snarled.

Nervously for an instant the White Linen Nurse tugged at the Little Girl’s hand. Nervously for an instant the Little Girl tugged at the White Linen Nurse’s hand. Then with a swallow like a sob the White Linen Nurse lifted her glowing face to his.

“K--kiss us good night!” said the White Linen Nurse.

Telescopically all in that startling second, vision after vision beat down like blows upon the Senior Surgeon’s senses. The pink, pink flush of the girl; the lure of her; the amazing sweetness; the physical docility--oh, ye gods, the docility! Every trend of her birth, of her youth, of her training, forcing her now, if he chose it, to unquestioning submission to his will and his judgment! Faster and faster the temptation surged through his pulses. The path from her lips to her ear was such a little path; the plea so quick to make, so short, “I want you _now_!”

“K--kiss us good night!” urged the big girl’s unsuspecting lips. “Kiss us good night!” mocked the Little Girl’s tremulous echo.

Then explosively, with the noblest rudeness of his life, “No, I won’t!” said the Senior Surgeon, and slammed the door in their faces.

Falteringly up the stairs he heard the two ascending, speechless with surprise, perhaps, stunned by his roughness, still hand in hand, probably, still climbing slowly bedward, the soft, smooth, patient footfall of the White Linen Nurse and the jerky, laborious _clang, clang, clang_ of a little dragging, iron-braced leg.

Up and down, round and round, on and on and on, the Senior Surgeon resumed his pacing. Under his eyes great shadows darkened. Along the corners of his mouth the lines furrowed like gray scars. Up and down, round and round, on and on and on and on.

At ten o’clock, sitting bolt upright in her bed, with her worried eyes straining bluely out across the Little Girl’s somnolent form into unfathomable darkness, the White Linen Nurse in the throb of her own heart began to keep pace with that faint, horrid _thud, thud, thud_ in the room below. Was he passing the bookcase now? Had he reached the bay-window? Was he dawdling over those glistening scalpels? Would his nerves remember the flask in that upper desk drawer? Up and down, round and round, on and on, the harrowing sound continued.

Resolutely at last she scrambled out of her snug nest, and, hurrying into her great warm, pussy-gray wrapper, began at once very practically, very unemotionally, with matches and alcohol and a shiny glass jar, to prepare a huge steaming cup of malted milk. Beefsteak was vastly better, she knew, or eggs, of course; but if she should venture forth to the kitchen for real substantials the Senior Surgeon, she felt quite positive, would almost certainly hear her and stop her. So very stealthily thus, like the proverbial assassin, she crept down the front stairs with the innocent malted-milk cup in her hand, and then with her knuckles just on the verge of rapping against the grimly inhospitable door, went suddenly paralyzed with uncertainty whether to advance or retreat.

Once again through the somber, inert wainscoting, exactly as if a soul had creaked, the Senior Surgeon sensed the threatening, intrusive presence of an unseen personality. Once again he strode across the room and jerked the door open with terrifying anger and resentment.

As though frozen there on his threshold by her own bare little feet, as though strangled there in his doorway by her own great mop of gold hair, as stolid and dumb as a pink-cheeked graven image, the White Linen Nurse thrust the cup out awkwardly at him.

Absolutely without comment, as though she trotted on purely professional business and the case involved was of mutual concern to them both, the Senior Surgeon took the cup from her hand and closed the door again in her face.

At eleven o’clock she came again, just as pink, just as blue, just as gray, just as golden. And the cup of malted milk she brought with her was just as huge, just as hot, just as steaming, only this time she had smuggled two raw eggs into it.

Once more the Senior Surgeon took the cup without comment and shut the door in her face.

At twelve o’clock she came again. The Senior Surgeon was unusually loquacious this time.

“Have you any more malted milk?” he asked tersely.

“Oh, yes, sir!” beamed the White Linen Nurse.

“Go and get it,” said the Senior Surgeon.

Obediently the White Linen Nurse pattered up the stairs and returned with the half-depleted bottle. Frankly interested, she recrossed the threshold of the room and delivered her glass treasure into the hands of the Senior Surgeon as he stood by his desk. Raising herself to her tiptoes, she noted with eminent satisfaction that the three big cups on the other side of the desk had all been drained to their dregs.

Then very bluntly before her eyes the Senior Surgeon took the malted-milk bottle and poured its remaining contents out quite wantonly into his waste-basket. Then equally bluntly he took the White Linen Nurse by the shoulders and marched her out of the room.

“For God’s sake,” he said, “get out of this room, and stay out!”

_Bang!_ the big door slammed behind her. Like a snarling fang, the lock bit into its catch.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. Even just to herself, all alone there in the big black hall, she was perfectly polite. “Y-e-s, sir,” she repeated softly.

With a slightly sardonic grin on his face, the Senior Surgeon resumed his pacing up and down, round and round, on and on and on.

At one o’clock, in the dull, clammy chill of earliest morning, he stopped long enough to light his hearthfire. At two o’clock he stopped again to pile on a trifle more wood. At three o’clock he dallied for an instant to close a window. The new day seemed strangely cold. At four o’clock dawn, the wonder, the miracle, the long-despaired-of, quickened wanly across the east; then suddenly, more like a phosphorescent breeze than a glow, the pale, pale yellow sunshine came wafting through the green gloom of the garden. The vigil was over.

