Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

But, on the other hand, I noticed one thing which would tend
to show that the revelations of these mediums rest on an
objective reality. At Voiron, one of the regular attendants at my
demonstrations is a young girl, Louise----. She possesses a very
sedate and thoughtful cast of mind, not at all open to hypnotic
suggestion; and she has in a very high degree the capacity, which
is comparatively common in a lesser degree, of perceiving the
magnetic effluvia of human beings and, consequently, the fluidic
body. When Joséphine revives the memory of her past, a luminous
aura is observed around her, and is perceived by Louise. Now, to
the eyes of Louise, this aura becomes dark when Joséphine is in
the phase separating two existences. In every instance there is a
strong reaction in Joséphine when I touch points where Louise tells
me that she perceives the aura, whether it be dark or light.

I thought it well to give the report of one of these experiments almost in extenso, because those who maintain the palingenesic theory find in these the only appreciable argument which they possess. Colonel de Rochas renewed them more than once with different subjects. Among these, I will mention only one, a girl called Marie Mayo, whose history is more complicated than Joséphine’s, and whose successive reincarnations take us back to the seventeenth century and carry us suddenly to Versailles, among the historical personages moving about Louis XIV.

Let us add that Colonel de Rochas is not the only mesmerizer who has obtained revelations of this kind, which may henceforth be classed among the incontestable facts of hypnotism. I have mentioned his alone because they offer the most substantial guaranties from every point of view.

WHAT HAS BEEN PROVED?

What do they prove? We must begin, as in all questions of this kind, by entertaining a certain distrust of the medium. It goes without saying that all mediums, by the very nature of their faculties, are inclined to imposture, to trickery. I know that Colonel de Rochas, like Dr. Richet and like Professor Lombroso, was occasionally hoaxed. That is the inherent defect of the machinery which we must perforce employ; and experiments of this sort will never possess the scientific value of those made in a physical or chemical laboratory. But this is not an a priori reason for denying them any sort of interest. As a question of fact, are imposture and trickery possible here? Obviously, even though the experiments be conducted under the strictest supervision. However complicated it may be, the subject can have learned his lesson, and can cleverly avoid the traps laid for him. The best guaranty, when all is said, lies in his good faith and his moral sense, which the experimenters alone are in a position to test and to know; and for that we must trust to them. Besides, they neglect no precaution necessary to make imposture extremely difficult. After taking the subject, by means of transverse passes, up the stream of his life, they make him come down the same stream; and the same events pass in the reverse order. Repeated tests and countertests always yield identical results; and the medium never hesitates or goes astray in the labyrinth of names, dates, and incidents.[5]

Moreover, it would be requisite for these mediums, who are generally people of merely average intelligence, suddenly to become great poets in order thus to create, down to every detail, a series of characters differing entirely one from the other, in which everything--gestures, voice, temper, mind, thoughts, feeling--is in keeping, and ever ready to reply, in harmony with their inmost nature, to the most unexpected questions. It has been said that every man is a Shakspere in his dreams; but have we not here to do with dreams which, in their uniformity, bear a singular resemblance to fact?

I think, therefore, that, until we receive evidence to the contrary, we may be allowed to leave fraud out of the question. Another objection that might be raised, as was done with respect to the Myers phantom, is the insignificance of their revelations from beyond the grave. I would rather look on this as an argument in behalf of their good faith. Those whose imagination is rich enough to create the wonderful persons whom we see living in their sleep would doubtless find no great difficulty in inventing a few fantastic but plausible details on the subject of the next world. Not one of them thinks of it. They are Christians, and therefore carry deep down in themselves the traditional terror of hell, the fear of purgatory, and the vision of a paradise full of angels and palms. They never refer to any of it. Although they are most often ignorant of all the theories of reincarnation, they conform strictly to the theosophical or neospiritualistic hypothesis, and are unconsciously faithful to it in their very indefiniteness: they speak vaguely of “the dark” in which they find themselves. They tell nothing because they know nothing. It is apparently impossible for them to give any account of a state that is still illumined. In fact, it is very likely, if we admit the hypothesis of reincarnation and of evolution after death, that nature, here as elsewhere, does not proceed by bounds. There is no special reason why she should take a prodigious and inconceivable leap between life and death.

We do not find the dramatic change which at first thought we are rather inclined to expect. The spirit is first of all confused at losing its body and every one of its familiar ways; it recovers itself only by degrees. It resumes consciousness slowly. This consciousness is subsequently purified, exalted, and extended, gradually and indefinitely, until, reaching other spheres, the principle of life that animates it ceases to reincarnate itself, and loses all contact with us. This would explain why we never have any but minor and elementary revelations.

All that concerns this first phase of the survival is fairly probable, even to those who do not admit the theory of reincarnation. For the rest, we shall see presently that the solutions which man’s imagination finds there merely change the question and are inadequate and provisional.

THE DANGER OF UNCONSCIOUS SUGGESTION IN MESMERIC TESTS

We now come to the most serious objection, that of suggestion. Colonel de Rochas declares that he and all the other experimenters who have given themselves up to this study “have not only avoided everything that could put the subject on a definite tack, but have often tried in vain to lead him astray by different suggestions.” I am convinced of it: there can be no question of voluntary suggestion.

