He took me by the arm, and I went along. There was nothing else to do. I tried to drop my hand bag as we went, but he heard it and picked it up. I was rather dazed. The only thing I could think of was that for the sake of the Cause and Poppy I must not tell who I was. But I begged him to send an officer to Poppy's house, because there was a burglar in it, probably after the idea of Vivian's new novel.
At the police station they telephoned Poppy, and here she made her terrible mistake. She said after wards that if Daphne had only explained she'd have known. But she thought it was all a part of the plot, and she went back to her studio and said she'd lost the money out of a table drawer. She told how it was, in notes and gold, and, of course, they found the exact amount in my bag. She says that when they told her they had it and a young woman too, she almost swooned. She tried to find Basil, but he was not in his rooms and Daphne had been arrested at Edgware Road and was incommunicado!
Poppy's position was pitiable. She didn't know what to do. If she declared the plot and freed me all London would laugh, and the Cause would suffer. If she did not declare the plot, I would get a prison sentence. I have drawn a poor picture of Poppy if you think I stood a chance against The Cause.
That is how things stood the next morning; Daphne, Vivian and I in jail, and Poppy in hysterics. Then a curious thing happened. The evening papers announced that Vivian had paid the tax for Poppy and was free. Viv repudiated the payment said he had not done it, and refused his liberty.
"Mr. Harcourt," said one paper, "is quite thin and shows the strain of his confinement. He is apparently cheerful, but very feeble, supporting him self by the back of a chair while he stood. His eyes flashed, however, as he stated that the Income Tax office could not legally accept the payment, as it was not his money. If any of his supporters had, in mistaken zeal, taken a collection for this purpose, he could only regret their action and refuse to profit by it."
At this time I had refused to talk and Poppy was in bed.
But on the next day the Times published a letter, signed "Only a Man" which stirred the whole thing up again. The writer declared that the tax had been paid with Vivian's own money, that the writer himself had stolen it out of a desk in Mr. Harcourt's house, that it had been sent by messenger to the proper authorities, and a receipt issued, which was appended. And that, in other words, while Mr. Harcourt was to be lauded for his principles, his refusal to accept his liberty was now absurd. Also, the writer was under the impression that an innocent person was being held for his crime.
This story being investigated by the authorities and Poppy's recovering enough to come down and identify me, furiously indignant at my detention and outraged that I had not told my name and how I came to be leaving her house at that hour, which she said was because we had had a long talk about the next campaign, I was freed at last. It leaked out like this:
(a) Viv was free with no loss of principle.
(b) Poppy's tax was paid, with no loss of principle.
(c) "A Mere Man" was not apprehended.
(d) Basil reappeared, after a heavy cold.
I was not present when Viv and Poppy met, owing to some formalities of my release. I drove to the house with Poppy's money in my bag, and went up unannounced. Viv was not pale and wan. He looked rested and fit, and Poppy was on his knee. When I went in she moved to the arm of his chair, but no further, and she kept her profile toward him.
They were very apologetic and said how sorry they were, and Poppy said she knew Daphne and I meant well, but that one wrong would never help another. I was speechless with rage, and I took from my bag her money and held it out to her.
"Of course," I said, "Vivian has no idea of who 'A Mere Man' is?"
"None whatever," said Viv shamelessly.
"That's curious," I observed. "I saw him quite distinctly, you know, as I went down the stairs."
(I had his back!)
I went out, with my head up. They called to me, and I think Vivian started to follow. But I got into a taxicab and drove to Daphne's. I was very depressed.
Basil came to see me that night. Daphne was still in jail, and very comfortable. She sent me word not to worry, as she was getting new material for speeches, and had two ready.
I refused to see Basil, but he followed the maid back, and stood looking down at me.
"Viv says you saw me," he began without any preamble.
"I did, but I didn't recognise you. You've committed yourself."
He changed colour.
