I
"If I were fifty years old," said the Young Doctor quite bluntly, "and found myself suddenly stripped of practically all my motor powers except my pocketbook and my sense of humor; and was told that I could make one wish——"
"But I am fifty years old," admitted the Sick Woman. "And I do find myself stripped of practically all my motor powers, except my pocketbook and my sense of humor!"
"Then for Heaven's sake—wish!" snapped the Young Doctor.
"Oh, my goodness!" mocked the Sick Woman. "You're not by any chance a—a fairy god-doctor, are you?"
"Fairy god-doctor?" bristled the young 3man. "The phrase is an unfamiliar one to me," he confided with some hauteur.
Quizzically then for a moment among her hotel pillows the woman lay staring out through the open window into the indefinite slate-roofed vista of Beyond—and Beyond—and Beyond. Then so furtively that the whites of her eyes showed suddenly like a snarling dog's she glanced back at the Young Doctor's grimly inscrutable face.
"You're quite sure that it isn't a will you want me to make? Not a wish?" she asked.
"Quite sure," said the Young Doctor, without emotion.
As two antagonists searching desperately for some weak spot in each other's mental armor, the patient's eyes narrowed to the doctor's, the doctor's to the patient's.
It was the patient who fled first from the probe.
"How many years can you give me?" she surrendered dully.
"I can't give you any! I can't afford it!" slapped the Young Doctor's brisk, cool voice.
"How many years can you sell me, then?" 4roused the woman with the first faint red flare of vigor across her cheek bones.
"Oh, I don't know," admitted the Young Doctor. Sagging back a little wearily against the edge of the bureau, with his long arms folded loosely across his breast he stood staring tensely down through the woman's question into the actual case itself. "Oh, I don't know," he admitted. "Oh, of course, if you had some one brand-new interest to revitalize you? If the matter of congenial climate could be properly adjusted? With all your abundant financial resources? And all the extra serenities and safeguards that financial resources can wrap a sick person in? Oh, I suppose one could almost positively guarantee you—guarantee you,—oh, years and years," he finished a trifle vaguely.
"Only that?" winced the woman. "Years and years?" she quoted mockingly. "It isn't enough! Not nearly enough!" she flared with sudden passion.
"Even so," smiled the Young Doctor. "That is a more definite estimate than I could, equally honestly, make for the youngest, friskiest child who prances to work or play 5every day through the tortuous traffic of our city streets."
"Oh," said the woman with a flicker of humor in her tears.
"Oh," smiled the doctor without an atom of humor in the smile.
With her handsome gray head cocked ever so slightly to one side, the woman's eyes seemed rather oddly intent on the Young Doctor for an instant.
"How—how thin you are—and how hungry-looking," she commented suddenly with quite irrelevant impudence.
"Thank you," bowed the Young Doctor.
"Ha!" chuckled the woman. "And I? 'How satiate-looking she is!' Is that what you'd like to say?"
"You are perfectly welcome to look any way you wish," said the Young Doctor with distinct coldness.
Indifferently then for a moment both doctor and patient seemed to relax into the centric personal hush of the sick- room itself, with its far outlying murmur of thudding feet, its occasional sharp, self-conscious click of remote elevator machinery. 6
Then the doctor snatched out his watch.
"Well, what is it you want me to do first?" roused the Sick Woman instantly.
"Make your wish!" said the doctor.
"Yes, I know," parried the woman. "But what do you want me to wish? What kind of a wish, I mean, do you want me to make?"
As though personally affronted by the question, the Young Doctor stepped suddenly forward.
"What kind of a wish do I want you to make?" he demanded. "Why, what kind of a wish should I want you to make except an honest wish? Not the second-hand, sanctimonious, reconsidered sort of wish that you think you ought to make. But the first glad, self-concerned, self-revitalizing whim that gushes up into your mind when anybody springs the word 'wish' at you!"
"Oh!" brightened the woman. "That ought to be easy enough." The sudden smile flooding into the very faintly distorted facial muscles gave a certain shrewd, waggish sort of humor to the assertion. "Why not?" she persisted speculatively. "Long life and happiness having been logically eliminated from 7my impulses, and both faith and fact having reasonably convinced me that all my loved ones are perfectly well provided for in either this world or the next, why shouldn't I wish for the one thing that will add most to my own personal diversion? Oh, very well," she began to consider. Whitely her eyelids drooped down across her turbid eyes. "Now you count ten, Doctor," she murmured quite casually. "And when you say ten I'll tell you the wish."
