Chapter III: Part 3

The information, for the shadow of a second before Dr. Heddis began speaking again, made the pupils of Hoffbein’s eyes dilate slightly. Bear Sterling’s eyes were pin points needling themselves past the grave figure of MacArthur and into the long face of Heddis, who continued:

“Can be prepared synthetically by means of the same cadaveric alkaloid, or ptomaine, that is formed in putrefaction of cadavers, that is, cadaverine or penta-methylene-diamine.”

Hoffbein began to squirm slightly.

“The injection, C8H17N (_Conium maculatum_), presumably combined with lactic acid is colorless and gradually turns yellow and brown in the air.”

Dr. Barton rose and leaned close to Dr. Heddis’ ear.

“In your opinion would the person who gave this ... drug ... require a knowledge of chemistry?”

Dr. Heddis pressed his plump thumb into his cheek.

“I can’t say, definitely. But ... all that a man needs to know of dynamite to destroy a city is that it will explode. Rathbone is checking supply sources, I understand. I’m not hopeful....”

He shrugged his thick shoulders.

“A medical student with a flare for toxicology could have made it synthetically. Anybody with a medical background could....”

“Then I suggest,” Dr. Harrison’s voice was patiently fighting the rising tension, “that we separate and think it over privately until after lunch. Men under a strain as long as this has been upon Ethridge and Dr. MacArthur are not at their mental best ... you both need rest; you have borne up magnificently.... Let’s re-convene here at two, gentlemen?”

Dr. Heddis turned from the door:

“If you need me, MacArthur....”

Dr. Hoffbein blocked his exit. “One question before we go. Is there much hysteria on the ward?”

“Nothing visible,” Cub Sterling snapped. “There is tension of course.”

A terrible desire to get away from it all for just fifteen minutes ... to forget! ... to run away and rest ... made Cub Sterling walk through the ground floor of his clinic and start down the accident room steps toward Otto’s.

Halfway down he hesitated.

Three minutes later he walked through Ward B, ascertained from a student nurse that Dr. James was at lunch and Dr. Mattus still with the students. Then he opened the door of Room Two.

Rested, relaxed eyes, whose black shadows had disappeared, whose violet shades sung against the white pillows, turned peacefully toward his measuring brown ones.

The girl took a cigarette from between her lips and began:

“I slept like a lamb. My leg doesn’t hurt. I told the interne a nurse brought me the cigarettes and they quieted my nerves, so your shirt-tail is clear. She let me keep them.... I’ve been thinking a lot. Look here! Today is Tuesday! There is absolutely no sense keeping me here, forever....”

Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Junior, closed the door sharply and strode over to the bed. His features were flattening. His dark curly hair was dishevelled. His voice had its “’Night!” quality.

“You are my patient and you are not to get out of that bed until I say so. I know today is Tuesday just as well as you do. Possibly better! What you seem never to realize is that I am a tremendously busy man. A Physician-in-Chief works! You are not the only patient in this hospital ... but God knows you are the most petulant! Spending all your days lying there thinking up problems to hound me with! Tying yourself in knots of complications, instead of realizing you are a damned lot luckier than you deserve!”

Her mouth had been contracting slowly. When Cub stopped for breath she opened it quickly and began:

“You may be right about the luck, Doctor Sterling. But one thing medicine has failed completely to teach you is that people without money still have pride! Do you think I’ve enjoyed lying here for ninety-six hours having you throw up to me that the Attorney-General will pay my bills? Do you? There is a rumor that the Attorney-General is going to be in the next Cabinet. I was riding with him to try and find out. If I had found out, I’d have had a scoop big enough to pay all the damned-old bills you care to sling at me....

“Well ... I didn’t find out! But that doesn’t keep me from ‘growing the bills.’ I’ve got to hold my job to meet them and I’ve got to get out to do it! And all the medical hysterics you could ever throw doesn’t change the facts. I....”

Her voice broke unexpectedly and she covered her head with a pillow.

Under the sheet Cub could see her body beginning to stiffen.

He reached over gently and took the cigarette from her fingers. Then he looked around for an ash-tray, saw none, and vacantly placed the cigarette between his own lips. The harassment of the morning had drained from his face. A deep concern replaced it.

His voice was bantering and slow:

“Looks like the phlebitis is traveling to your mind, little Salscie. Let’s take it step by step. The job; it’s intact. The doctor who asked me to take you in has been talking to the City Editor about you every day. Mistake was I ordered no visitors and no flowers and so you thought they had abandoned you. You may stay a month so far as they are concerned. The job will be there when you get back. If you stay a month, probably by then our friction may have worn itself out and you’ll begin to see how nice I really am. Want to try?”

The pillow remained inert, but the feet and legs began to relax. Cub cut his eye over the body and began talking again. He decided silently that when the breasts stopped rising, he’d quit talking....

He took the cigarette from his lips and moistened them:

“About the bills, I’ve been a rotter. I should have told you that the paper was paying them, or the hospital, or ... but I was pushed into the situation uninformed. I didn’t know whether you were the king’s mistress or the governor’s. I didn’t care a damn! And then some terribly, horribly important situations arose in the hospital and instead of thinking the thing out, I bungled it.”

The heaving in the breasts became slower, and Cub said:

“About the bills, I’ll do whatever you want me to. The hospital will take your note, or I’ll lend you the money myself. There is only one thing I will not do. I _will not_ let you walk out of this hospital until I am absolutely sure that you are perfectly well. So make up your mind to that! I’m sorry if I’ve been cruel.... I didn’t mean to! Probably I’m just too stupid to be kind, Salscie!”

The heaves died completely. He sat absolutely silent.

With her left hand she caught the edge of the pillow case and pulled the pillow beside her upon the bed. Her eyes looked straight and completely into his. Her voice was contrite and admiring:

“You are the first man who ever offered to lend me money and didn’t paw me at the same time!”

