THE WHITE LINEN NURSE (continued 2)

Very stiffly the Little Girl pursed her lips. “It’s plenty generous enough when it’s all done!” she said severely. “And I’ll thank you, Miss Malgregor, not to interrupt me again!” With excessive deliberateness she went back to the first line of her poem and began all over again:

“Why, that’s a—a cunning little prayer,” yawned the White Linen Nurse. Most certainly of course she would have smiled if the yawn hadn’t caught her first. But now in the middle of the yawn it was a great deal easier to repeat the “very cunning” than to force her lips into any new expression. “Very cunning, very cunning,” she kept crooning conscientiously.

Modestly, like some other successful authors, the Little Girl flapped her eyelids languidly open and shut for three or four times before she acknowledged the compliment. “Oh, cunning as any of ’em,” she admitted offhandishly. Only once again did she open either mouth or eyes, and this time it was merely one eye and half a mouth. “Do my fat iron braces hurt you?” she mumbled drowsily.

“Yes, a little,” conceded the White Linen Nurse.

“Ha! they hurt me all the time!” gibed the Little Girl.

Five minutes later, the child who didn’t particularly care about being held, and the girl who didn’t particularly care about holding her, were fast asleep in each other’s arms, a naughty, nagging, restive little hornet all hushed up and a-dream in the heart of a pink wild-rose!

Stalking out of the house in his own due time the Senior Surgeon reared back aghast at the sight.

“Well, I’ll be hanged!” he muttered. “Most everlastingly hanged! Wonder what they think this is? A somnolent kindergarten show? Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!”

Awkwardly, on the top step, he struggled alone into his cumbersome coat. Every tingling nerve in his body, every shuddering sensibility, was racked to its utmost capacity over the distressing scenes he had left behind him in the big house. Back in that luxuriant sick-room, youth incarnate lay stripped root, branch, leaf, bud, blossom, fruit, of all its manhood’s promise. Back in that erudite library, culture personified, robbed of all its fine philosophy, sat babbling illiterate street-curses into its quivering hands. Back in that exquisite pink-and-gold boudoir, blonded fashion, ravished for once of all its artistry, ran stumbling round and round in interminable circles like a disheveled hag. In shrill crescendos and discordant basses, with heart-piercing jaggedness, with blood-curdling raspishness, each one, boy, father, mother, meddlesome relative, competent or incompetent assistant, indiscriminate servant, filing his separate sorrow into the Senior Surgeon’s tortured ears.

With one of those sudden revulsions to materialism which is liable to overwhelm any man who delves too long at a time in the brutally unconventional issues of life and death, the Senior Surgeon stepped down into the subtle, hyacinth-scented sunshine with every latent human greed in his body clamoring for expression before it, too, should be hurtled into oblivion. “Eat, damn you, and drink, damn you, and be merry, damn you, for tomorrow even you, Lendicott R. Faber, may have to die!” brawled and rebrawled through his mind like a ribald phonograph tune.

At the edge of the bottom step a precipitous lilac branch that must have budded and bloomed in a single hour smote him stingingly across his cheek. “Laggard!” taunted the lilac branch.

With the first crunching grit of gravel under his feet, something transcendently naked and unashamed that was neither brazen sorrow nor brazen pain thrilled across his startled consciousness. Over the rolling, marshy meadow, beyond the succulent willow-hedge that hid the winding river, up from some fluent, slim canoe, out from a chorus of virile young tenor voices, a little passionate love-song, divinely tender, most incomparably innocent, came stealing palpitantly forth into that inflammable spring world without a single vestige of accompaniment on it!

Wrenched like a sob out of his own lost youth, the Senior Surgeon’s faltering college memories took up the old refrain:

Just for an instant a dozen long-forgotten pictures lanced themselves poignantly into his brain: dingy, incontrovertible old recitation-rooms where young ideas flashed as bright and futile as parade swords; elm-shaded slopes where lithe young bodies lolled on green velvet grasses to expound their harshest cynicisms; book-history, book-science, book-economics, book-love,—all the paper passion of all the paper poets swaggering imperiously on boyish lips that would have died a thousand bashful deaths before the threatening imminence of a real girl’s kiss! Magic days, with youth the one glittering, positive treasure on the tree of life, and woman still a mystery!