But do we not know that in these regions unconscious and involuntary suggestion is often more powerful and effective than the other? In the hackneyed and rather childish experiment of table-turning, for instance, which, after all, is only a crude and elementary form of telepathy, the replies are nearly always dictated by the unconscious suggestion of a participant or a mere onlooker.[6] We should therefore first of all have to make sure that neither the hypnotizer nor an onlooker, nor yet the subject himself, has ever heard of the reincarnated persons. It will be enough, I shall be told, to employ for the countertests another operator and different onlookers who are ignorant of the previous revelations. Yes, but the subject is not ignorant of them; and it is possible that the first suggestion has been so profound that it will remain forever stamped upon the unconsciousness, and that it will reproduce the same incarnations indefinitely in the same order.

All this does not mean that the phenomena of suggestion are not themselves laden with mysteries; but that is another question. For the moment, as we see, the problem is almost insoluble, and control is impracticable. Meanwhile, since we have to choose between reincarnation and suggestion, it is right that we should confine ourselves in the first instance to the latter, in accordance with the principles which we have observed in the case of automatic speech and writing. Between two unknowns, common sense and prudence decree that we should turn first to the one on whose frontiers lie certain facts more frequently recorded, the one which shows a few familiar glimmers. Let us exhaust the mystery of our life before forsaking it for the mystery of our death. Throughout this vast expanse of treacherous ground, it is important that, until fresh evidence arrives, we should keep to one inflexible rule, namely, that thought transference exists as long as it is not absolutely and physically impossible for the subject or some person in the room to have cognizance of the incident in question, whether the cognizance be conscious or not, forgotten or actual. Even this guaranty is not sufficient, for it is still possible for some one taking no part in the sitting, and even very far away from it, to be placed in communication with the medium by some unknown means, and to influence the medium at a distance and unwittingly. Lastly, to provide for every contingency before letting death come upon the boards, it would be necessary to make certain that atavistic memory does not play an unforeseen part. Cannot a man, for instance, carry hidden in the depths of his being the recollection of events connected with the childhood of an ancestor whom he has never seen, and communicate it to the medium by unconscious suggestion? It is not impossible. We carry in ourselves all the past, all the experience, of our ancestors. If by some magic we could illumine the prodigious treasures of the subconscious memory, why should we not there discover the events and facts that form the sources of that experience? Before turning toward yonder unknown, we must utterly exhaust the possibilities of this terrestrial unknown. It is moreover remarkable, but undeniable, that, despite the strictness of a law which seems to shut out every other explanation, despite the almost unlimited and probably excessive scope allotted to the domain of suggestion, there nevertheless remain some facts which perhaps call for another interpretation.

THE LACK OF COMPELLING PROOF IN THE THEORY

But let us return to reincarnation, and recognize, in passing, that it is very regrettable that the arguments of the theosophists and neospiritualists are not compelling; for there never was a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful, and consoling, or, to a certain point, a more probable creed than theirs. But the quality of a creed is no evidence of its truth. Even though it is the religion of six hundred millions of mankind, the nearest to the mysterious origins, the only one that is not odious, and the least absurd of all, it will have to do what the others have not done--bring unimpeachable testimony; and what it has given us hitherto is only the first shadow of a proof begun.

Indeed, even that would not put an end to the riddle. In principle, reincarnation sooner or later is inevitable, since nothing can be lost or remain stationary. What has not been demonstrated in any way, and will perhaps remain indemonstrable, is the reincarnation of the whole, identical person, notwithstanding the abolition of memory. But what matters that reincarnation to him, if he be unaware that he is still himself? All the problems of the conscious survival of man start up anew, and we have to begin all over again. Even if scientifically established, the doctrine of reincarnation, just like that of a survival, would not set a term to our questions. It replies to neither the first nor the last, those of the beginning and the end, the only ones that are essential. It simply shifts them, pushes them a few hundreds, a few thousands, of years back, in the hope, perhaps, of losing or forgetting them in silence and space. But they have come from the depths of the most prodigious infinities, and are not content with a tardy solution. I am most certainly interested in learning what is in store for me, what will happen to me immediately after my death. You tell me:

“Man, in his successive incarnations, will make atonement by suffering, will be purified, in order that he may ascend from sphere to sphere until he returns to the divine essence whence he sprang.”

I am willing to believe it, notwithstanding that all this still bears the somewhat questionable stamp of our little earth and its old religions; I am willing to believe it; but even then? What matters to me is not what will be for some time, but for always; and your divine principle appears to me not at all infinite nor definite. It even seems to me greatly inferior to that which I conceive without your help. Now, even if it were based on thousands of facts, a religion that belittles the God conceived by my loftiest thought could never dominate my conscience. Your infinity or our God, without being even more unintelligible than mine, is nevertheless smaller. If I be again immerged in Him, it means that I emerged from Him; if it be possible for me to have emerged from Him, then He is not infinite; and, if He be not infinite, what is He? We must accept one thing or the other: either He purifies me because I am outside Him and He is not infinite; or, being infinite, if He purify me, then there was something impure in Him, because it is a part of Himself which He is purifying in me. Moreover, how can we admit that this God who has existed for all time, who has the same infinity of millenaries behind Him as in front of Him, should not yet have found time to purify Himself and put a period to His trials? What He was not able to do in the eternity previous to the moment of my existence He will not be able to do in the subsequent eternity, for the two are equal. And the same question presents itself where I am concerned. My principle of life, like His, exists from all eternity, for my emergence out of nothing would be more difficult of explanation than my existence without a beginning. I have necessarily had innumerable opportunities of incarnating myself; and I have probably done so, seeing that it is hardly likely that the idea came to me only yesterday. All the chances of reaching my goal have therefore been offered to me in the past; and all those which I shall find in the future will add nothing to the number, which was already infinite. There is not much to say in answer to these interrogations, which spring up everywhence the moment our thought glances upon them. Meanwhile, I had rather know that I know nothing than feed myself on illusory and irreconcilable assertions. I had rather keep to an infinity the incomprehensibility of which has no bounds than restrict myself to a God whose incomprehensibility is limited on every side. Nothing compels you to speak of your God; but, if you take upon yourself to do so, it is necessary that your explanations should be superior to the silence which they break.