"This isn't a game, Mrs. Gallien!" bristled the Young Doctor.
Very languidly the woman opened her eyes wide.
"Oh, isn't it?" she asked. "Then I won't wish, thank you."
"What are you talking about?" scolded the Young Doctor.
"About getting well," conceded the woman. Languidly the white eyelids closed again. "And if getting well isn't a game—I won't get well, either," affirmed the woman.
With a gasp of irritation the Young Doctor snatched up his hat and left the room.
But outside the door, neither up the hall nor down the hall, nor across the hall, was the nurse waiting where he had told her to wait. 8
"Oh, drat you women!" he grinned sheepishly. "Well, go ahead! One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—TEN!"
With an audible imprecation he stalked back into the sick- room and threw himself down into the first chair he could reach.
"Oh, drat you women!" he grinned sheepishly. "Well, go ahead! One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten!"
As automatically almost as a mechanical doll the Sick Woman opened her eyes.
"Oh, all right!" she smiled. "Now I will tell you the wish. But first I must tell you that the thing I hate most in the world is an empty twilight. And the thing I love best is a crowded shop. Oh, the joy of shopping!" she quickened. "The fun, the fury of it! Buy, buy, buy, while the light lasts and the money shines! But as for the empty twilight?" she wilted again. "I wish—" her voice caught suddenly, "I wish that the last mail of the day may never leave me utterly letterless. And that I may always be expecting a package by express!"
"Do you really mean it?" asked the Young 11Doctor without the slightest trace of perturbance.
"Why, of course I mean it!" smiled the woman. "But do you dream for a moment that you can guarantee that?"
"I can at least prescribe it," said the Young Doctor.
"You have more subtlety than I thought," drawled the woman.
"You have more simplicity than I had dared to hope," bowed the Young Doctor.
Again, in shrewd half-mocking appraisement, the two measured each other.
Then with a great, busy frown the Young Doctor turned to his notebook.
"Let me see," he estimated. "It was four weeks ago yesterday— that you fell on the street."
"Was it?" said the woman indifferently.
"Mrs. Gallien," asked the Young Doctor with some abruptness, "just exactly where is your home?"
"I have no home," said the woman.
"Yes, but you must live somewhere," bristled the Young Doctor.
"Only in my pocketbook and my sense of 12humor," quoted the woman with frank mockery.
"But why make such a mystery about your domicile?" persisted the Young Doctor.
"That's just it," said the woman. "I haven't any domicile to make a mystery of! It's seventeen years since I've lived in what you call a domicile.
"Where have you lived?" demanded the Young Doctor.
"Oh, on steamers mostly," conceded the woman. Very faintly the pallid nostrils dilated. "I've been to Australia five times," she acknowledged. "And China twice. And Japan,—" she quickened. "All the little vague outlying islands, all the great jostling eager seaports! By steam, by paddle wheels, by lax, loose-flapping rainbow-colored sails!" In sudden listlessness she turned her cheek to the pillow again. "Wherever the sea is salt," she murmured. "Wherever the sea is salt! Hunting, always and forever hunting,—yes, that's it,—always and forever hunting for lights and laughter and——"
"Pardon me," said the Young Doctor, quite abruptly. "But is your husband living?" 13
"No," said the woman. "He died two years ago."
Inquisitively for a moment the Young Doctor studied the nerve-ravaged face before him.
"Pardon me," he stammered. "But—but was it a great shock to you?"
"It was a great relief," said the woman, without emotion. "He had been hopelessly insane for seventeen years."
"Oh!" jumped the Young Doctor, as though the thought fairly tortured his senses.
"Oh!" speculated the woman quizzically, with the merciful outer callousness which the brain provides for those who are obliged to carry some one scorching thought for an indeterminate period of years.
As though in sheer nervous outlet the Young Doctor began almost at once to pace the room.
"Seeing that there are no—no personal ties, apparently, to hold you here—or drive you there," he said, "the matter of congenial climate ought to be one that we can easily arrange." 14
With half ironic amusement the Sick Woman lay and watched his worried, fluctuating face.
"The question of climate is all arranged!" she said. "The speed that was stripped from my body last week, has at least been put back into my brain. Just where I am going, just whom I am going to take with me, just what I am going to do to amuse me, every last infinitesimal detail of all the rest of my life," she smiled, "I have planned it all out while you have been dawdling there between the wardrobe and the bureau."