Cub laughed heartily, and then snapped:

“Maybe that’s because I’m stupid!”

Her dimples danced and then she sobered.

“When I’m well, will you come to see me...?”

Cub held her eyes to his and nodded emphatically.

“Whenever you say I may! As often as you’ll let me!”

She began lowering her lids and filled the silence with words:

“Really?”

Cub sat very still and curiosity made her raise her eyes to his again. When they were safely locked, he said, slowly:

“R-e-a-l-l-y!”

The little flecks of sunlight in the room began cascading around her hair, an inside blush centered in her neck.

Cub sat perfectly still and watched her. She knew he was watching her and she also knew that something which made her sick with joy was squirming inside of her. She began speaking desperately and with frightful haste:

“We might have to hang your legs out of a window when you come to dinner. When I get a card table up, there’s not much extra space, you know ... but ... oh, by the way ... could you steal a knife and fork from the doctors’ dining room, do you think? Not steal, but....”

Cub laughed joyously.

Her face was sober.

He said, “Cigarettes, a knife and fork, ... anything else, Salscie?”

“Yes, Cub. What’s the trouble you spoke about in the hospital?”

The banter slipped from his features and his left shoulder began to rise.

“Nothing for you to worry about. Just ... some ... friction.”

She took her right hand from under the covers and reached over and caught his.

“Is it me?”

His eyes met hers and he increased his pressure on the hand.

“No! You can’t cause everything, Salscie!”

Then he rose abruptly.

“I’d better get back, though. Also I’ll make a survey of the knife and fork situation. That pack of cigarettes will be gone by tonight, won’t it?”

She lay back among the pillows and nodded slowly.

Cub beat his way through the singing air and closed the door securely behind him.

»IV«
The First Doll

Bear Sterling hurried back to take a look at his brain tumor. He had stopped for a few words with Cub, but Cub had insisted that he must get back to his clinic and relieve Mattus. So after finishing with the brain tumor, which was coming along nicely, Bear went to his own office, shut the door, lay down upon a couch and went to sleep.

There was a crisis ahead. He needed a nap.

Dr. Barton did his rounds, discussed three unusual children with his resident, did as much work and appeared as natural as possible for an hour, and then filled his pipe and began the process of elimination on the evidence.

Dr. Harrison had a fifteen minute survey with his resident; afterward locked himself up in his laboratory and settled down to a “thinking through.”

Hoffbein returned to his clinic and tried to behave as though nothing had happened. His consultant and resident nearly died of excitement.

Dr. MacArthur cleared his desk and endeavored to clear his mind. He had just rung for his secretary and prepared to go upstairs and lie down in a vacant interne room and get some rest, when Prissy Paton and Princeton Peters slipped in and closed the door behind them.

“Can you give us a minute, MacArthur?” Peters’ voice was sepulchral.

Prissy stood in the background and looked as if he were going to cry.

“Certainly. What’s on your minds? Sit down.”

They sat upon the edges of the chairs.

“Well?”

“Go on, Peters, and tell him,” Prissy prompted in his treble.

Princeton’s eyes took on their purple mist and he began:

“Dear MacArthur, what we are about to tell you is drawn out of us by our great love for the Elijah Wilson ... and for you. We feel you must know, and we could not tell you in front of Bear. It would have killed him.”

“What is it? Get to the point.”

“Last night at midnight, Dr. Paton and I were coming up the corridor from Woman’s Clinic ... I had been to see about the eyes of the president of the Woman’s College ... sudden attack ... and Ethridge came out of the door of Medicine Clinic just ahead of us.”

Dr. MacArthur put his hands under his desk and gripped his knees. His voice, however, was perfectly calm, as he replied.

“You must have been mistaken, Dr. Peters. Ethridge said he was in his rooms.”

“That is the saddest part. We heard him say it! And we could not both be mistaken about Ethridge’s back. His queer walk, MacArthur. One shoulder higher than the other.... And we both saw it.”

“But you say yourself that neither of you saw his face, Dr. Peters.”

“You are quite right,” Prissy purred, “we did not see his face ... but I would swear upon my mother’s Bible that it was he.”

“I’ll ask him,” MacArthur’s voice was decisive.

“Please, MacArthur, don’t act hastily! It would be futile to ask _him_, and if it were not for the horrible slur upon the hospital....”

Princeton’s pleading was so intense that he did not note Dr. MacArthur’s silent anger, but Prissy sensed it.

“You must get some rest, MacArthur,” he soothed. “Come on Peters,” and at the door he finished. “Great decisions must be made and we shall not meet them unprepared.”

Miss Evelina Kerr, student nurse, lay prone upon her bed, sobbing bitterly, silently, rackingly. Outside her door a supervisor from Medicine Clinic, off duty at the time, sat erect in a straight back chair, reading one of Edgar Wallace’s novels.

Up and down the hall of the Nurses’ Home voices rose and fell. The nurses on night shift were awakening. Miss Roenna Kerr, head nurse in Medicine Clinic, sailed down the polished floor and as her reflection preceded her, a loud whisper sung.

“Foots!”

The voices ceased, and the doors filled with blond, black, straw-colored, yellow and red heads in all degrees of disarray. Thirty pairs of eyes saw her switch her stern to a halt in front of the supervisor and smile.

“Mattie! How sweet of you to stay by my child!”

Mattie said deferentially:

“Miss Kerr, anything ... anything that I could do!”

Miss Kerr knew Mattie was playing policeman on orders from the Superintendent of Nurses, but she also knew that Mattie was accustomed to taking her own orders. Her lips drew to a beautiful firming and she said huskily:

“Having you in training and upon my staff, Mattie, has been one of the really great joys of a very trying life!”