"What else was there to do?" he demanded. "Those two geese would have gone on forever. Viv had the money in his desk, but it was my plan, not his."
As it happened, I had sent father a cablegram about Viv and Poppy just before I was arrested, and now I saw his reply on the mantel.
"Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," he had cabled. Well, I had had the jail, and Basil had had a cold! Basil followed my eyes.
"More cablegrams!" he said. Why doesn't that chap come over and get you?"
"Because I am going back to him. I can't stand the pressure, Basil. Viv and Poppy are all right for this year, but how about next? Is it to be the same thing again?"
"They're going to Italy to live."
"A compromise?" I quoted, rather bitterly. " 'Not victory but a truce.' You and I made that marriage. It was the T. C. that did it."
Basil took the cablegram from the mantel and deliberately read it. When he got to the signature he drew a long breath and then he grinned.
"So that's that!" he said. "Well, Maggie, are you going back to father, or staying here with me?"
"You're afraid of me."
'Til take the risk, Madge. I didn't tell yon, Uncle Egbert died while you were away."
"I've been in jail for stealing," I quavered. "And I'd do it again, Basil, for the Cause."
"Bless the Cause," said Basil manfully. "Why shouldn't you vote, if you want to? Aren't you cleverer, and lovelier, and more courageous than any man that ever lived? Anyhow, you're right. Things are rotten. What sane government would lock a man up because his wife refuses to pay her taxes?"
I lifted my head from his shoulder.
"That wretched house at home " I began.
But he was quite cheerful.
"We'll sell it," he said, "and you shall spend the money for pretties to wear, that don't pay a tax."
It was compromise again. I knew it, but I yielded. After a time I said:
"Basil, what was the retort you gave Poppy about the T.C.?"
"Nothing much," he replied complacently, "I told her, if anyone sprung it at her again, to say that if men had made the Ten Commandments, they'd have added an eleventh amendment long ago, or else have annulled them."
* * *
CONTENTS
LOVE STORIES
By Mary Roberts Rinehart
TWENTY-TWO
I
The Probationer's name was really Nella Jane Brown, but she was entered in the training school as N. Jane Brown. However, she meant when she was accepted to be plain Jane Brown. Not, of course, that she could ever be really plain.
People on the outside of hospitals have a curious theory about nurses, especially if they are under twenty. They believe that they have been disappointed in love. They never think that they may intend to study medicine later on, or that they may think nursing is a good and honourable career, or that they may really like to care for the sick.
The man in this story had the theory very hard.
When he opened his eyes after the wall of the warehouse dropped, N. Jane Brown was sitting beside him. She had been practising counting pulses on him, and her eyes were slightly upturned and very earnest.
There was a strong odour of burnt rags in the air, and the man sniffed. Then he put a hand to his upper lip—the right hand. She was holding his left.
"Did I lose anything besides this?" he inquired. His little moustache was almost entirely gone. A gust of fire had accompanied the wall.
"Your eyebrows," said Jane Brown.<
br />
The man—he was as young for a man as Jane Brown was for a nurse—the man lay quite still for a moment. Then:
"I'm sorry to undeceive you," he said. "But my right leg is off."
He said it lightly, because that is the way he took things. But he had a strange singing in his ears.
"I'm afraid it's broken. But you still have it." She smiled. She had a very friendly smile. "Have you any pain anywhere?"
He was terribly afraid she would go away and leave him, so, although he was quite comfortable, owing to a hypodermic he had had, he groaned slightly. He was, at that time, not particularly interested in Jane Brown, but he did not want to be alone. He closed his eyes and said feebly:
"Water!"
She gave him a teaspoonful, bending over him and being careful not to spill it down his neck. Her uniform crackled when she moved. It had rather too much starch in it.
The man, whose name was Middleton, closed his eyes. Owing to the morphia, he had at least a hundred things he wished to discuss. The trouble was to fix on one out of the lot.