It is true that the scientific spiritualists do not venture as far as this God; but, then, tight-pressed between the two riddles of the beginning and the end, they have almost nothing to tell us. They follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds in a world where seconds no longer count, and then they abandon them in the darkness. I do not reproach them, because we have here to do with things which, in all probability, we shall not know in the day when we shall think that we know everything. I do not ask that they shall reveal to me the secret of the universe, for I do not believe, like a child, that this secret can be expressed in three words or that it can enter my brain without bursting it. I am even persuaded that beings who might be millions of times more intelligent than the most intelligent among us would not yet possess it, for this secret must be as infinite, as unfathomable, as inexhaustible as the universe itself. Nevertheless, the fact remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations. At best, it is only a short space gained, and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to go through what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now going through what befalls me in my life here. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. I do not doubt that the facts reported are genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because at the moment when they can speak to us they have nothing to tell us, or because at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw forever, and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.

[1] Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and copyright U. S.
A., 1913, by Eugène Fasquelle.

[2] “The Survival of Man,” Chap. XXV, p. 325.

[3] In this connection, however, we find two or three rather
perturbing facts, a remarkable one being that at a spiritualistic
meeting held by the late W. T. Stead the prediction of the murder
of King Alexander and Queen Draga was described with the most
circumstantial details. A verbatim report was drawn up of this
prediction and signed by thirty witnesses; and Stead went next
day to beg the Servian minister in London to warn the king of the
danger that threatened him. The event took place, as announced, a
few months later. But “precognition” does not necessarily require
the intervention of the dead; moreover, every case of this kind,
before being definitely accepted, would call for prolonged study
in every particular.

[4] In order to exhaust this question of survival and of
communications with the dead, I ought to speak of Dr. Hyslop’s
recent investigations, made with the assistance of the mediums
Smead and Chenoweth (communications with William James). I ought
also to mention Julia’s famous “bureau” and, above all, the
extraordinary séances of Mrs. Wriedt, the trumpet medium, who not
only obtains communications in which the dead speak languages of
which she herself is completely ignorant, but raises apparitions
said to be extremely disturbing. I ought lastly, to examine the
facts set forth by Professor Porro, Dr. Venzano, and M. Rozanne,
and many other things besides, for spiritualistic investigation
and literature are already piling volume upon volume. But it was
not my intention or my pretension to make a complete study of
scientific spiritualism. I wished merely to omit no essential
point and to give a general but accurate idea of this posthumous
atmosphere which no really new and decisive fact has come to
unsettle since the manifestations of which we have spoken.

[5] In order to hide nothing and to bring all the documents into
court, we may point out that Colonel de Rochas ascertained upon
inquiry that the subjects’ revelations concerning their former
existences were inaccurate in several particulars.

“Their narratives were also full of anachronisms, which disclosed
the presence of normal recollections among the suggestions
that came from an unknown source. Nevertheless, one perfectly
indubitable fact remains, which is that of the existence of
certain visions recurring with the same characteristics in the
case of a considerable number of persons unknown to one another.”

[6] In this connection, may I be permitted to quote a personal
experience? One evening at the Abbaye de Saint-Wandrille, where
I am wont to spend my summers, some newly arrived guests were
amusing themselves by making a small table spin on its foot. I
was quietly smoking in a corner of the drawing-room, at some
distance from the little table, taking no interest in what was
happening around it and thinking of something quite different.
After due entreaty, the table replied that it held the spirit of
a seventeenth-century monk who was buried in the east gallery
of the cloisters under a flagstone dated 1693. After the
departure of the monk, who suddenly, for no apparent reason,
refused to continue the interview, we thought that we would go
with a lamp and look for the grave. We ended by discovering
in the far cloister, on the eastern side, a tombstone in very
bad condition, broken, worn down, trodden into the ground, and
crumbling, on which, by examining it very closely, we were able
with great difficulty to decipher the inscription, “A.D. 1693.”
Now, at the moment of the monk’s reply there was no one in the
drawing-room except my guests and myself. None of them knew the
abbey; they had arrived that very evening a few minutes before
dinner, after which, as it was quite dark, they had put off their
visit to the cloisters and the ruins until the following day.
Therefore, short of a belief in the “shells” or the “elementals”
of the theosophists, the revelation could have come only from
me. Nevertheless, I believed myself to be absolutely ignorant
of the existence of that particular tombstone, one of the least
legible among a score of others, all belonging to the seventeenth
century, which pave this part of the cloisters.

Country Roads of New England

Four Drawings by Walter King Stone

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 TWO

WITH PICTURES BY HERMAN PFEIFER

SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING INSTALMENT

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.

When the White Linen Nurse found anything again, she found herself lying perfectly flat on her back in a reasonably comfortable nest of grass and leaves. Staring inquisitively up into the sky she thought she noticed a slight black-and-blue discoloration toward the west, but more than that, much to her relief, the firmament did not seem to be seriously injured. The earth, she feared, had not escaped so easily. Even away off somewhere near the tip of her fingers the ground was as sore, as sore as could be, under her touch. Impulsively to her dizzy eyes the hot tears started, to think that now, tired as she was, she would have to jump right up in another minute or two and attend to the poor earth. Fortunately for any really strenuous emergency that might arise, there seemed to be nothing about her own body that hurt at all except a queer, persistent little pain in her cheek.