Mattie began disintegrating, and Miss Kerr put her hand upon the knob of her niece’s door and was inside before the supervisor could moisten her lips.

The room was inky, the dark blue window shade was pulled even with the sill. Miss Kerr whispered, involuntary, “Evelina!”

Two sobs inverted their explosion. The girl sat up beating the air. Miss Kerr ignored her agony and began relentlessly:

“This is no time for hysterics. Come on and tell me! What did you tell them...?”

“Who, Auntie?”

“The General Staff.” Each letter of each word came bitingly.

“Nothing, Aunt Eeenie!”

Miss Kerr threw out her chin, and enunciated carefully:

“No woman can talk to that many men about nothing for half an hour. You fail to realize Evelina that everything you have you owe to me. Your training, your education, your clothes, even the straightening of your teeth I paid for!”

The girl cringed in the blackness. Her voice was subservient:

“I ... I ... know it, Auntie. I swear ... to God ... I didn’t tell them ... and I never will! I’d get thrown out of training ... before ... I’d....”

Miss Kerr’s words sealed her lips. They beat into her brain:

“A private who accuses his general ... is always court-martialed!”

Then she turned upon her heel and closed the door after her.

For ten minutes the student nurse sobbed dryly. Complete exhaustion then smothered the sobs. She fell asleep.

In the nurses’ cafeteria the first group were beginning to choose their lunches. The white uniforms of the graduate nurses and the blue uniforms of the student nurses with their white collars and cuffs reflected the glare from the thin curtains at the sunlit windows.

Near a table occupied by four student nurses sat Rose Standish, head nurse in the accident room. Her small ivory face was buried in a volume of “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and she guided the teaspoons of gelatine and whipped cream into her mouth by a sense of feeling, not sight. Her outer eye was transferring to her inner one the charm of a mind drenched in the world’s great love.

The student nurse with a raucous Kansas whine was saying:

“What’s happened to ’Lina Kerr?”

“I don’t know. Why?” responded a flat Alabama drawl.

“I saw her in the corridor with two supervisors at ten o’clock and Minnie says they’ve got her locked in her room and won’t let anybody talk to her. She ... she ... looked frightful.”

“Where have you been for the last week?” a Virginian purred. “Three people have died on the ward where she has night duty and they all are trying to blame it on her.”

“Have you lost your mind, Lizzie?” sneered the Alabamian.

“Well, if you don’t believe me, why did you ask me? They had her up before the General Staff this morning.”

“Honest?”

“Yes. Honest! That’s sweet for her, if you ask me.”

“Jumping Jehosophat! You think she did it?”

“No. Of course not. Dr. Cub Sterling was the doctor on all of the cases.”

At the mention of his name the conversation she had just been hearing re-echoed in Rose Standish’s mind and she looked up just in time to catch the shrug of the girl’s thin shoulders and her smirk.

“Did he?”

“How should I know?” the girl shrugged again.

Rose Standish closed her book and rose. She wanted air, and plenty of it. Ever since the second year of her training she had had a very secret passion for Cub Sterling. Ever since that time he caught her on the stairway behind the pharmacy kissing ... she blushed when she thought about it ... Tony Watson, one of his internes ... and never told anybody, and then when Tony had pneumonia and died, he had let her help to nurse him and ... be with him ... at the last.

She reached the sun-parlor of the Nurses’ Home and collapsed into a chair. After all these five years the thought of Tony could do that to her! After all these five years ... and it was because that thought could turn her body to liquid soap that she still was so deeply grateful to Cub Sterling. He was white as chalk and always had been. Gold through and through ... and those student nurses suspected him of murdering patients. The dirty cats! The rotten little worms! The nasty pigs!

Why, when he found her in Tony’s arms halfway down that pitch-black stairway, he had pretended he didn’t recognize either of them. He had laughed and said, “My mistake!”

And then when he had reached the lower doorway, before he opened it, he turned ... she could hear his voice, even now....

“It’s a disease worth having. Good luck!”

Good luck ... good luck. She was looking out of the window at the sunshine; she had long ago quit crying. The grating voice of a furious woman came up the corridor toward her:

“And I think, Miss Williams, that the nursing staff should request Dr. MacArthur to cast his attention upon other departments, if you know what I mean.”

The voice reached the sun-parlor. It came from the firm lips of Miss Roenna Kerr.

And it settled Rose Standish’s fate.

She rose, respectfully slipped out of another door and into the main corridor of the hospital.

Doctors Peters and Paton closed the door to Dr. MacArthur’s office softly behind him, and Dr. MacArthur was too weak to get up and open it.

He felt like a man ordered to fit a jigsaw puzzle during an earthquake.

Somewhere among the group of people he had seen this morning there had been a liar. Out of them some person ... in whom the hospital had placed a trust ... had lied to him, face to face. Coniine....

Malice and all uncharitableness, deceit and hate, murder and meanness. Coniine....

He cradled his head in his arms and moaned. Cub Sterling, his godchild, almost his own son, and with the exception of the old orderly William, every witness.... And now two members of the staff.

How in heaven’s name could Cub ever clear himself ... now....

He was so deep in his misery that he did not hear the door open and quietly close. It was the voice which roused him.

A small nurse with an elfin face and large gray eyes was standing beside him. She said:

“Please, Dr. MacArthur, may I speak to you, suh?”

He lifted his head and motioned her to a chair. She remained standing, her upright little body with its slim legs and small, finely arched feet, motionless.

Dr. MacArthur recognized that she had something tremendously important to tell him. He smiled.

“What can I do for you, Miss ... er...?”

“Rose Standish, suh,” she supplied.