"Dawdling?" snapped the Young Doctor. Quite abruptly he stopped his nervous pacing. "Well, where is it that you want to go?" he asked.
Musingly the woman's eyes stared off again into the window- framed vista of the city roofs.
"On an island," she said. "Off the coast of South Carolina there is a house. It is really rather a dreadful old place. I have not seen it since I was a girl. It was old then. It must be almost a wreck now. And the island is not very large. And there is no other house on the island. Just this great rambling deserted shack. And six battered old live-oak trees half strangled with dangly gray moss. And there are blue jays always in the gray 15moss, and cardinal birds, and unestimable squirrels. And there is a bedroom in the house forty feet long. And in that bedroom there is a four-poster seven feet wide, and most weirdly devised of old ships' figureheads, a smirking, faded siren at one corner, a broken-nosed sailor at another,—I forget the others—but altogether in memory I see it as a rather unusually broad and amusing shelf to be laid aside on. And there, in the middle of that great ship-figured bed, in the middle of that great dingy sunken-cabin sort of room with its every ancient windowpane blearing grayly into the sea, through deck-like porches so broad, so dark, so glowering that no streak of cloud or sky will ever reach my eyes again, nor any strip of gray-brown earth—I shall lie, I say, in unutterable peace and tranquillity as other ghosts have lain before me, 'forty fathoms deep' below all their troubles. And always as I lie thus, there will be the sigh of the surf in my ears. And the swell of the tide in my eyes. Eternally across my windows fin-like wings shall soar and pass and gray mosses float and flare."
"Cheerful!" snapped the Young Doctor. 16
"Yes. Isn't it?" beamed the woman.
With a gasp of surprise the Young Doctor turned and stared at her.
"Why, I really believe that you think so!" he stammered.
"Why, of course I think so!" said the Woman. "Why not?" she queried. "A dimming candle glows brightest in a dark room!" Not a trace of morbidness was in her voice, not a flicker of sentimentality. "And besides," she smiled. "It is also my desire to remove myself as far as possible from the main thoroughfares of life."
"I don't see why!" protested the Young Doctor.
"This is the 'why,'" said the woman. "Just as I fell that day," she smiled. "In my last conscious moment, I mean,—a hurrying child stumbled and stepped on me." Once again the smile twisted ever so slightly to one side. "And never any more while I live," said the woman, "do I care to repeat the sensation of being an impediment to traffic." Very idly for a moment she seemed to focus her entire interest on the flapping window curtain. "And I shall name my 17house—name my house—" she mused. With sudden impetuous conviction every lax muscle of her face tightened into action. "Once—once in New England," she hurried, "I saw a scarlet-gold tulip named 'Glare of the Garden'! For absolute antithesis I shall call my house 'Gloom of the Sea!'"
"Do you wish to take your present young nurse with you?" asked the doctor a bit abruptly.
The crooked smile on the woman's face straightened instantly into thin-lipped positiveness.
"I do not!" said the woman. "I detest novices! Their professional affectations drive me mad! I am born, weaned, educated, courted, married, widowed,—crippled, in the moppish time it takes them to wash my face, to straighten the simplest fork on my breakfast tray! Every gesture of their bodies, every impulse of their minds, fairly creak with the laborious, studied arrogance of an immature nature thrust suddenly into authority! If I've got to have personal service all the rest of my days for goodness' sake give me a big, experienced nature reduced by some untoward 18reason to the utmost terms of simplicity!" As quickly as it had come, the irritation vanished from her face. "There is a chambermaid here in this hotel—I love her!" said the woman. "She was a hospital superintendent somewhere, once, until her deafness smashed it." As ingenuously as a child's the tired, worldly- wise eyes lifted to the Young Doctor's face. "I like deaf people," said the woman. "They never chatter, I have noticed. Nor insist upon reading the newspapers to you. Being themselves protected from every vocal noise that does not directly concern them, they seem instinctively to accord you the same sacristy. And besides," smiled the woman, "this ex- superintendent's hair is as gray as mine. And I adore women whose hair is just exactly as gray as mine. And also," smiled the woman, "her name happens to be 'Martha'—and I have always craved the personal devotion of someone named 'Martha'. And I shall pay her an extra hundred dollars a month," smiled the woman, "to call me 'Elizabeth'. Never in my life," said the woman, "have I ever had any food cooked for my first name. Martha 19will do everything for me, you understand?" she added quickly.