Not until the Little Crippled Girl’s dirt-smouched face intervened between her own staring eyes and the sky did she realize that the pain in her cheek was a pinch.

“Wake up! wake up!” scolded the Little Crippled Girl, shrilly. “Naughty--pink-and-white Nursie! I wanted to hear the bump! You screamed so loud I couldn’t hear the bump.”

With excessive caution the White Linen Nurse struggled up at last to a sitting posture, and gazed perplexedly about her.

It seemed to be a perfectly pleasant field--acres and acres of mild old grass tottering palsiedly down to watch some skittish young violets and bluets frolic in and out of a giggling brook. Up the field? Up the field? Hazily the White Linen Nurse ground her knuckles into her incredulous eyes. Up the field, just beyond them, the great empty automobile stood amiably at rest. From the general appearance of the stone wall at the top of the little grassy slope it was palpably evident that the car had attempted certain vain acrobatic feats before its failing momentum had forced it into the humiliating ranks of the backsliders.

Still grinding her knuckles into her eyes, the White Linen Nurse turned back to the Little Girl. Under the torn, twisted sable cap one little eye was hidden completely, but the other eye loomed up as rakish and bruised as a prize-fighter’s. One sable sleeve was wrenched disastrously from its armhole, and along the edge of the vivid, purple little skirt the ill-favored white ruffles seemed to have raveled out into hopeless yards and yards and yards of Hamburg embroidery.

The Little Girl began to gather herself together a trifle self-consciously.

“We--we seem to have fallen out of something,” she confided with the air of one who halves a most precious secret.

“Yes, I know,” said the White Linen Nurse; “but _what_ has become of--your father?”

Worriedly for an instant, the Little Girl sat scanning the remotest corners of the field, then abruptly, with a gasp of real relief, she began to explore with cautious fingers the geographical outline of her black eye.

“Oh, never mind about Father,” she asserted cheerfully. “I guess--I guess he got mad and went home.”

“Yes, I know,” mused the White Linen Nurse; “but it doesn’t seem--probable.”

“Probable?” mocked the Little Girl, most disagreeably; then suddenly her little hand went shooting out toward the stranded automobile.

“Why, _there_ he is,” she screamed--“under the car! Oh, look--look--looky!”

Laboriously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her knees. Desperately she tried to ram her fingers like a clog into the whirling dizziness round her temples.

“Oh, my God! oh, my God! what’s the dose for anybody under a car?” she babbled idiotically.

Then with a really Herculean effort, both mental and physical, she staggered to her feet, and started for the automobile.

But her knees gave out, and wilting down to the grass, she tried to crawl along on all fours till straining wrists sent her back to her feet again.

Whenever she tried to walk, the Little Girl walked; whenever she tried to crawl, the Little Girl crawled.

“Isn’t it _fun_!” the shrill childish voice piped persistently. “Isn’t it just like playing shipwreck!”

When they reached the car, both woman and child were too utterly exhausted with breathlessness to do anything except just sit down on the ground and stare.

Sure enough, under that monstrous, immovable-looking machine the Senior Surgeon’s body lay rammed, face down, deep, deep into the grass.

It was the Little Girl who recovered her breath first.

“I think he’s dead,” she volunteered sagely. “His legs look--awfully dead to me.” Only excitement was in the statement. It took a second or two for her little mind to make any particularly personal application of such excitement. “I hadn’t--exactly--planned--on having _him_ dead,” she began with imperious resentment. A threat of complete emotional collapse zigzagged suddenly across her face. “I won’t have him dead! I won’t! I _won’t_!” she screamed out stormily.

In the amazing silence that ensued the White Linen Nurse gathered her trembling knees up into the circle of her arms and sat there staring at the Senior Surgeon’s prostrate body, and rocking herself feebly to and fro in a futile effort to collect her scattered senses.

“Oh, if some one would only tell me what to do, I know I could do it! Oh, I know I could do it! If some one would only tell me what to do!” she kept repeating helplessly.

Cautiously the Little Girl crept forward on her hands and knees to the edge of the car, and peered speculatively through the great yellow wheel-spokes. “Father!” she faltered in almost inaudible gentleness. “Father!” she pleaded in perfectly impotent whisper.

Impetuously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her own hands and knees and jostled the Little Girl aside.

“Fat Father!” screamed the White Linen Nurse. “Fat Father! Fat Father! _Fat Father!_” she gibed and taunted with the one call she knew that had never yet failed to rouse him.

Perceptibly across the Senior Surgeon’s horridly quiet shoulders a little twitch wrinkled and was gone again.

“Oh, his heart!” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “I must find his heart!”

Throwing herself prone upon the cool, meadowy ground and frantically reaching under the running-board of the car to her full arm’s-length, she began to rummage awkwardly hither and yon beneath the heavy weight of the man in the desperate hope of feeling a heart-beat.

“Ouch! you tickle me!” spluttered the Senior Surgeon, weakly.

Rolling back quickly with fright and relief, the White Linen Nurse burst forth into one maddening cackle of hysterical laughter. “Ha! ha! ha!” she giggled. “Hi! hi!”

Perplexedly at first, but with increasing abandon, the Little Girl’s voice took up the same idiotic refrain. “Ha! ha! ha!” she choked. “Hi! hi! hi!”

With an agonizing jerk of his neck, the Senior Surgeon rooted his mud-gagged mouth half an inch farther toward free and spontaneous speech. Very laboriously, very painstakingly, he spat out one by one two stones and a wisp of ground-pine and a brackish, prickly tickle of stale goldenrod.