When the staff re-convened, Hoffbein was irritated. He had gone about his routine and lunched in the doctors’ dining room. While he was there no other member of the staff entered and it had made him out a fool to all the internes. Looked like he wasn’t “in” on the decisions. Prissy and Princeton had had ample time to repent their rash disclosure and were afraid; MacArthur might face them with it before Harrison and Bear Sterling. Dr. Harrison and Bear Sterling looked tired and uncertain. Dr. Barton’s open face had assumed its judgmatical mask. Dr. MacArthur eyed each man carefully.

It was plain that all of them were ready to talk. He sat erect in his chair and prepared for battle. The small chatter died out, and the seven men silently awaited Cub Sterling.

At four minutes past two he entered. His bushy, curly hair was rumpled, his left shoulder was hysterically high. In his right hand he carried a small doll in a pink organdie dress and bonnet that continued crying, “Ma-Ma, Ma-Ma.” He seemed unaware of the noise; but it pierced the other men like a jigsaw. They all jumped and Dr. MacArthur’s face for the first time appeared blank. Bear Sterling was the first to regain his equilibrium; after all he had dealt with the man as a child.

“Cub. What in the hell have you got there?” he growled.

But Cub strode obliviously past him and Dr. Barton took the doll. She stopped crying immediately. That and Dr. Barton’s action brought Cub to a halt.

“Dr. MacArthur, that doll was found by Bessie Ellis upon the foot of her crib in Ward B when she awoke this morning. Evidently a present someone had put there during the night. Nobody on the ward knew anything about it. It must have been left by....”

“Who is Bessie Ellis, son?” Dr. Harrison soothed.

“She’s a nephritis case we have had on the ward for several months. Six years old and cute. Barton and Father know her.”

“Quite a pet,” Bear affirmed.

“Sinister!” Princeton Peters murmured.

“No. Real evidence,” Bear’s brows were thunderously low. “She must bear the finger prints of the murderer.”

“Impossible,” Cub barked. “She has been handled by at least ten people since Bessie found her.”

And then everybody began talking at once and Dr. MacArthur rapped for silence.

“Gentlemen,” his voice was commanding, “each of you has had two hours in which to think over the situation. I need not remind you that our decisions must be the sum of our wisdom, and reached without emotion. Therefore it is my suggestion that we, one at a time, state our conclusions, beginning as we are sitting. Dr. Peters what is your opinion?”

“I should rather, MacArthur, reserve....”

“No. Out with it. We’ll never get anywhere that way.”

Princeton’s lavender eyes paled with uncertainty. Cub’s sensational entrance had wobbled his mind.

He moistened his thick lips and his voice lost its usual certainty. It actually contained a tremor when he began:

“I have always, as you know, gentlemen, deferred to you upon any question about which I was uncertain. I have always valued the opinion of specialists above the opinions of ... even of friends ... where any patient, whether dear to me or not, was involved.”

“Need I say, my dear MacArthur, that the Elijah Wilson is dearer to me than a beloved patient, even? The condition is so horribly serious that I am against delay. It should be referred immediately, in my opinion, to a specialist, namely, the police. I feel it should be turned over, I repeat, immediately.”

His speech fell upon them like descending plaster. Somewhere physically they all jumped. Bear grit his teeth and snorted, Harrison scowled, MacArthur gripped his knees....

Nobody spoke, except Barton.

“I’m against it!”

His voice was flat and final.

“Why?” Paton purred. “I, personally, am for it. Wholeheartedly.”

“Nonsense!” Dr. Harrison exploded before Dr. Barton could reply. “Sheer, childish nonsense. Are you out to kill the hospital or the murderer, Peters? I repeat, some linen is too foul to wash in public! It has taken forty years and more to build up the reputation of this place and you are planning to destroy it....”

“Why, Dr. Harrison, I’m not ‘planning’ anything. Dr. MacArthur asked me for an opinion and I gave it. That’s all!”

“Beg your pardon, Peters. No offense.”

The antagonism stiffened.

Dr. MacArthur intervened, “Your opinion, Dr. Paton?”

“I agree entirely with Dr. Peters. Men trained in the detection of criminals are the men to catch murderers.” Prissy folded his hands righteously and sat in a waxy pose.

Dr. MacArthur ignored his silent disapproval and passed on.

“Barton?”

“Against the police, suh. Entirely against them. Their intervention is the way, to my thinking, to muddle the whole thing ... and take an awful chance of making the story public. Something must undoubtedly be done, and done quickly, but what, suh, I frankly do not know.

“One thing which seems to me possible is to have every person connected with the affair given a psychiatric examination by Dr. Hoffbein.”

Hoffbein’s back straightened and he smiled deeply.

“That’s in his line, it seems,” Dr. Barton finished.

“I’m against that ... flat!” Bear Sterling mumbled. “In the first place the only hope of ever catching the murderer is to pretend we are not looking for him. At least twenty people are under suspicion as possibilities. Remove any one of those twenty people and you may be removing the murderer. Every person in connection with that ward in any capacity whatsoever must continue there until the murderer is caught. Otherwise ... we senselessly throw our needle into a hay stack!”

“You’re right, Bear,” MacArthur replied. “Absolutely right!”

“What about the medical student doing routine tests on this ward?” Prissy interposed. “Dr. Heddis said anybody could, with medical knowledge.... What type of lad is he?”

“False clue,” Cub snapped. “He’s been home with the mumps for ten days. The interne on the floor has been doing his work....”

“Well, what about Dr. ... er...?”

“James. Sarah James,” Cub defied. “The doll rules her out of the last one, at least. She was out of town yesterday.”

Dr. Barton who had been considering Bear’s statement replied:

“I see your point, Dr. Sterling, and it is an excellent one ... but I failed, evidently, to express myself clearly.” His voice was perfectly even. “I was thinking of an examination of that student nurse.”

Cub Sterling sat forward and clipped, “So was I.”

His father turned his searching eyes into him and demanded, “What about her?”

There was a knock at the door and it opened almost immediately. The erect figure of the Chief Pharmacist shifted their attention. Baldy Rathbone held in his hand a sheaf of telegrams.