Stumbling out into the shadowy hall to greet the new day and the new beginning, the Senior Surgeon almost tripped and fell over the White Linen Nurse, sitting all huddled up and drowsy-eyed in a gray little heap on his outer threshold. The sensation of stepping upon a human body is not a pleasant one. It smote the Senior Surgeon nauseously through the nerves of his stomach.

“What are you doing here?” he fairly screamed at her.

“Just keeping you company, sir,” yawned the White Linen Nurse. Before her hand could reach her mouth again, another great childish yawn overwhelmed her. “Just--watching with you, sir,” she finished more or less inarticulately.

“Watching with me?” snarled the Senior Surgeon, resentfully. “Why should you watch with me?”

Like the frightened flash of a bird the heavy lashes went swooping down across the pink cheeks and lifted as suddenly again.

“Because you’re my--_man_,” yawned the White Linen Nurse.

Almost roughly the Senior Surgeon reached down and pulled the White Linen Nurse to her feet.

“God!” said the Senior Surgeon. In his strained, husky voice the word sounded like an oath. Grotesquely a little smile went scudding zigzag across his haggard face. With an impulse absolutely alien to him he reached out abruptly again and raised the White Linen Nurse’s hand to his lips. “_Good_ God was what I meant--Miss Malgregor,” he grinned a bit sheepishly.

Quite bruskly then he turned and looked at his watch.

“I’d like my breakfast just as soon now as you can possibly get it,” he ordered peremptorily, in his own morbid, pathological emergency no more stopping to consider the White Linen Nurse’s purely normal fatigue than he in any pathological emergency of hers would have stopped to consider his own comfort, safety, or, perhaps, even life.

Joyously then like a prisoner just turned loose, he went swinging up the stairs to recreate himself with a smoke and a shave and a great splashing, cold shower-bath.

Only one thing seemed really to trouble him now. At the top of the stairs he stopped for an instant and cocked his head a bit worriedly toward the drawing-room, where from some slow-brightening alcove bird-carol after bird-carol went fluting shrilly up into the morning.

“Is that those damned canaries?” he asked briefly.

Very companionably the White Linen Nurse cocked her own towsled head on one side and listened with him for half a moment.

“Only four of them are damned canaries,” she corrected very gently. “The fifth one is a parrakeet that I got at a mark-down because it was a widowed bird and wouldn’t mate again.”

“Eh?” jerked the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse, and started for the kitchen.

No one but the Senior Surgeon himself breakfasted in state at five o’clock that morning. Snug and safe in her crib up-stairs the Little Crippled Girl slumbered peacefully on through the general disturbance. And as for the White Linen Nurse herself, what with chilling and rechilling melons, and broiling and unbroiling steaks, and making and remaking coffee, and hunting frantically for a different-sized water-glass or a prettier-colored plate, there was no time for anything except an occasional hurried, surreptitious nibble half-way between the stove and the table.

Yet in all that raucous, early morning hour together neither man nor girl suffered toward the other the slightest personal sense of contrition or resentment; for each mind was trained equally fairly, whether reacting on its own case or another’s, to differentiate pretty readily between mean nerves and a mean spirit.

Only once, in fact, across the intervening chasm of crankiness did the Senior Surgeon hurl a smile that was even remotely self-conscious or conciliatory. Glancing up suddenly from a particularly sharp and disagreeable speech, he noted the White Linen Nurse’s red lips mumbling softly one to the other.

“Are you specially--religious, Miss Malgregor?” he grinned quite abruptly.

“No, not specially, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Why, sir?”

“Oh, it’s only,” grinned the Senior Surgeon, dourly--“it’s only that every time I’m especially ugly to you, I see your lips moving as though in ‘silent prayer,’ as they call it; and I was just wondering if there was any special formula you used with me that kept you so everlastingly damned serene. Is there?”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“What is it?” demanded the Senior Surgeon, quite bluntly.

“Do I _have_ to tell?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. A little tremulously in her hand the empty cup she was carrying rattled against its saucer. “Do I _have_ to tell?” she repeated pleadingly.

A delirious little thrill of power went fluttering through the Senior Surgeon’s heart.

“Yes, you _have_ to tell me,” he announced quite seriously.

In absolute submission to his demand, though with very palpable reluctance, the White Linen Nurse came forward to the table, put down the cup and saucer, and began to finger a trifle nervously at the cloth.

“Oh, I’m sure I didn’t mean any harm, sir,” she stammered; “but all I say is,--honest and truly all I say is,--’Bah! he’s nothing but a man, nothing but a man, nothing but a man!’ over and over and over. Just that, sir.”

Uproariously the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair and jumped to his feet.

“I guess, after all, I’ll have to let the little kid call you ‘Peach’ one day a week,” he acknowledged jocosely.

With great seriousness then he tossed back his great, splendid head, shook himself free apparently from all unhappy memories, and started for his workroom, a great, gorgeously vital, extraordinarily talented, gray-haired boy, lusting joyously for his own work and play again after a month’s distressing illness.