Cherry Ames Boxed Set 1-4

by Helen Wells

  Cherry smiled and sighed and went upstairs. She peeked in at Charlie’s plain, orderly room with the model airplanes he had built not so long ago. She stopped in at her parents’ big cool room with the hand-patched rose quilt. It might be a long time before she saw these familiar things again.

  At last Cherry went into her own gay little room and took a long last look around. Her window looked down on the lilac bush, which grew to her sill, and on the slender mulberry tree where the birds nested every year. She could hear them twittering now. She turned from the window and sat down a moment on the bed. It wore a cherry-red satin cover, with matching covers for her bed pillows, to make it a couch. The small bookshelves at its either end, against the white wall, the twin crystal lamps, the dressing table with its crisp white skirts, and the billowing white curtains tied with wide cherry-red ribbons—all these tempted her to stay. But Cherry could no more have stayed put, doing nothing, than she could have contentedly slept her life away. Her room would be waiting for her, in the exciting meantime.

  And then her mother was calling to her that it was time to start, and Midge was rushing about bringing her the wrong gloves, and Charlie came upstairs for her suitcase. Her father had the car out in front; Cherry could hear the engine’s impatient throbbing. She ran down the stairs, murmuring, “Good-by! Good-by! I’ll come back to you some day!”

  All through the streets of Hilton, Cherry was thinking that. First they drove through the quiet streets of pleasant homes, with children roller skating on the sidewalk, where Cherry had skated and sledded herself. The first early bonfires were burning pungently beside Victory gardens. They passed the big brick high school and, half-homesick, Cherry picked out “her” old windows as they drove by. They passed Dr. Joe’s worn white cottage, closed up now, where Cherry had first seen the shining humane vision of medicine. Then downtown, through the busy well-kept streets with two- and three-story buildings, all kinds of shops, the four movie theaters, Cherry’s favorite candy store, women she knew with bags of groceries in their arms, old Mr. Kyne’s old horse still hitched to that grocery wagon. Cherry was finding it harder and harder to leave. She answered her family absently. It was a good thing she was being escorted to the station, for, left alone, her feet might have taken a route of their own right back to her home.

  At the corner, Mr. Ames stopped the car for a traffic light. Cherry glanced idly at the corner window of a department store. What she saw made her sit up and catch her breath. It was a poster, and on it was a boy in khaki who looked like her own brother Charlie. His rifle was stuck upright into the earth; he was kneeling and clinging to the rifle with both hands, his head drooping.

  Cherry’s homesickness disappeared instantly. All the urgency she had felt before surged back now, redoubled. It was easy—it was imperative—to go now! Lose this war, and there would be no Hilton to come home to.

  Cherry turned to find her mother’s face drained of color.

  “Mother!” Cherry said, and took her hand in her own. “Don’t you get upset like that! They may get hurt, but they can be saved—the Army looks out for its men.”

  “He looks just like Charlie!” Then Mrs. Ames relaxed and leaned back against the seat. “You know, honey,” she admitted, “I didn’t want you to go. I didn’t say so, but—I didn’t. Now I guess I do. You’re going to take my place, all the nurses are going to take the mothers’ places, out there.”

  “That’s the idea,” Cherry reassured her. “And I’ll write to you often.” But now, she was impatient to be gone, on her way. She was glad that the train pulled in right away, and that there was little time for farewells.

  It was what Charlie said that counted most. “I’ll keep ’em flying and you’ll put ’em back to flying. Good luck!” He saluted her.

  “Good for you, Cherry,” her father said soberly. He tucked a roll of bills into her purse, and bent and kissed her. “You’re a brave girl.”

  Her mother clung to her. “God be with you, Cherry.”

  Midge was frankly letting the tears drip down her cheeks. “It’s not that… I’m… worried about you,” she got out between sobs. “But I can’t… go too until I… stop flunking algebra!”

  Cherry laughed and hastily hugged them all. “Don’t worry—I’ll write—take care of yourselves so I won’t worry!” she said breathlessly. The engine let out a hoarse roar. A great pillar of white steam filled the air, and Cherry ran for the train. She hopped aboard and Charlie tossed her bag on after her, just as the wheels started to turn.