Cub Sterling’s eyes followed those of the other men.

“I’m very sorry to interrupt, gentlemen, but this, Dr. MacArthur, is the report about where coniine may be obtained.”

He held out the yellow sheets toward Dr. MacArthur.

“Where, Baldy?”

“It is available in gram quantities at the United Wholesale Drug Company in New York, Parke Davis in Detroit, and the Burroughs Welcome Agents in San Francisco.”

“Anywhere else?”

“No, sir.”

MacArthur took the telegrams. Baldy hesitated, massaged his shiny spot and finished:

“They report no recent sales, sir.”

“Blind alley!” Bear Sterling grunted.

“I’m afraid so, Doctor. Anything else, Dr. MacArthur?”

Dr. MacArthur looked over his glasses and shook his head.

“Not that I can think of. Thank you for your promptness.”

“Dr. Heddis asked me to say, sir, that he has just checked the Medical Library. There have been no reference works upon the subject out for several years. He, therefore, feels that the student body is cleared.”

“Thank you again, Baldy.”

“May I ask a question?” Cub Sterling was clipping his words. “Will it keep long?”

“What?” Baldy was resentful of his superior tone.

“Coniine.”

He turned and looked Cub Sterling full in the eye.

“I don’t know, Doctor. We have never handled it in the pharmacy.”

He was gone before Cub could reply; but his parting speech brought an involuntary nod from Doctors Peters and Paton, and Hoffbein pierced Cub with a barometer stare. Bear Sterling appeared to have missed the stab.

“Murderers always have motives. If we could find the motive.... What about that girl and Hoffbein’s examining her. Where’s the harm?”

“The harm, Bear,” Dr. Harrison pulled his beard, “is (you will pardon me, Hoffbein, and correct me if am wrong, please?) that presuming she is the murderer, any examination different from that given any other person might frighten her into a temporary respite, but it would not put us any nearer a solution.”

“That is true. Perfectly true.” Hoffbein’s words were enunciated with a finality, though Cub Sterling thought he hated to say them.

“And in view of the paper I found upon my desk when I returned at two o’clock such an examination would seriously hinder our apprehension of her ... if she is the murderer.”

“What paper, Dr. MacArthur?”

“Haven’t I told you? I’m sorry. A typewritten sheet ... here it is ... which states, Dr. Hoffbein ... that because of two low marks she received in a course in which Ethridge was lecturing last month, she has dropped from seven to seventeenth in her class and will not be in line for a staff job upon graduation. She cried straight through for three nights afterward.”

The paper was still shielding the pudgy faces of Doctors Paton and Peters, so Barton, the man furthest from them asked, “Who brought it?”

“I don’t know. My door was open and I found it upon my desk. It is signed ... also upon the typewriter ... ‘A Student Nurse.’ Gentlemen, we will never accomplish anything ... unless we come to some conclusions. Will you please give us your opinion, Dr. Hoffbein?”

Dr. Hoffbein’s eyes turned a liquid black. He folded his precise head on one side and each word settled itself upon the air before its successor was spoken.

“Gentlemen, I am not in favor of the police. A mental criminal is a mental case. A murder of this type is undoubtedly a mental criminal. A very clever, otherwise normal and possibly brilliant intellect. A man ... er ... a person quite out of scope of ... a police.”

He shrugged the police, with a final hiss, off his thin shoulders.

“What are your personal impressions, Dr. Hoffbein?” Bear Sterling rumbled.

“I ... I ... er ... as a psychiatrist ... I cannot afford to have personal opinions, Dr. Sterling.”

“Aw, for heaven’s sake! What d’y’_think_?”

Dr. Hoffbein’s little pigeon breast heaved. His eyes had completely lost their whites.

“I ... I ... I ... think,” he hesitated, and Bear cut in—

“Don’t be so damn slow about it!”

At that Hoffbein flared.

“It is my impression that action ... drastic ... and terrible should be quickly taken to apprehend this dangerous man ... and that action should come through the psychiatric service.”

At last Bear Sterling caught the insinuations which hovered thunderously over the room. He turned too purple for speech, so Dr. Harrison laid him upon a sofa and murmured:

“Remember your heart, old timer. Remember your heart. Nothing to be alarmed about. ‘Just a symptom of your disease.’”

And then he laughed heartily, and Dr. Otto Hoffbein ducked like a beaten boxer. “A symptom of your disease” is a psychiatric term.

Cub Sterling got his father a glass of water. His hand trembled as he held it. Barton eased a pillow under his head. Peters and Paton sat like frightened schoolboys in the corner. Hoffbein was still cowed.

“Better, Bear?” Dr. MacArthur asked leaning over him. Dr. Harrison turned and said:

“Here is the situation. It has to be met. You are going to accomplish nothing by fighting. Every man in this room knows that between last night and this morning a woman was murdered in this hospital. As a result there have been some near murders since....” he gave Hoffbein another look and his eye lit upon Dr. Paton and Dr. Peters.... “Actions speak louder than words. If you love the Elijah Wilson, as you have spent the day saying you do, then quit ‘emoting’ and begin to think!

“Police as a solution! Out of the question, entirely. Impossible to catch the criminal if he, she or it, knows it is shadowed, let alone what police would do to the reputation of the hospital.

“Suggestion number two. Turn the night student nurse over to psychiatrists. Impossible, for the very good reason given by Dr. MacArthur. Let alone the cruelty of the situation should she be innocent.

“Suggestion number three. Turn the whole thing over to the psychiatrists. Understand perfectly, gentlemen, that I am casting no slurs upon psychiatry, when it stays within its limits. Hoffbein points out this is a mental criminal. That’s within its limits. Suppose we turned the whole thing over to you, Hoffbein? Had you thought how long it would take you and your entire force to examine twenty people? Thirty new patients a month is all you claim you are equipped to handle and give them the proper attention, and these twenty which the hospital would turn over would have to have a great deal more than just that.