“Blankety-blank-blank-_blank_!” he announced in due time--“blankety-blank-blank-blank-_blank_! Maybe when you two blankety-blank imbeciles have got through your blankety-blank cackling, you’ll have the blankety-blank decency to save my--my blankety-blank-blank-blank-_blank-blank life_!”

“Ha! ha! ha!” persisted the poor White Linen Nurse, with the tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Hi! hi! hi!” snickered the poor Little Girl through her hiccoughs.

Feeling hopelessly imprisoned under the monstrous car, the Senior Surgeon closed his eyes for death. No man of his weight, he felt sure, could reasonably expect to survive many minutes longer the apoplectic, blood-red rage that pounded in his ear-drums. Through his tight-closed eyelids very, very slowly a red glow seemed to permeate. He thought it was the fires of hell. Opening his eyes to meet his fate like a man, he found himself staring impudently close, instead, into the White Linen Nurse’s furiously flushed face, which lay cuddled on one plump cheek, staring impudently close at him.

“Why--why--get out!” gasped the Senior Surgeon.

Very modestly the White Linen Nurse’s face retreated a little further into its blushes.

“Yes, I know,” she protested; “but I’m all through giggling now. I’m sorry--I’m--”

In sheer apprehensiveness the Senior Surgeon’s features crinkled wincingly from brow to chin as though struggling vainly to retreat from the appalling proximity of the girl’s face.

“Your--eyelashes--are too long,” he complained querulously.

“Eh?” jerked the White Linen Nurse’s face. “Is it your brain that’s hurt? Oh, sir, do you think it’s your brain that’s hurt?”

“It’s my stomach,” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “I tell you I’m not hurt; I’m just--squashed. I’m paralyzed. If I can’t get this car off me--”

“Yes, that’s just it,” beamed the White Linen Nurse’s face--“that’s just what I crawled in here to find out--how to get the car off you. That’s just what I want to find out. I could run for help, of course; only I couldn’t run, ’cause my knees are so wobbly. It would take hours, and the car might start or burn up or something while I was gone. But you don’t seem to be caught anywhere on the machinery,” she added more brightly; “it only seems to be sitting on you. So if I could only get the car off you! But it’s so heavy. I had no idea it would be so heavy. Could I take it apart, do you think? Is there any one place where I could begin at the beginning and take it all apart?”

“Take it apart--hell!” groaned the Senior Surgeon.

A little twitch of defiance flickered across the White Linen Nurse’s face.

“All the same,” she asserted stubbornly, “if some one would only tell me what to do, I know I could do it.”

Horridly from some unlocatable quarter of the engine an alarming little tremor quickened suddenly, and was hushed again.

“Get out of here--quick!” stormed the Senior Surgeon.

“I won’t,” said the White Linen Nurse, “until you tell me what to do.”

Brutally for an instant the ingenuous blue eyes and the cynical gray eyes battled each other.

“_Can_ you do what you’re told?” faltered the Senior Surgeon.

“Oh, yes,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“I mean, can you do exactly what you’re told?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. “Can you follow directions, I mean? Can you follow them explicitly? Or are you one of those people who listens only to her own judgment?”

“Oh, but I haven’t got any judgment,” protested the White Linen Nurse.

Palpably in the Senior Surgeon’s bloodshot eyes the leisurely seeming diagnosis leaped to precipitous conclusions.

“Then get out of here quick, for God’s sake, and get to work!” he ordered.

Cautiously the White Linen Nurse jerked herself back into freedom and crawled around and stared at the Senior Surgeon through the wheel-spokes again. Like one worrying out some intricate mathematical problem, his mental strain was pulsing visibly through his closed eyelids.

“Yes, sir?” prodded the White Linen Nurse.

“Keep still!” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “I’ve got to think,” he said. “I’ve got to work it out. All in a moment you’ve got to learn to run the car. All in a moment! It’s awful!”

“Oh, I don’t mind, sir,” affirmed the White Linen Nurse, serenely.

Frenziedly the Senior Surgeon rooted one cheek into the mud again.

“You don’t _mind_?” he groaned. “You don’t _mind_? Why, you’ve got to learn--everything--everything from the very beginning!”

“Oh, that’s all right, sir,” crooned the White Linen Nurse.

Ominously from somewhere a horrid sound creaked again. The Senior Surgeon did not stop to argue any further.

“Now come here,” he ordered. “I’m going to--I’m going to--” Startlingly his voice weakened, trailed off into nothingness, and rallied suddenly with exaggerated bruskness. “Look here, now, for Heaven’s sake, use your brains! I’m going to dictate to you very slowly, one thing at a time, just what to do.”

Quite astonishingly the White Linen Nurse sank down on her knees and began to grin at him.

“Oh, no, sir,” she said; “I couldn’t do it that way--not one thing at a time. Oh, no, indeed, sir--No.” Absolute finality was in her voice, the inviolable stubbornness of the perfectly good-natured person.

“You’ll do it the way I tell you to,” roared the Senior Surgeon, struggling vainly to ease one shoulder or stretch one knee-joint.

“Oh, no, sir,” beamed the White Linen Nurse; “not one thing at a time. Oh, no; I couldn’t do it that way. Oh, no, sir; I won’t do it that way--one thing at a time,” she persisted hurriedly. “Why, you might faint away or something might happen right in the middle of it--right between one direction and another, and I wouldn’t know at all what to turn on or off next; and it might take off one of your legs, you know, or an arm. Oh, no; not one thing at a time.”

“Good-by, then,” croaked the Senior Surgeon. “I’m as good as dead now.” A single shudder went through him, a last futile effort to stretch himself.