  The last thing Cherry saw was her mother smiling and waving, and the wings on Charlie’s broad chest shining very bright in the Middle West sun.

  CHAPTER II

  Lieutenant Ames Reporting

  CHERRY WAS HAPPY. SHE WAS BACK AT SPENCER AND back on a hospital ward! Rows and rows of white beds were ranged along this long, white, still room, filled with quiet women patients. Two student nurses in blue and white scurried in and out of the ward kitchen and the ward’s utility room. Beyond the ward windows, trees were turning gold and red in the vast yard, and the many white buildings of great Spencer Hospital stood like a fortress. Cherry walked down the row of beds, her crisp white uniform rustling, her pert nurse’s cap perched on her black curls, thinking happily, “This is where I belong!”

  She took a deep sniff of soap-and-medicines smell. It was a good satisfying feeling to be back at work again, even temporarily. Cherry was doing general floor duty here on Women’s Medical Ward for two weeks, until all her classmates came back and her Army unit was formed.

  The ward phone tinkled. The head nurse, at her desk near the door, rose and answered it. “Ward 4, Mrs. Crane speaking. Yes, she’s here,” she said with some annoyance. She beckoned Cherry to come over, with a resigned frown on her middle-aged face. “Miss Ames, you’re entirely too popular. This is the sixth call you’ve had on your very first day of duty! Can’t your ex-classmates see you off duty?”

  “But we haven’t seen one another for all of two weeks!” Cherry teased. The head nurse smiled faintly but shook her head. “I’ll tell them to stop it, Mrs. Crane,” Cherry promised. “Hello!”

  “That crone Crane!” said a lively girl’s voice. “Well, it’s only till we move in on Uncle Sam. Boy, I can hardly wait! Just got back to Spencer this minute—”

  “Oh, yes, Miss Jones,” Cherry said formally to Gwen. “I could see you around six. And would you please,” she raised her voice for the head nurse’s benefit, “advise the others that their continued telephone calls disturb ward routine?”

  “All right, you Voice of Virtue,” Gwen giggled knowingly. “See you at first dinner. Where’s Ann?”

  “I am unable to supply that information, Miss Jones,” Cherry said professionally into the phone. “I suggest you apply at the office.”

  “I suggest you give the old dragon my love and kisses,” Gwen laughed. “Good-by. Oh! Cherry! Bertha’s waving a piece of paper in front of me and it says—wait—it says we’re all to meet at seven-thirty to get our unit started!”

  “Already? Hold on! What else does it say?” Cherry asked quickly. But Gwen had hung up. Cherry reluctantly hung up, too.

  “Not a personal call?” Mrs. Crane said, softening.

  “Uh… an inquiry and a notice,” Cherry gulped, and became extremely busy giving the patients their afternoon care. A most important notice! Things were rolling even faster than she had expected.

  A little before six, Cherry raced over to Spencer Hall, the hospital’s main building, and into the nurses’ attractive pale green dining room. She hurriedly filled her tray at the food counter and then peered into the crowds at the tables, looking for Gwen’s red head. The big room was jammed with graduate nurses in all-white, with student nurses in striped blue-and-white dresses, white aprons and caps, and with shy and humble beginners in probationer’s gray, sans bib and sans cap.

  Cherry wiggled herself and her tray through the tables, exchanging hello’s with cool blond Marie Swift and Vivian Warren. She g
reeted Josie Franklin, whose eyes behind their glasses looked like a frightened rabbit’s. Bertha Larsen waved hello to her too. Finally she reached Gwen.

  “Here’s Ames!” Gwen’s merry freckled face crinkled up in a smile.

  Quiet little Mai Lee was with her. The Chinese girl pulled out a chair for Cherry, and Cherry sat down. She grew excited when she saw how excited all her old classmates were.

  “What’s the news? Will someone kindly tell me?”

  “I don’t know where to start!” Gwen exclaimed. “They’re going to send someone over from the Army in a few days—maybe it’ll be a romantic officer! And we’re going to be what’s called an affiliated unit. We nurses, and our own Spencer doctors and technicians, will all stay together because we’re already used to working together.”