“It would take you ... every man working day and night ... and nobody seeing to the clinic ... two weeks to give us any kind of a report. Two weeks sitting upon dynamite!

“Not on your life. Our problem is this, as I see it:

“To catch the murderer, quickly, quietly, and without creating any suspicion whatever throughout the institution. We have got to keep our face, or ruin the hospital.

“How to catch the murderer, I frankly do not know. But that is the situation, as I see it now. I suggest we take it as such and work it out here....”

Bear Sterling was sitting up again, and Dr. MacArthur was back at his desk.

“I have the solution, Harrison,” he said calmly. “Put a nurse in the bed in which the three patients have been murdered.”

“Are you crazy, MacArthur?” Hoffbein’s voice was at last hysterical.

“No. I hope not,” Dr. MacArthur’s voice was deadly calm. “But today I have had the privilege of seeing such cool, calm courage exhibited by a person who really loves this hospital as to make me proud to be here ... even ... now.

“A nurse came to me after the meeting this morning ... one of our graduates ... and volunteered to go into that bed as a patient. Think it over, gentlemen. That’s a solution, d’y’see?”

Dr. MacArthur’s words lay over them like spring rain. Some men they heartened. Some they chilled. All they impressed.

Only Dr. Harrison spoke.

“I hope I’m a friend of hers,” he said.

They were silent so long it upset Dr. Peters.

“Suppose she is murdered, Dr. MacArthur? We couldn’t _allow_ it!”

“Dr. Peters, this nurse knew of the murders, that is why she offered to go there. Can’t you understand ... that? I brought out that she might be murdered and she countered with” ... he put one hand in front of his mouth ... “that her life was a small thing compared to the reputation of the Elijah Wilson Hospital and the Medicine Clinic.”

Cub Sterling lifted his wild head and snorted.

“She shouldn’t take those chances ... for us.”

And then Dr. MacArthur sat perfectly straight and lied.

“She’s not. She’s taking them for the hospital. _She_ wants to take them. Suppose we vote upon it, gentlemen?”

“Dr. Peters?”

“I am against subjecting any nurse to danger.”

“Dr. Paton?”

“I ... I ... agree with Peters.”

“Dr. Barton?”

“She seems to me ... the solution.”

“Dr. Hoffbein?”

“I should like to be allowed to give her an examination.”

“Sorry. But if she goes on the ward, she must be in bed within an hour. Do I take it you favor her offer?”

Hoffbein acquiesced hesitantly.

“Dr. Harrison?”

“I regret the danger, but I agree with you, MacArthur.”

“Dr. Sterling?”

“I agree, MacArthur.”

“Ethridge?”

“It’s too much to ask....”

“Nobody asked it, son. She volunteered. And with my vote, and Heddis’ advice, I take it that your decision is, gentlemen, that this nurse within an hour becomes a patient in Bed 11, Ward B, of Medicine Clinic ... and God willing ... catches the murderer.

“Make it as natural as possible, Ethridge. Have your father and Mattus look at her.”

“Any hypodermics?”

“I think not. You agree, gentlemen?”

When they had risen Princeton Peters’ eyes had purpled and he asked reverently:

“Who is she, MacArthur?”

“Rose Standish, gentlemen.”

Cub Sterling, who was standing in the doorway, turned as though someone had slapped him upon the back. His left shoulder was high.

»V«
A Brave Nurse

“Miss Kexter,” Miss Kerr still bore her rump and bust inflated, “this is the new patient for Ward B.”

Beside her stood Rose Standish. She wore a plain blue coat suit and a small black hat pulled down to her gray eyes.

Miss Kexter turned from Miss Kerr and looked at her.

“Hullo, Miss Standish,” she said. “You sick?” and reached for the small suitcase.

“Hope not ... much,” Miss Standish’s ivory face was somber. “Dr. Sterling thinks I may have a bum lung. In for observation.”

They walked into the ward and Miss Kerr observed, “Two vacant beds. Oh, yes, that patient in 21 went home, didn’t she? Put Miss Standish in that bed.”

Miss Standish looked upset. Trained nurses haven’t much use for a member of their profession who has the chicken-heartedness to succumb to physical ailments. And Miss Kerr’s manner plainly said so. But Rose Standish had not been head nurse in the accident room three years without being able to think quickly.

“Oh, please, Miss Kerr, mayn’t I be put in that vacant bed over there, by the window?”

Miss Kerr, who had suspected something from the first and thought that the vacant bed she had forgotten had forestalled Dr. Sterling’s plans, snapped:

“Certainly not. Any patient with a suspected lung should not be near a window ... and a nurse ought to know better than to want to be.”

The patients, who were too sick to be wheeled out upon the porch, looked on with interest. Mrs. Witherspoon, who spent most of her waking hours with her bed curtains drawn and upon a bed-pan, peeked out from between the curtains. She leaned too far, and then exclaimed:

“Lan’ sakes, nurse! Nurse, come quick!”

Miss Kexter vanished behind the curtains and Miss Kerr stood stiffly looking out of the window, and Miss Standish placed her suitcase upon the assigned bed and prepared to open it, but footsteps ... male footsteps ... were coming up the corridor, so she hesitated. Dr. Mattus spoke before he was in the ward. In fact he began speaking when he saw Miss Standish standing by the bed.

“Hello! How are you feeling? Any weaker? You are not to sleep in that bed. I want you by the window.”

Then he saw Miss Kerr, and smiled. That smile always saved him verbal battles. It was delivered straightforward and deep into the eyes of the avenging female, whatever her age. Miss Kerr moistened her lips and prepared to resist it, but Miss Kexter had returned from Mrs. Witherspoon’s disaster and Dr. Mattus turned to her quickly.