"Yes, but how do you know that she'll go with you?" asked the Young Doctor dryly.
"How do I know that she'll go with me?" flared the woman. The imperious consciousness of money was in the flare, but also the subtler surety of a temperamental conviction. "Why, of course she'll go!" said the woman. As definitely as though she had assumed that sunshine would be sunshine, she dismissed the whole topic from their conversation.
"Oh, all right," smiled the Young Doctor a bit ironically. "I am to infer then that climate, locality, care, companionship, everything has been arranged except your wish for a chronic Package by Express?"
"Oh, that is all arranged too!" boasted the woman.
"I don't see it," said the Young Doctor.
"I saw it," said the woman, "while you were straightening your necktie! Oh, of course, the shops can never happen again." She winced with real emotion. "All the gay, covetous fingering of silk or bronze, the shrewd explorative sallies through aisles of 20treasure and tiers of tantalization! But just the package part?" She rallied instantly. "Oh, the package part I assure you is perfectly easy, as long as memory lasts and imagination holds. With a check book on one side of me and a few dollars worth of postage stamps on the other, all I'll have to do," she laughed, "is just to lie there on my back and study the advertising pages of all the magazines. Every fascinating gown that cries for help from a fashion catalogue! Every irresistible lawn mower that brags of its prowess from the columns of an agricultural journal! Ten cent packages of floral miracles, or ten dollar lotions from the beauty shops! Certainly never again till the end of time ought there to dawn a day when I haven't a reasonable right to expect that something will arrive!
"And I shall have a wrangle boat, of course," babbled the woman impishly. "What is it? Oh, 'motor boat' you call it? Oh, any old kind of an engine,—I don't care, so long as it serves its purpose of keeping a man and a boy busy all day long quarreling as they always do just how to run it. And once a 21day, every late afternoon, I shall send the wrangle boat to the mainland—way—way out beyond the sky line of my piazza. And the instant that boat swings back into vision again, just between the droop of the roof and the lift of the railing, they will hoist a flag if there is anything for me. And if there isn't—if there isn't?" Across her whimsical prophecy indescribable irritation settled suddenly. "And if there isn't anything, they need never return!" snapped the woman.
"Oh, of course, that's all right at first," mocked the Young Doctor. "But in your original description of your island I remember no mention of large storehouses or empty warerooms. After a while you know, with things arriving every day or so. And the house, I infer, except for the one big room you speak of, sustains no special acreage."
"Stupid!" rallied the woman.
"Oh, I see," puzzled the Young Doctor. "You—you mean that you're going to give the things away? Hordes of young nieces, and poor relations and all that sort of thing? Why—why, of course!"
"Oh, no!" said the woman. With suddenly 22narrowing eyes her whole face turned incalculably shrewd and cold. "Oh, no! I am all through giving anything away!" Defiantly for an instant she challenged the Young Doctor's silence, then sank back with frank indifference into her pillows again. "Worldly as I am," she smiled very faintly, "and worldly as my father and mother were before me, and their father and mother, doubtless, before them, there is one little prayer that I shall never forget,—and I found it, if the fact interests you, inscribed painstakingly in faded violet ink in the back of my grandfather's first check book, before, evidently, either wealth or worldliness had quite begun to set in. And this is the little prayer:
"If fortune and finance should so ordain that I may never be any kind of a giver, Heaven grant that at least I may not be a stingy receiver but share unstintedly with such benefactor as may favor me the exceeding happiness which his benefaction has most surely conferred upon me!"
Once more the faint smile twisted into cynicism. "That's it," said the woman. "I'm tired of stingy receivers!" 23
"I—I'm afraid I don't get you," said the Young Doctor.
"Don't you ever get anything?" snapped the woman explosively.
It was the Young Doctor's turn to flare now. "Oh, yes," he said. "Sometimes I get awfully tired of the vagaries of women!"
Out of her nerves rather than her mirth the woman burst out laughing.
"You are so young!" she said.
"Not as juvenile as your vagaries," protested the Young Doctor.