"I feel like a bit of conversation," he observed. "How about you?"
Then he saw that she was busy again. She held an old-fashioned hunting-case watch in her hand, and her eyes were fixed on his chest. At each rise and fall of the coverlet her lips moved. Mr. Middleton, who was feeling wonderful, experimented. He drew four very rapid breaths, and four very slow ones. He was rewarded by seeing her rush to a table and write something on a sheet of yellow paper.
"Resparation, very iregular," was what she wrote. She was not a particularly good speller.
After that Mr. Middleton slept for what he felt was a day and a night. It was really ten minutes by the hunting-case watch. Just long enough for the Senior Surgical Interne, known in the school as the S.S.I., to wander in, feel his pulse, approve of Jane Brown, and go out.
Jane Brown had risen nervously when he came in, and had proffered him the order book and a clean towel, as she had been instructed. He had, however, required neither. He glanced over the record, changed the spelling of "resparation," arranged his tie at the mirror, took another look at Jane Brown, and went out. He had not spoken.
It was when his white-linen clad figure went out that Middleton wakened and found it was the same day. He felt at once like conversation, and he began immediately. But the morphia did a curious thing to him. He was never afterward able to explain it. It made him create. He lay there and invented for Jane Brown a fictitious person, who was himself. This person, he said, was a newspaper reporter, who had been sent to report the warehouse fire. He had got too close, and a wall had come down on him. He invented the newspaper, too, but, as Jane Brown had come from somewhere else, she did not notice this.
In fact, after a time he felt that she was not as really interested as she might have been, so he introduced a love element. He was, as has been said, of those who believe that nurses go into hospitals because of being blighted. So he introduced a Mabel, suppressing her other name, and boasted, in a way he afterward remembered with horror, that Mabel was in love with him. She was, he related, something or other on his paper.
At the end of two hours of babbling, a businesslike person in a cap—the Probationer wears no cap—relieved Jane Brown, and spilled some beef tea down his neck.
Now, Mr. Middleton knew no one in that city. He had been motoring through, and he had, on seeing the warehouse burning, abandoned his machine for a closer view. He had left it with the engine running, and, as a matter of fact, it ran for four hours, when it died of starvation, and was subsequently interred in a city garage. However, he owned a number of cars, so he wasted no thought on that one. He was a great deal more worried about his eyebrows, and, naturally, about his leg.
When he had been in the hospital ten hours it occurred to him to notify his family. But he put it off for two reasons: first, it would be a lot of trouble; second, he had no reason to think they particularly wanted to know. They all had such a lot of things to do, such as bridge and opening country houses and going to the Springs. They were really overwhelmed, without anything new, and they had never been awfully interested in him anyhow.
He was not at all bitter about it.
That night Mr. Middleton—but he was now officially "Twenty-two," by that system of metonymy which designates a hospital private patient by the number of his room—that night "Twenty-two" had rather a bad time, between his leg and his conscience. Both carried on disgracefully. His leg stabbed, and his conscience reminded him of Mabel, and that if one is going to lie, there should at least be a reason. To lie out of the whole cloth——!
However, toward morning, with what he felt was the entire pharmacopœia inside him, and his tongue feeling like a tar roof, he made up his mind to stick to his story, at least as far as the young lady with the old-fashioned watch was concerned. He had a sort of creed, which shows how young he was, that one should never explain to a girl.
There was another reason still. There had been a faint sparkle in the eyes of the young lady with the watch while he was lying to her. He felt that she was seeing him in heroic guise, and the thought pleased him. It was novel.
To tell the truth, he had been getting awfully bored with himself since he left college. Everything he tried to do, somebody else could do so much better. And he comforted himself with this, that he would have been a journalist if he could, or at least have published a newspaper. He knew what was wrong with about a hundred newspapers.
He decided to confess about Mabel, but to hold fast to journalism. Then he lay in bed and watched for the Probationer to come back.