“Please get Miss Standish undressed immediately, I want to do a physical upon her.”

“I can undress myself, Dr. Mattus.”

“You cannot. Until we can definitely locate your area, the more rest, the better. Remember that, young lady, and be a good patient.”

He smiled at her ... and she returned it ... and Miss Kerr went down the corridor and into the medicine closet door.

Dr. Mattus went for his stethoscope, Miss Kexter went to an insistent telephone and Rose Standish drew the curtains and undressed. Then she folded her best pink rayon panties and undershirt, her chiffon stockings and silk blouse with the rose-point and her plain suit and put them into the small suitcase. On top she placed her hat and patent leather pumps. She put her hairbrush ... the ivory one with heavy bristles which Tony had given her (he had bought it with five dollars an Italian pressed upon him when he delivered the man’s wife in externe-obstetrics) ... onto the bedside table and laid her tooth brush and paste beside it.

She re-opened the suitcase and took from a pocket in the top the same volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese” she had been reading at luncheon.

She put her purse in the bedside table, closed the suitcase, dropped her black satin bedroom slippers from her feet, slipped off her black rayon kimona and got into bed.

She wore her only silk nightgown and it felt soothing upon her small round breasts. It caressed her thighs. She opened her book, pulled back the curtains and began to read.

A student nurse came on the floor and took the suitcase and brought the bed-pan for a specimen. Then she asked if there was anything else, and went away.

Mrs. Witherspoon, who had completed her operations for the moment, emerged from her curtains.

“Good evin’, dearie. Hope you feelin’ fair?”

“Yes, thank you. How are you feeling?”

“Better, dearie. You don’t remember me, do you?” Her small murky eyes fastened themselves upon Rose’s near cheek.

Rose laid down her book and smiled at her kindly.

“No, I’m sorry, but I am afraid I do not remember. I’ve been sick and tired and my memory isn’t very good, Mrs....”

“Witherspoon, honey. I come through the accident room a week ago comin’ Sunday. My insulatin’ was low. Too much sugar you know, honey ... and you was so kin’. I could scarce speak and you was so kin’. I’ll never forgit how kin’ you was, showin’ me the labatory, an’ all.

“You done me so nice that I thinks I ought to tell you, dearie, ’bout thet bed. Three people ... countin’ the one ... _they_ seys was operated on ... and Miss Kerr knows was daid ... three patients done died in thet bed sence Thursday. Miss Frisby, an awful nice girl with a goitre, and Mrs. Overlea ... she was a heart attacker ... and then last night, Miss Tuck. It looks suspicious, I seys. If I was you, dearie....”

She was interrupted by the reappearance of Dr. Mattus and Dr. Sarah James. They pulled the curtains to Miss Standish’s bed and Mrs. Witherspoon tucked her chins into her breasts and went back to her crocheting.

Rose Standish noticed her feet felt like icicles.

When their examination was over she was frightened. You could not go over any human being that thoroughly without finding something wrong, and her nurse’s disdain for a person who allowed herself to get sick disturbed her considerably. Suppose they really did find something and kept her in bed here a month? A lot more than she had bargained for ... that!

Mrs. Witherspoon laid down her crocheting and peered at the little nurse’s pale face.

“They did you up kinda bad, dearie. All them blood tests and things. Severe I calls it. A body can’t even keep her corns nowadays!”

Rose Standish laughed in spite of herself.

“Oh, I didn’t mind. A nurse gets used to things.”

“I reckin’ you right. I reckin’ you right. It’s pow’ful sad the amount a body can put up with, whin you is used to it. Take me, dearie. I had eleven children. Four breeches presentations, three feet, three dry, and one nat’rul. And would you believe it, the nat’rul was the wors’! It lef’ me kinda flat fo’ months. A body gits prepared to put up wid things ... thet hurts ... now things like this sugar business ... no pain, nor nuthin’ ... you can’t get resisted fur.”

“Relaxation, Mrs. Witherspoon, is the best weapon with which to fight disease. I’m tired. I think I’ll take a nap.”

“Do you good, dearie. Excitement and all, and then puttin’ you in thet bed, too. Death-beds is weakenin’. It takes a sunnin’ every day and a good six months to make a mattress lose a death struggle.”

Rose Standish turned her face to the window and closed her eyes, and shivered. “Lose your heart, lose your appendix, lose anything, but don’t lose your nerves,” was what Tony always said.

Ridiculous to be feeling like this. Crazy. Perhaps if she tried to think about something else, then her feet would quit perspiring. Think about the way Dr. MacArthur had looked when she offered to come ... Galsworthy said that your mouth was what you had become but your eyes were what you were.... Dr. MacArthur’s eyes were like wave crests against a blue, blue sky. Clean and deep and clear, when he had turned them into her, stood up, and said:

“You have done more for me in fifteen minutes than anybody in the hospital has ever done. You have picked me out of despair.”

She began to tremble again and then she realized that it was the way he had looked when he said it that made her tremble. That look was the grandest thing that had happened to her since Tony kissed her the day he died.

Of course she must expect to be jumpy, to feel fidgetty, to get dry in the throat; good heavens, all of that was perfectly natural under the circumstances! Dr. MacArthur had even told her to expect it, and he had said:

“If you get scared, shift your mind to something else. You are like a doctor observing an operation, you are like an important actress watching a play of which she knows all of the lines being enacted by amateurs. Remember what you used to do as a student nurse and see,” and then he smiled wryly, “if the routine has changed one second’s worth. I bet it hasn’t.”

She opened her eyes and felt better. She looked at her watch and found it was four forty-five. Time to bring the patients in off the porch and prepare for supper. Behind her she heard a voice and turned over. The woman, whose bed stood next to Mrs. Witherspoon’s, had been rolled into place already!