“Good-by,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Good-by. I’d heaps rather have you die perfectly whole, like that, of your own accord, than have me run the risk of starting the car full-tilt and chopping you up so, or dragging you off so, that you didn’t find it convenient to tell me how to _stop_ the car.”

“You’re a--a--a--” spluttered the Senior Surgeon, incoherently.

“_Crinkle-crackle!_” went that mysterious, horrid sound from somewhere in the machinery.

“Oh, my God!” surrendered the Senior Surgeon, “do it your own--damned way! Only--only--” His voice cracked raspingly.

“Steady! Steady there!” said the White Linen Nurse. Except for a sudden odd pucker at the end of her nose her expression was still perfectly serene. “Now begin at the beginning,” she begged. “Quick! Tell me everything just the way I must do it! Quick! quick! quick!”

Twice the Senior Surgeon’s lips opened and shut with a vain effort to comply with her request.

“But you can’t do it,” he began all over again; “it isn’t possible. You haven’t got the mind.”

“Maybe I haven’t,” said the White Linen Nurse; “but I’ve got the memory. _Hurry!_”

“_Creak!_” said the funny little something in the machinery.

“Oh, get in there quick!” surrendered the Senior Surgeon. “Sit down behind the wheel!” he shouted after her flying footsteps. “Are you there? For God’s sake, are you there? Do you see those two little levers where your right hand comes? For God’s sake, don’t you know what a lever is? Quick now! Do just what I tell you!”

A little jerkily then, but very clearly, very concisely, the Senior Surgeon called out to the White Linen Nurse just how every lever, every pedal, should be manipulated to start the car.

Absolutely accurately, absolutely indelibly, the White Linen Nurse visualized each separate detail in her abnormally retentive mind.

“But you can’t possibly remember it,” groaned the Senior Surgeon. “You can’t possibly. And probably the damned car’s _bust_ and won’t start, anyway, and--” Abruptly the speech ended in a guttural snarl of despair.

“Don’t be a--blight!” screamed the White Linen Nurse. “I’ve never forgotten anything yet, sir!”

Very tensely she straightened up suddenly in her seat. Her expression was no longer even remotely pleasant. Along her sensitive, fluctuant nostrils the casual crinkle of distaste and suspicion had deepened suddenly into sheer dilating terror.

“Left foot--press down--hard--left pedal,” she began to singsong to herself.

“No, _right_ foot--_right_ foot!” corrected the Little Girl, blunderingly from somewhere close in the grass.

“Inside lever--pull--’way--back!” persisted the White Linen Nurse, resolutely, as she switched on the current.

“No, _outside_ lever! _Outside! Outside!_” contradicted the Little Girl.

“Shut your damned mouth!” screeched the White Linen Nurse, her hand on the throttle as she tried the self-starter.

Bruised as he was, wretched, desperately endangered there under the car, the Senior Surgeon could almost have grinned at the girl’s terse, unconscious mimicry of his own most venomous tones.

Then with all the forty-eight lusty, ebullient years of his life snatched from his lips like an untasted cup, and one single noxious, death-flavored second urged, forced, crammed down his choking throat, he felt the great car quicken and start.

“God!” said the Senior Surgeon, just “God!” The God of mud, he meant; the God of brackish grass; the God of a man lying still hopeful under more than two and a half ton’s weight of unaccountable mechanism, with a novice in full command.

Up in her crimson leather cushions, free-lunged, free-limbed, the White Linen Nurse heard the smothered cry. Clear above the whir of wheels, the whizz of clogs, the one word sizzled like a red-hot poker across her chattering consciousness. Tingling through the grasp of her fingers on the vibrating wheel, stinging through the sole of her foot that hovered over the throbbing clutch, she sensed the agonized appeal. “Short lever, spark; long lever, gas,” she persisted resolutely. “It must be right; it must!”

Jerkily then, and blatantly unskilfully, with riotous puffs, and spinning of wheels, the great car started, faltered, balked a bit, then dragged crushingly across the Senior Surgeon’s flattened body, and with a great wanton burst of speed tore down the sloping meadow into the brook rods away. Clamping down the brakes with a wrench and a racket like the smash of a machine-shop, the White Linen Nurse jumped out into the brook, and with one wild, terrified glance behind her, staggered back up the long, grassy slope to the Senior Surgeon.

Mechanically through her wooden-feeling lips she forced the greeting that sounded most cheerful to her.

“It’s not much fun, sir, running an auto,” she gasped. “I don’t believe I’d like it.”

Half propped up on one elbow, still dizzy with mental chaos, still paralyzed with physical inertia, the Senior Surgeon lay staring blankly about him. Indifferently for an instant his stare included the White Linen Nurse. Then glowering suddenly at something beyond her, his face went perfectly livid.

“Good God! the--the car’s on fire!” he mumbled.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Why, didn’t you know it, sir?”

Headlong the Senior Surgeon pitched over on the grass, his last vestige of self-control stripped from him, horror unspeakable racking him sobbingly from head to toe.

Whimperingly the Little Girl came crawling to him, and, settling down close at his feet, began with her tiny lace handkerchief to make futile dabs at the mud-stains on his gray silk stockings.

“Never mind, Father,” she coaxed; “we’ll get you clean sometime.”

Nervously the White Linen Nurse bethought her of the brook. “Oh, wait a minute, sir, and I’ll get you a drink of water,” she pleaded.

Bruskly the Senior Surgeon’s hand jerked out and grabbed at her skirt.

“Don’t leave me!” he begged. “For God’s sake, don’t leave me!”