However, here things began to go wrong. He did not see Jane Brown again. There were day nurses and night nurses and reliefs, and internes and Staff and the Head Nurse and the First Assistant and—everything but Jane Brown. And at last he inquired for her.
"The first day I was in here," he said to Miss Willoughby, "there was a little girl here without a cap. I don't know her name. But I haven't seen her since."
Miss Willoughby, who, if she had been disappointed in love, had certainly had time to forget it, Miss Willoughby reflected.
"Without a cap? Then it was only one of the probationers."
"You don't remember which one?"
But she only observed that probationers were always coming and going, and it wasn't worth while learning their names until they were accepted. And that, anyhow, probationers should never be sent to private patients, who are paying a lot and want the best.
"Really," she added, "I don't know what the school is coming to. Since this war in Europe every girl wants to wear a uniform and be ready to go to the front if we have trouble. All sorts of silly children are applying. We have one now, on this very floor, not a day over nineteen."
"Who is she?" asked Middleton. He felt that this was the one. She was so exactly the sort Miss Willoughby would object to.
"Jane Brown," snapped Miss Willoughby. "A little, namby-pamby, mush-and-milk creature, afraid of her own shadow."
Now, Jane Brown, at that particular moment, was sitting in her little room in the dormitory, with the old watch ticking on the stand so she would not over-stay her off duty. She was aching with fatigue from her head, with its smooth and shiny hair, to her feet, which were in a bowl of witch hazel and hot water. And she was crying over a letter she was writing.
Jane Brown had just come from her first death. It had taken place in H ward, where she daily washed window-sills, and disinfected stands, and carried dishes in and out. And it had not been what she had expected. In the first place, the man had died for hours. She had never heard of this. She had thought of death as coming quickly—a glance of farewell, closing eyes, and—rest. But for hours and hours the struggle had gone on, a fight for breath that all the ward could hear. And he had not closed his eyes at all. They were turned up, and staring.
The Probationer had suffered horribly, and at last she had gone behind the screen and folded her hands and closed her eyes, and said very low:
&n
bsp; "Dear God—please take him quickly."
He had stopped breathing almost immediately. But that may have been a coincidence.
However, she was not writing that home. Between gasps she was telling the humours of visiting day in the ward, and of how kind every one was to her, which, if not entirely true, was not entirely untrue. They were kind enough when they had time to be, or when they remembered her. Only they did not always remember her.
She ended by saying that she was quite sure they meant to accept her when her three months was up. It was frightfully necessary that she be accepted.
She sent messages to all the little town, which had seen her off almost en masse. And she added that the probationers received the regular first-year allowance of eight dollars a month, and she could make it do nicely—which was quite true, unless she kept on breaking thermometers when she shook them down.
At the end she sent her love to everybody, including even worthless Johnny Fraser, who cut the grass and scrubbed the porches; and, of course, to Doctor Willie. He was called Doctor Willie because his father, who had taken him into partnership long ago, was Doctor Will. It never had seemed odd, although Doctor Willie was now sixty-five, and a saintly soul.
Curiously enough, her letter was dated April first. Under that very date, and about that time of the day, a health officer in a near-by borough was making an entry regarding certain coloured gentlemen shipped north from Louisiana to work on a railroad. Opposite the name of one Augustus Baird he put a cross. This indicated that Augustus Baird had not been vaccinated.
By the sixth of April "Twenty-two" had progressed from splints to a plaster cast, and was being most awfully bored. Jane Brown had not returned, and there was a sort of relentless maturity about the nurses who looked after him that annoyed him.
Lying there, he had a good deal of time to study them, and somehow his recollection of the girl with the hunting-case watch did not seem to fit her in with these kindly and efficient women. He could not, for instance, imagine her patronising the Senior Surgical Interne in a deferential but unmistakable manner, or good-naturedly bullying the First Assistant, who was a nervous person in shoes too small for her, as to their days off duty.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 417