"But my vagaries are not juvenile!" insisted the woman. "They are as old and ingrained as time itself. For seventeen years," quickened the woman, "I have been 'gathering gifts' from all over the world, ripping things out of impersonal wholesale, as it were, to apply them as best I might to this person's, or the other's, individual need. Say, if you want to, that I have had nothing else to do on my travels except to spend money, yet the fact remains that as far as my own personal satisfactions are concerned in the matter of giving, I have been pouring presents for seventeen years into a bottomless pit. Never once, I 24 mean," smiled the woman, "never once, yearning over the abyss as the gift went down, have I ever heard the entrancing thud that a gift ought to make when it lands on real appreciation. Never!"
"Well, you are a cynic!" conceded the Young Doctor.
"I admit it," said the woman. "Yet even a cynic may be fair- minded." For the first time in her tired, sophisticated face, shrewdness and irony were equally routed by sheer perplexity. "I've thought it all out as decently as I could from the other person's point of view," she puzzled. "I see his side, I think. I have no legal, constitutional right, of course, to demand a person's gratitude for any gift which is purely voluntary on my part. Lots of people in all probability would infinitely rather not have a gift than be obliged thereby to write a 'Thank you' for it. Against such a person's wish and inclination, I mean, I've no right to pry 'Thank you's' out of him, even with gold-mounted golf sticks or first editions. I've no right to be a highwayman, I mean. Even if I'm literally dying for a 'Thank you' I've no more right, I mean, to 25hold up a person with a gift than I'd have to hold him up with a gun."
"Then what are you fussing about?" asked the Young Doctor.
"I'm fussing about the hatefulness of it," said the woman. All the shrewdness came suddenly back to her face. "This is what I mean!" she cried sharply. "When I stay in Paris three months, for instance, to collect a trousseau for the daughter of a man who meant something to me once in my youth, and receive in due time from that girl a single page of gothic handwriting thanking me no matter how gushingly for my 'magnificent gift,' I tell you I could fairly kill her for her stingy receiving! Not a word from her about hats, you understand? Not a comment on shoes! Not the vaguest, remotest mention of chiffon veils, silk stockings, evening gowns, street suits, mink furs, anything! Just the whole outfit, trunk after trunk of 'em, all lumped in together and dismissed perfectly casually under the lump word 'gift!' and it wasn't just a 'gift' that I gave her, you understand?" said the woman with a sudden real twinge of emotion. "Almost nobody, you know, ever 26gives just a 'gift.' What I really gave her, of course, was three whole months of my taste, time, temperament! Three whole months of my wanting-to-give! Three whole months of a woman's dreams for a young girl! What I really gave her, of course, was the plaudits of her elders, the envies of all her girl chums, the new, unduplicatable pride and dignity of a consciously perfect equipment! What I really gave her, of course, was the light in her bridegroom's eyes when he first saw her merge a throb of mist and pearls through the gray gloom of the cathedral chancel! What I really gave her of course was the——"
"Yes, but you surely know that she appreciated the gift," deprecated the Young Doctor.
"Why, of course she appreciated the gift!" snapped the woman. "But what I'm trying to find is some one who'd appreciate the giver! Anybody can appreciate a gift," she added with unprecedented scorn. "Pleased?" snapped the woman. "Why, of course, she was pleased! The only thing I'm fussing about is that she was too stingy to share her pleasure 27with me! The fire I worked so hard to light, lit all right, but simply refused to warm me! That's it! Why! Did she note by one single extra flourish of her pen that the lining of her opera cloak was like the petalling of a pink Killarney rose? Or that the texture of her traveling suit would have made a princess strut with pride? When she lumped a dozen Paris hats into the one word 'nice' did she dream for one single instant that she had lulled my perfectly human hunger to know whether it was the red one or the green one or the gold which most became her ecstatic little face? Did it ever occur to her to tell me what her lover said about the gay little brown leather hunting suit? Six months hence, freezing to death in some half-heated palace on the Riviera, is there one chance in ten thousand, do you think, that she will write me to say, 'Oh, you darling, how did you ever happen to think of a moleskin breakfast coat and footies?' And again!" scolded the woman. "When a stodgy old missionary on his way back to Africa relaxes enough on a mid-ocean moonlight night so that it's fun a month later to send him a mule and cart just to keep his 28faithful, clumsy old feet off the African sands, do you think it's fun for him to send me eight smug laborious pages complimenting me—without a moon in them,—on 'the great opportunities for doing good which my enormous wealth must give me,' and commending me specially 'for this most recent account of my stewardship which I have just evidenced in my noble gift'?" For one single illuminating flash humor twitched back into the woman's eyebrow. "Stewardship—bosh!" she confided. "On a picture post card—with stubby, broken- nosed pencil—I would so infinitely rather he had scribbled, 'Bully for you, Old Girl! This is some mule!'"