Weakly he struggled up again and sat staring piteously at the blazing car. His unrelinquished clutch on the White Linen Nurse’s skirt brought her sinking softly down beside him like a collapsed balloon. Together they sat and watched the gaseous yellow flames shoot up into the sky.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” piped the Little Girl.

“Eh?” groaned the Senior Surgeon.

“Father,” persisted the shrill little voice--“Father, do people ever burn up?”

“Eh?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. Brutally the harsh, shuddering sobs began to rack and tear again through his great chest.

“There! there!” crooned the White Linen Nurse, struggling desperately to her knees. “Let me get--everybody a drink of water.”

Again the Senior Surgeon’s unrelinquished clutch on her skirt jerked her back to the place beside him.

“I said _not to leave me_!” he snapped out as roughly as he jerked.

Before the affrighted look in the White Linen Nurse’s face a sheepish, mirthless grin flickered across one corner of his mouth.

“Lord! but I’m shaken!” he apologized. “Me, of all people!” Painfully the red blood mounted to his cheeks. “Me, of all people!” Bluntly he forced the White Linen Nurse’s reluctant gaze to meet his own. “Only yesterday,” he persisted, “I did a laparotomy on a man who had only one chance in a hundred of pulling through, and I--I laughed at him for fighting off his ether cone--laughed at him, I tell you!”

“Yes, I know,” soothed the White Linen Nurse; “but--”

“But nothing!” growled the Senior Surgeon. “The fear of death? Bah! All my life I’ve scoffed at it. Die? Yes, of course, when you _have_ to, but with no kick coming. Why, I’ve been wrecked in a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and I didn’t care; and I’ve lain for nine days more dead than alive in an Asiatic cholera camp, and I didn’t care; and I’ve been locked into my office three hours with a raving maniac and a dynamite bomb, and I didn’t care; and twice in a Pennsylvania mine disaster I’ve been the first man down the shaft, and I didn’t care; and I’ve been shot, I tell you, and I’ve been horse-trampled, and I’ve been wolf-bitten, and I’ve _never_ cared. But to-day--to-day--” Piteously all the pride and vigor wilted from his great shoulders, leaving him all huddled up, like a woman, with his head on his knees--“but to-day I’ve got mine,” he acknowledged brokenly.

Once again the White Linen Nurse tried to rise.

“Oh, please, sir, let me get you a--drink of water,” she suggested helplessly.

“I said not to leave me!” jerked the Senior Surgeon.

Perplexedly, with big staring eyes, the Little Crippled Girl glanced up at this strange fatherish person who sounded so suddenly small and scared like herself. Jealous instantly of her own prerogatives, she dropped her futile labors on the mud-stained silk stockings and scrambled precipitously for the White Linen Nurse’s lap, where she nestled down finally after many gyrations, and sat glowering forth at all possible interlopers.

“Don’t leave _any_ of us!” she ordered with a peremptoriness not unmixed with supplication.

“Surely some one will see the fire and come and get us,” conceded the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, surely,” mused the White Linen Nurse. Just at that moment she was mostly concerned with adjusting the curve of her shoulder to the curve of the Little Girl’s head. “I could sit more comfortably,” she suggested to the Senior Surgeon, “if you’d let go my skirt.”

“Let go of your skirt? Who’s touching your skirt?” gasped the Senior Surgeon, incredulously. Once again the blood mounted darkly to his face. “I think I’ll get up--and walk around a bit,” he confided coldly.

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

With a tweak of pain through his sprained back, the Senior Surgeon suddenly sat down again. “I _sha’n’t_ get up till I’m good and ready,” he declared.

“I wouldn’t, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. Very slowly, very complacently, all the while she kept right on renovating the Little Girl’s personal appearance, smoothing a wrinkled stocking, tucking up obstreperous white ruffles, tugging down parsimonious purple hems, loosening a pinchy hook, tightening a wobbly button. Very slowly, very complacently, the Little Girl drowsed off to sleep, with her weazen, iron-cased little legs stretched stiffly out before her. “Poor little legs! Poor little legs! Poor little legs!” crooned the White Linen Nurse.

“I don’t know that you need to make a _song_ about it,” winced the Senior Surgeon. “It’s just about the cruellest case of complete muscular atrophy that I’ve ever seen.”

Blandly the White Linen Nurse lifted her big blue eyes to his.

“It wasn’t her ‘complete muscular atrophy’ that I was thinking about,” she said. “It’s her panties that are so unbecoming.”

“Eh?” exclaimed the Senior Surgeon.

“Poor little legs! Poor little legs! Poor little legs!” resumed the White Linen Nurse, droningly.

Very slowly, very complacently, all around them April kept right on being April. Very slowly, very complacently, all around them the grass kept right on growing, and the trees kept right on budding. Very slowly, very complacently, all around them the blue sky kept right on fading into its early evening dove-colors.

Nothing brisk, nothing breathless, nothing even remotely hurried, was there in all the landscape except just the brook, and the flash of a bird, and the blaze of the crackling automobile.

The White Linen Nurse’s nostrils were smooth and calm with the lovely sappy scent of rabbit-nibbled maple-bark and mud-wet arbutus buds. The White Linen Nurse’s mind was full of sumptuous, succulent marsh-marigolds and fluffy-white shad-bush blossoms.