  “How many of us?” Cherry asked breathlessly.

  Mai Lee looked amused but she replied, “Well, there were sixty in our class, so that’s sixty nurses. Then there will be at least three doctors. The names were posted just ten minutes ago. Dr. Hal Freeman and that nice Dr. ‘Ding’ Jackson and your Dr. Lex Upham, Cherry.” Cherry’s heart rose at this news, but she was not surprised. “Anaesthetists and X-ray and laboratory people, of course. And—” Both Mai Lee and Gwen groaned.

  “What’s the matter?” Cherry asked in alarm. “Have you both a stomach-ache?”

  Gwen stuck her flaming head forward. “Watch your own stomach sink! Guess who’s going to be our unit’s chief surgeon and unit director!”

  Cherry guessed and shrank in her chair. “Don’t say it’s Dr. Wylie,” she pleaded.

  “Yes, my love, the very same.” Gwen took a drink of water as if to revive herself. Dr. Wylie was senior surgeon of Spencer, one of the Administrators of Spencer, and nationally famous. He would—Cherry knew from previous experience—direct them within an inch of their young lives. Gwen explained that Dr. Wylie, who had been working for six months at the battle fronts, felt he now was more urgently needed to form and direct a new unit.

  “I’m nearly as frightened of your Dr. Marius Lexington Upham as I am of Dr. Wylie,” Mai Lee admitted.

  Gwen nodded ruefully. “He’s just too brilliant to be human!”

  “He’s perfectly human!” Cherry defended him. “You idiots just never got to know him because you’re scared of him, and you’re scared of him because you don’t know him—if you follow me.”

  “Follow a tornado like Lex?” Gwen said. “Not Gwen Jones! If Cherry can handle him, it’s at her own risk! By the way, is Dr. Joe Fortune coming with our unit?”

  But the girls did not know, not even Cherry.

  “What’s worrying me,” Josie Franklin blurted out from the next table, “is those corpsmen. I don’t want to be in charge of any soldiers and give orders and train them, even if they are going to help us nurse and everything. What am I going to do with six soldiers?” she wailed. “Do I look like a military woman?”

  Cherry burst out laughing. “Never mind,” she consoled Josie. “We’re going to take a lot of orders before we start giving any!”

  They rose and strolled out to the huge rotunda. Cherry looked around at the library, the reception room, even the offices, and pictured the white wards and operating rooms upstairs. “I really love this hospital,” she thought. “It’s my second home. Now see here, Ames, you aren’t going to get homesick a second time, are you?”

  Gwen beside her was looking around, too, and frowning. “Lots of familiar faces gone, aren’t there?”

  It was true: the younger doctors and nurses were streaming out of Spencer to join the Army and Navy. But there were many new student nurses and internes stepping in to man the hospital, faces Cherry had never seen before. She was relieved to see these new young people.

  Just then a young man strode into the rotunda from the yard. He was solidly, even massively, built, with an alert, intelligent face. His eyes and decided brows were much darker than his straight sandy hair. His lordly stride, his impatient commanding manner, proclaimed him someone out of the ordinary.

  “Lex!” Cherry whirled around and smiled at him warmly.

  His returning smile lighted up his young, aggressive face. He caught up with her and Gwen. “Hi, Cherry! You’re looking wonderful! Have a good vacation?” he asked Gwen genially, and turned to say a friendly hello to Mai Lee and Bertha and Marie Swift and the others. The nurses smiled back, but they were too respectful to be at ease. It was rumored that even Dr. Wylie once had stood corrected by the brilliant and unpredictable Dr. Lex Upham.

  “Tornado!” Cherry saw Gwen’s lips form the word. One by one, and not as inconspicuously as they thought, the girls fled into the big sitting room. Cherry hoped Lex would not notice, but he stood looking after them like a child who is left out of a party. Then he turned back to Cherry and beamed at her.

  “I missed you,” he said.

  “In these two little weeks?” Cherry laughed. “Didn’t you take a vacation? Everyone else did.”

  “Well… I… you see… I got to experimenting with some new hormones, helping Dr. Fortune, and it was so interesting I couldn’t tear myself away. It’s like playing detective with a microscope.”