With a little sigh of fatigue she sank back into her pillows. "'More blessed to give than to receive?' Quite evidently!" she said. "Everywhere it's the same! People love pictures and never note who painted them! People love stories and never remember who wrote them! Why, in any shop in this city," she roused, "I wager you could go in and present a hundred dollar bill to the seediest old clerk you saw—and go back in an hour and he wouldn't know you by sight! 'The gift without 29the giver is bare?'" she quoted savagely. "Ha! What they really meant was 'The giver added to the gift is a bore?'"
"Well, what do you propose to do about it?" quizzed the Young Doctor a bit impatiently.
"I propose to do this about it!" said the woman. "I propose to become a reformer!"
"A reformer?" jeered the Young Doctor.
"Well, then—an avenger! if you like the word better," conceded the woman. "Oh, I shall keep right on buying things, of course," she hastened mockingly to assure him. "And giving things, of course. One could hardly break so suddenly the habit and vice of a life time. Only I shan't scatter my shots all over the lot any more. But concentrate my deadliest aim on one single individual. Indeed, I think I shall advertise," mocked the woman. "In that amazing column of all daily papers so misleadingly labeled 'wants' instead of able-to-haves I shall insert some sort of a statement to the effect that:
"An eccentric middle-aged woman of fabulous wealth, lavish generosity, and no common sense whatsoever, will receive into her 'lovely Southern 30 Home' one stingy receiver. Strictest reference required. Object: Reformation or—annihilation."
"It would be interesting to see the answers you'd get!" rallied the Young Doctor with unwonted playfulness.
Almost imperceptibly the woman twisted her eyebrows. "Oh, of course, I admit that most of them would be from asylums," she said. "Offering me special rates. But there's always a chance, of course, that—that—" Straight as a pencil-ruling both eyebrows dropped suddenly into line. "But I'm quite used to taking chances, thank you!" she finished with exaggerated bruskness.
"What else do you propose to take?" asked the Young Doctor a bit dryly.
"You!" said the woman.
At the edge of the bureau the Young Doctor wheeled abruptly in his tracks.
"Well, you won t!" he said. His face was quite white with anger.
"Why not?" drawled the woman. As ruthlessly as a child she seemed to be estimating suddenly the faintly perceptible shine of the man's shoulder seams. Only the frankness of the stare relieved it of its 31insolence. "Why not?" she said. "Is your practice here so huge that you can totally afford to ignore a salary such as I would give you?"
"Nevertheless," winced the Young Doctor, "even you cannot buy everything!"
"Can't I?" smiled the woman. In passionate willfulness and pride her smile straightened out again into its thin-lipped line. "But I need you!" she asserted arrogantly. "I like you! If I had had my choice of every practitioner in the city, I— I!" With a precipitous whimper of nerves the tears began suddenly to stream down her cheeks. "There is—there is something about you," she stammered. "In a—in a trolley car accident, in a steamer panic, out of a—out of a thousand," she sobbed, "I instinctively would have turned to you!" As abruptly as it had come, the flood of tears vanished from her face, leaving instead a gray-streaked flicker of incredulity. "Why, I don't even know how I did happen to get you!" she admitted aghast. "Out of all the doctors in the city—it must have been intended! It must! If there's any Providence at all it must arrange 32 such details! How did I happen to get you?" she demanded imperiously.
For the first time across the Young Doctor's lean, ascetic face an expression of relaxation quickened.
"Well if you really want to know," he said. "As you were being lifted out of your carriage at the hotel door, I was just coming out of the Free Lunch——"
"Hunger or thirst?" scoffed the woman.
"None of your business," smiled the Young Doctor.
"Oh, and besides," rallied the woman instantly. "I thought, likely as not, that there might be some girl. Somebody you could coach! About my passion for shopping, I mean! I don't care who gets the things! If there's anybody you like, she might just as well be the one!"
"Thank you," rebristled the Young Doctor. "But I don't happen to know any girls!"
"Good enough!" said the woman. "Then there's nothing at all to complicate your coming!"