She was as insignificant as a dried corn stalk. Heart case probably. That queer revived look a wilted flower has when you stick the stem in hot aspirin water. She was saying:

“The air was swell! It’s comin’ on cool and ’pears like we may get a thunder shower by bed-time.”

Across from Rose Standish’s bed had been rolled that of a tremendously fat woman. Some sort of thyroid insufficiency. The outlines of her obese legs were visible under the sheets. Rose shivered. Nice job bathing a hog like that. She had seen one in the accident room last winter with secondary burns. Fat, layers and layers and layers. Awful to operate upon!

The woman smiled at her and began speaking:

“New?”

“Yes. Miss Standish,” Mrs. Witherspoon supplied.

Rose bowed politely.

The fat woman whispered loudly:

“I seen her, Mrs. With’spoon!”

“Seen who?”

“Seen ... Her...!”

“Y’did!”

“Who is ‘Her’?” Rose asked.

The fat woman toppled with knowledge. Mrs. Witherspoon snatched the words from her parting lips.

“The patient in Room Two. They say she was hurt in a bus acci-dent. But thet was Thursday, an’ she ain’t daid yit. The windie shade is always drawed and the nurses acts like she ain’t no sicker then the rest....”

“She’s awful prutty,” the fat woman tried to interrupt.

Mrs. Witherspoon continued:

“Callin’ thim dyin’ patient rooms an’ puttin’ thim ’tween the ward an’ the porch! I ain’t no hosbittle fixer, but it ’pears to me, I’d a put ’em closen onto the nurse’s dest....”

Rose Standish laughed softly.

“For a dying patient, Mrs. Witherspoon, the Head Nursing Office sends a general duty nurse to do ‘special charting’. So dying patients have private nurses. It doesn’t matter where the rooms are.”

“She ain’t got no privett nurse!” the heavy woman hissed.

“Perhaps the hospital was full and they put her there when she came in and can’t risk moving her. Have you been here long?” Rose said.

The woman lifted her pendulous breasts and swung them out from the body.

“Whew! Hot today! Three weeks goin’ on Monday, mam. Long enough to know thet I wouldn’t sleep in thet bed, you is in, not for a million dollars.”

“What’s the matter with it?” Rose inquired demurely.

“It’s ... it’s ...” her breasts rested upon her bed as she leaned forward, “It’s a death....”

But Miss Kexter’s appearance on the ward brought her speech to a sudden halt. She flopped her body back upon the pillows and smiled weakly.

“When I think of all the clothes I got to wash whin I get outa here. I prides myself my chillun is the cleanest goin’, and the teachers always seys so, too. In all the health campaigns at School 17, Willie is always chose....”

But Rose Standish heard no more. Miss Kexter was standing beside her bed and saying, “When did you decide to be sick?” Miss Standish caught the sarcastic banter in her voice and replied lightly, “I haven’t. And I hope I aren’t.”

Miss Kexter stood perplexedly by for a moment, pondering that phrase. “I aren’t, I am not, I aren’t,” she kept saying it over and over to herself. Rose Standish had been to college. She couldn’t be wrong, yet that didn’t sound right, somehow ... “I aren’t.”

“Sorry this happened to you when the infirmary was closed. You must hate it on a ward. Hard as we work, I must say in spite of the depression, I think the nurses ought to be allowed to be sick in private, don’t you?”

“Don’t know,” Rose’s voice had taken on its accident room clip, but the tone was conversational. “Came so suddenly hadn’t thought about it. Awful jolt in a way. Glad to be put anywhere, just so it’s the Elijah Wilson.”

“How did you find it out?” Miss Kexter’s voice had lost the skepticism.

“Oh, I don’t know. Been running an afternoon temperature, and then yesterday I spit a little blood, so I went to Dr. Cub Sterling.” She shrugged her shoulders despairingly.

“That’s a shame.” Miss Kexter’s voice, like her face, was shallow and flat. “You don’t mind that bed, do you?”

Rose’s “No. Why?” was casual.

“Oh, nothing. Just that three patients went out in it this week and they put us on the spot about it.” She had leaned forward and her whisper was flat, also. “There’s been holy hell around here. They were all patients of Father and Son.”

“Anybody know what killed them?” Rose’s voice was curiously inquiring.

“The Angels, darling. How the hell should I know? Even ‘Foots’ hasn’t seen their charts since autopsy and is she mad? ’Bout to bust a brassiere!”

Rose Standish laughed in spite of herself. The thought of Miss Roenna Kerr bursting a brassiere fitted in perfectly with her own suppressed hysteria.

Her laugh was high and thin and flutelike. It saved her tears. It cleared her system. All of her accumulating fear escaped into it.

Miss Kexter’s common face expanded into a grin.

“Shut up, Standish,” she begged, “or _you’ll_ bust a lung.”

Rose didn’t wait to simmer down. She hushed immediately. She had, for the moment, forgotten she was ill.

The woman with the pendulous breasts swayed forward and said, “Let a fellow in on the joke, sister.”

But Mrs. Witherspoon’s raucous voice demanded, “Tend to me, Miss Kexter. A pan, quick!” And as she ran from the ward Miss Kexter turned and ordered, “Don’t talk to Miss Standish, now. She’s got to be quiet.”

Rose turned upon her side and looked out of the window. She put her thin little face against her flattened hands and lay completely still. That laugh had made her realize how tired she really was, and how silly she had been to let the superstitions of these women frighten her. What she needed was a nap and then she’d be all right. She closed her lovely eyes and snuggled into the pillows.

It wasn’t coming to the ward that had made her so awfully tired, but remembering all ... all everything ... about Tony again. For two years, now, she had taught her mind to close up as suddenly as a four-o’clock when she began to remember. Remembering was no good, it only made you ache in your back and sting behind your eyes.