“Woman a mystery?” Harshly the phrase ripped through the Senior Surgeon’s brain. Croakingly in that instant all the grim, gray scientific years re-overtook him, swamped him, strangled him. “Woman a mystery? O ye gods! And youth? Bah! Youth! A mere tinsel tinkle on a rotting Christmas-tree!”

Furiously with renewed venom he turned and threw his weight again upon the stubbornly resistant crank of his automobile.

Vaguely disturbed by the noise and vibration, the White Linen Nurse opened her big drowsy blue eyes upon him.

“Don’t—jerk it so!” she admonished hazily; “you’ll wake the Little Girl!”

“Well, what about my convenience, I’d like to know?” snapped the Senior Surgeon, in some astonishment.

Heavily the White Linen Nurse’s lashes shadowed down again across her sleep-flushed cheeks.

“Oh, never mind about that,” she mumbled non-concernedly.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, wake up there!” bellowed the Senior Surgeon above the sudden roar of his engine.

Adroitly for a man of his bulk he ran around the radiator and jumped into his seat. Joggled unmercifully into wakefulness, the Little Girl greeted his return with a generous, if distinctly non-tactful, demonstration of affection. Grabbing the unwitting fingers of his momentarily free hand, she tapped them proudly against the White Linen Nurse’s plump pink cheek.

“See, I call her ‘Peach’!” she boasted joyously, with all the triumphant air of one who felt assured that mental discrimination such as this could not possibly fail to impress even a person as naturally obtuse as a father.

“Don’t be foolish!” snarled the Senior Surgeon.

“Who? Me?” gasped the White Linen Nurse, in a perfect agony of confusion.

“Yes, you,” snapped the Senior Surgeon, explosively, half an hour later, after interminable miles of absolute silence and dingy yellow field-stubble and bare, brown alder-bushes.

Truly out of the ascetic habit of his daily life, “where no rain was,” as the Bible would put it, it did seem to him distinctly foolish, not to say careless, not to say out and out incendiary, for any girl to go blushing her way like a fire-brand through a world so palpably populated by young men whose heads were tow, and whose hearts indisputably tinder rather than tender.

“Yes, you!” he reasserted vehemently, at the end of another silent mile.

Then plainly begrudging this second inexcusable interruption of his most vital musings concerning spinal meningitis, he scowled his way savagely back again into his own grimly established trend of thought.

Excited by so much perfectly good silence that nobody seemed to be using, the Little Crippled Girl ventured gallantly forth once more into the hazardous conversational land of grown-ups.

“Father,” she experimented cautiously with most commendable discretion.

Fathoms deep in abstraction, the Senior Surgeon stared unheeding into the whizzing black road. Pulses and temperatures and blood-pressures were seething in his mind; and sharp sticks and jagged stones and the general possibilities of a puncture; and murmurs of the heart and râles of the lungs; and a most unaccountable knock-knock-knocking in the engine; and the probable relation of middle-ear disease; and the perfectly positive symptoms of optic neuritis; and a damned funny squeak in the steering-gear.

“Father,” the Little Girl persisted valiantly.

To add to his original concentration, the Senior Surgeon’s linen collar began to chafe him maddeningly under his chin. The annoyance added two scowls to his already blackly furrowed face, and at least ten miles an hour to his running time, but nothing whatsoever to his conversational ability.

“Father,” the Little Girl whimpered with faltering courage. Then panic-stricken, as wiser people have been before her, over the dreadful spookish remoteness of a perfectly normal human being who refuses either to answer or even to notice your wildest efforts at communication, she raised her waspish voice in its shrillest, harshest war-cry.

“Fat Father! Fat Father! F-A-T F-A-T-H-E-R!” she screeched out frenziedly at the top of her lungs.

The gun-shot agony of a wounded rabbit was in the cry, the last gurgling gasp of strangulation under a murderer’s reeking fingers, catastrophe unspeakable, disaster now irrevocable.