  “So you forgot me for a hormone! Fine loyal friend you are!” Cherry scoffed.

  “If you’re jealous of a hormone, you ought to meet my fascinating new bacillus. I’ve named it for you.”

  “So now I look like a bug to you,” Cherry said with a straight face. “And don’t tell me I am deliberately misunderstanding you!”

  Lex’s face darkened like a thundercloud. His temper exploded so quickly—and his sense of humor popped up again so promptly—that Cherry, who was quick-tempered herself, never could resist teasing him. He caught the laughter in her eyes.

  “This time I don’t bite,” he told her. “See here, Cherry. Do I have to go into that sitting room for the meeting with all those girls?”

  “I’ll protect you, Lex,” said a cool, feminine voice. A quiet, brown-haired girl had come up. She was wearing a dark blue suit that matched her steady eyes, and she was carrying a suitcase.

  “Ann Evans!” Cherry cried, as Lex relieved her of her suitcase. “I looked for you on the Wabash train—I thought you’d get on about an hour after I did. And here you show up a whole day late!”

  “I was sick. But I notified Miss Reamer,” Ann replied. “Have I missed anything important?”

  “The meeting for Spencer unit is just starting,” Lex said. “Come on, ladies.”

  The sixty nurses from Cherry’s class filled the big sitting room. Lex found Dr. “Ding” Jackson and Dr. Freeman there, and the three young men laughingly huddled together—“for masculine security,” lanky “Ding” said.

  The meeting was largely routine, the first but exciting steps toward getting themselves organized. Cherry looked about at the familiar faces and wondered in what far lands they would some day find themselves. She wondered, too, whether Dr. Joe was coming with them. Leaning over to where Lex sat, she whispered a question to him. Lex should know: he assisted Dr. Joe in his research.

  He wrote back a note, in his firm small script. “Don’t know exactly. Very secretive. Something about his malaria serum experiment.” While Cherry was reading it, he reached for the note and added, “We’ll miss him if he doesn’t.”

  Cherry went to see Dr. Joe the following afternoon when she went off ward duty. She found him in his laboratory in Lincoln Hall. As usual, it was littered with notes, basins, test tubes, and half-empty tins of tobacco. Dr. Joe himself, in a rumpled white lab coat, his thick short gray hair rumpled too, was leaning dreamily against the wall, sucking on a cold pipe. Cherry recognized the usual signs; he was thinking something out. She kept silent, affectionately watching him.

  Cherry was very fond of Midge’s father, gentle, studious, impractical Dr. Joseph Fortune. Dr. Joe had helped Cherry and her twin brother Charlie into the world, and Dr. Joe had been her inspiring friend ever since. When Mrs. Fortune died, Cherry—though she was still in high sc
hool—had kept an eye on madcap Midge and on absent-minded Dr. Joe. She had helped him with his medical research in his little kitchen laboratory, she had encouraged him when no one else believed in his research. It was Dr. Joe’s devoted example that had sent Cherry to Spencer Nursing School. And it was Cherry’s efforts that finally helped Dr. Joe to win his present recognition. She wondered, watching him now, why he was so mysterious about his immediate plans. Finally she said aloud, jokingly:

  “Is anyone here?”

  Dr. Joe smiled and turned to her. “Hello, my dear. How is Hilton and everyone? How is Midge? I hope your mother isn’t worn out with her.”

  “Midge is in top form, and everyone is fine.” Cherry scanned his tired though still boyish face. “Are you all right, Dr. Joe?”

  “I’m a little worried,” Dr. Joe admitted. But he made no move to say what he was worried about. Cherry, of course, did not ask questions. “I had a letter from Midge just this morning,” Dr. Fortune continued. “It seems she—By the way, child, have you seen Dr. Wylie?”

  “I see Dr. Wylie? Heavens, no!”

  “Hmm. Must talk to him about getting his authorization for my further research. He doesn’t like what I want to do—and where I want to try it out.”

  Cherry tried to look polite, interested, encouraging and not inquisitive. But Dr. Joe merely wandered about the laboratory, absently picking things up and setting them down again. Then he remembered that she was there, and smiled at her. His thoughtful eyes studied her.