The Senior Surgeon’s nostrils were all puckered up with the stench of burning varnish. The Senior Surgeon’s mind was full of the horrid thought that he’d forgotten to renew his automobile fire-insurance, and that he had a sprained back, and that his rival colleague had told him he didn’t know how to run an auto, anyway, and that the cook had given notice that morning, and that he had a sprained back, and that the moths had gnawed the knees out of his new dress-suit, and that the Superintendent of Nurses had had the audacity to send him a bunch of pink roses for his birthday, and that the boiler in the kitchen leaked, and that he had to go to Philadelphia the next day to read a paper on “Surgical Methods at the Battle of Waterloo” and he hadn’t even begun the paper yet, and that he had a sprained back, and that the wall-paper on his library hung in shreds and tatters, waiting for him to decide between a French fresco effect and an early English paneling, and that his little daughter was growing up in wanton ugliness under the care of coarse, indifferent hirelings, and that the laundry robbed him weekly of at least five socks, and that it would cost him fully seven thousand dollars to replace this car, and that he had a sprained back.

“It’s restful, isn’t it?” cooed the White Linen Nurse.

“Isn’t _what_ restful?” glowered the Senior Surgeon.

“Sitting down,” said the White Linen Nurse.

Contemptuously the Senior Surgeon’s mind ignored the interruption and reverted precipitously to its own immediate problem concerning the gloomy, black-walnut-shadowed entrance-hall of his great house, and how many yards of imported linoleum at $3.45 a yard it would take to recarpet the “confounded hole”; and how it would have seemed, anyway, if--if he hadn’t gone home as usual to the horrid black-walnut shadows that night, but been carried home instead, feet first and quite dead--dead, mind you, with a _red_ necktie on, and even the cook was out! And they wouldn’t even know where to lay him, but might put him by mistake in that--in that--in his dead wife’s dead bed!

Altogether unconsciously a little fluttering sigh of ineffable contentment escaped the White Linen Nurse.

“I don’t care how long we have to sit here and wait for help,” she announced cheerfully, “because to-morrow, of course, I’ll have to get up and begin all over again--and go to Nova Scotia.”

“Go _where_?” lurched the Senior Surgeon.

“I’d thank you kindly, sir, not to jerk my skirt quite so hard,” said the White Linen Nurse, just a trifle stiffly.

Incredulously once more the Senior Surgeon withdrew his detaining hand.

“I’m not even touching your skirt,” he denied desperately. Nothing but denial and reiterated denial seemed to ease his self-esteem for an instant. “Why, for Heaven’s sake, should I want to hold on to your skirt?” he demanded peremptorily. “What the deuce,” he began blusteringly--“why in--”

Then abruptly he stopped and shot an odd, puzzled glance at the White Linen Nurse, and right there before her startled eyes she saw every vestige of human expression fade out of his face as it faded out sometimes in the operating-room when, in the midst of some ghastly, unforeseen emergency that left all his assistants blinking helplessly about them, his whole wonderful, scientific mind seemed to break up like some chemical compound into all its meek component parts, only to reorganize itself suddenly with some amazing explosive action that fairly knocked the breath out of all on-lookers, but was pretty apt to knock the breath _into_ the body of the person most concerned.

When the Senior Surgeon’s scientific mind had reorganized itself to meet _this_ emergency, he found himself vastly more surprised at the particular type of explosion that had taken place than any other person could possibly have been.

“Miss Malgregor,” he gasped, “speaking of preferring ‘domestic service,’ as you call it--speaking of preferring domestic service to--nursing, how would you like to consider--to consider a position of--of--well, call it a--a position of general--heartwork--for a family of two? Myself and the Little Girl here being the two, as you understand,” he added briskly.

“Why, I think it would be grand!” beamed the White Linen Nurse.

A trifle mockingly the Senior Surgeon bowed his appreciation.

“Your frank and immediate--enthusiasm,” he murmured, “is more, perhaps, than I had dared to expect.”

“But it _would_ be grand,” said the White Linen Nurse. Before the odd little smile in the Senior Surgeon’s eyes her white forehead puckered all up with perplexity. Then with her mind still thoroughly unawakened, her heart began suddenly to pitch and lurch like a frightened horse whose rider has not even remotely sensed as yet the approach of an unwonted footfall. “What did you say?” she repeated worriedly. “Just exactly what was it that you said? I guess, maybe, I didn’t understand just exactly what it was that you said.”

The smile in the Senior Surgeon’s eyes deepened a little.

“I asked you,” he said, “how you would like to consider a position of ‘general heartwork’ in a family of two, myself and the Little Girl here being the two. ‘Heartwork’ was what I said. Yes, ‘heartwork,’ not housework.”

“_Heartwork?_” faltered the White Linen Nurse. “Heartwork? I don’t know what you mean, sir.” Like two falling rose-petals her eyelids fluttered down across her affrighted eyes. “Oh, when I shut my eyes, sir, and just hear your voice, I know of course, sir, that it’s some sort of a joke; but when I look right at you, I--I--don’t know--what it is.”

“Open your eyes and keep them open, then, till you do find out,” suggested the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

Defiantly once again the blue eyes and the gray eyes challenged each other.

“‘Heartwork’ was what I said,” persisted the Senior Surgeon. Palpably his narrowing eyes shut out all meaning but one definite one.

The White Linen Nurse’s face became almost as blanched as her dress.

“You’re--you’re not asking me to--_marry_ you, sir?” she stammered.

“I suppose I am,” acknowledged the Senior Surgeon.

“Not _marry_ you!” cried the White Linen Nurse. Distress was in her voice, distaste, unmitigable shock, as though the high gods themselves had fallen at her feet and splintered off into mere candy fragments. “Oh, not _marry_ you, sir?” she kept right on protesting. “Not be--_engaged_, you mean? Oh, not be _engaged_--and everything?”

“Well, why not?” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

Like a smitten flower the girl’s whole body seemed to wilt down into incalculable weariness.