Clamping down his brakes with a wrench that almost tore the insides out of his engine, the Senior Surgeon brought the great car to a staggering standstill.

“What is it?” he cried in real terror. “For God’s sake, what is it?”

Limply the Little Girl stretched down from the White Linen Nurse’s lap till she could nick her toe against the shiniest woodwork in sight. Altogether aimlessly her small chin began to burrow deeper and deeper into her big fur collar.

“For God’s sake, what do you want?” demanded the Senior Surgeon. Even yet along his spine the little nerves crinkled with shock and apprehension. “For God’s sake, what do you want?”

Helplessly the child lifted her turbid eyes to his. With unmistakable appeal, her tiny hand went clutching out at one of the big buttons on his coat. Desperately for an instant she rummaged through her brain for some remotely adequate answer to this most thunderous question, and then retreated precipitously as usual to the sacristy of her own imagination.

“All the birds were there, Father!” she confided guilelessly.

Short of complete annihilation, there was no satisfying vengeance whatsoever that the Senior Surgeon’s exploding passion could wreak upon his offspring. Complete annihilation being unfeasible at the moment, he merely climbed laboriously out of the car, re-cranked the engine, climbed laboriously back into his place, and started on his way once more. All the red, blustering rage was stripped completely from him. Startlingly rigid, startlingly white, his face was like the death-mask of a pirate.

Pleasantly excited by she didn’t know exactly what, the Little Girl resumed her beloved falsetto chant, rhythmically all the while with her puny iron-braced legs beating the tune into the White Linen Nurse’s tender flesh.

Frenziedly as a runaway horse trying to escape from its own pursuing harness and carriage, the Senior Surgeon poured increasing speed into both his own pace and the pace of his tormentor. Up hill, down dale, screeching through rocky echoes, swishing through blue-green spruce-lands, dodging indomitable boulders, grazing lax, treacherous embankments, the great car scuttled homeward. Huddled behind his steering-wheel like a warrior behind his shield, every body muscle taut with strain, every facial muscle diabolically calm, the Senior Surgeon met and parried successively every fresh onslaught of yard, rod, mile.

Then suddenly in the first precipitous descent of a mighty hill, the whole earth seemed to drop out from under the car. Down, down, down, with incredible swiftness and smoothness, the great machine went diving toward abysmal space! Up, up, up, with incredible bumps and bouncings, trees, bushes, stone walls went rushing to the sky!

Gasping surprisedly toward the Senior Surgeon the White Linen Nurse saw his grim mouth yank round abruptly in her direction as it yanked sometimes in the operating-room with some sharp, incisive order of life or death. Instinctively she leaned forward for the message.

Not over-loud, but strangely distinct, the words slapped back into her straining ears:

“If it will rest your face any to look scared, by all means do so. I’ve lost control of the machine,” called the Senior Surgeon, sardonically, across the roar of the wind.

The phrase excited the White Linen Nurse, but it did not remotely frighten her. She was not in the habit of seeing the Senior Surgeon lose control of any situation. Merely intoxicated with speed, delirious with ozone, she snatched up the Little Girl close, close to her breast.

“We’re flying!” she cried. “We’re dropping from a parachute! We’re—”

Swoopingly, like a sled striking glare, level ice, the great car swerved from the bottom of the hill into a soft rolling meadow. Instantly from every conceivable direction, like foes in ambush, trees, stumps, rocks reared up in threatening defiance.

Tighter and tighter the White Linen Nurse crushed the Little Girl to her breast. Louder and louder she called in the Little Girl’s ear.

“Scream!” she shouted. “There might be a bump! Scream louder than a bump! Scream! Scream! S-c-r-e-a-m!”

In that first overwhelming, nerve-numbing, heart-crunching terror of his whole life as the great car tilted up against a stone, plowed down into the mushy edge of a marsh, and skidded completely round, crash-bang into a tree, it was the last sound that the Senior Surgeon heard—the sound of a woman and child screeching their lungs out in diabolical exultancy!

(The second instalment of this three-part serial story will be published in the September CENTURY.)