"But I'm not coming!" stared the Young Doctor. The pupils of his eyes were dilated 33like a deer's jacked suddenly with an infuriating light.
"But you are coming," said the woman without a flicker of emotion. "Day after tomorrow it is. At three-thirty from the Pennsylvania Station."
"I'm not!" said the Young Doctor.
"You are!" said the woman.
When it comes right down to the matter of statistics, just how many times in your life you've had your own way and just how many times you haven't, Mrs. Tome Gallien was not exaggerating when she boasted to the Young Doctor that she was quite in the habit of having her own way. She certainly was! In the majority of incidents she had, indeed, always had her own way. And in the majority of incidents she had her own way now. That is to say, that the South Carolina train did leave the Pennsylvania Station at just exactly the time she said it would. And Martha the deaf was on that train. And she, herself, was on that train.
But the Young Doctor was not.
"Not much! Not much!" was the way the 34Young Doctor said it, if you really want to know.
But he said very little else that afternoon. To be perfectly frank his luncheon had been very poor, and his breakfast, before that, and his dinner, before that. Further reiteration would be purely monotonous. Moreover, on this particular February day the weather was extravagantly Northern, his office, as cold and dark and bleak as some untenanted back alley, and his general professional prospects as dull as, if not indeed duller than, the last puff of ashes in his pipe. Yet even so he counted his situation ecstasy compared to the thought of being dragged South by the wrapper-strings of a gray-haired invalid-woman as headstrong as she was body-weak. "Not much!" Long after there was no tugging warm taste left in his pipe he was still tugging at the phrase. "Not much!"
But Mrs. Tome Gallien on her fine train scudding South was even more chary of words than he when it came to her own comment on his defection.
"Idjot!" she telegraphed back from Washington. 35
The operator who repeated the message over the telephone was frankly apologetic.
"Yes, Doctor," explained the metallic voice. "That's just exactly the way we received it. It isn't even 'idiot'" argued the voice. "Because we wired back for verification. 'I-d-j-o-t!' That's what it is. Maybe it's a—a code word," condoned the voice amiably.
It certainly was a "code" word. And the message that it sought to convey was plainly this:
"How any young struggling practitioner in a strange city, with not only his future to make but even his present, how such a one has got the nerve, the nerve, I say, to refuse a regular salaried position and all expenses, all expenses, mind you, in a salubrious climate, and with a lady,—well, with a lady whom other men infinitely wiser and more sophisticated than he have not found utterly devoid perhaps of interest and charm?"
Talk about being packed "cram-jam?" Surely no week-end suitcase could ever have bulged more with significance than did this one tiny telegram "Idjot!" And equally surely its context "dressed" the Young Doctor's 36mind quite completely for almost a week.
But the great square white envelope that arrived in due time from Mrs. Tome Gallien had nothing in it at all except a check. No reproaches, I mean, no upbraidings, no convalescent rhapsodies of gratitude even. Just a plain straightforward unsentimental black and white check covering so many professional visits at so much a visit. A man might have sent it. A perfectly well man, I mean.
"And so the episode ends," mused the Young Doctor with distinct satisfaction.
But it didn't end so, of course. Women like Mrs. Tome Gallien were not created to end things but to start 'em. Of such is the kingdom of Leaven.
It was on the following Thursday that the grand piano arrived at the Young Doctor's office.
Now the Young Doctor's office might easily have accommodated more patients than it did. But piano movers are almost always so fat. Puffing, blowing, swearing, tugging,—the whole dingy room seemed suddenly packed with brawn. 37
"But it isn't my piano!" protested the Young Doctor from every chair, desk, table, of his ultimate retreat. "It isn't my piano!" he yelled from the doorway. "It isn't my piano!" he scolded through the window.
But it was his piano, of course! The piano movers swore that it was. The piano warerooms telephoned that it was. . . Worst of all, the piano itself on one plump ankle flaunted a tag which proclaimed that it was. And the proclamation was most distinctly in Mrs. Tome Gallien's handwriting.
"For Dr. Sam Kendrue," it said. "As a slight token of my appreciation and esteem."
"'Appreciation?'" groaned the Young Doctor. "'Esteem?'" In the first venom of his emotion he sat right down and wrote Mrs. Gallien just exactly what he thought of her. And of it. "It" being of course the piano.
"Whatever in the world," he demanded, "would I do with a piano? Oh, of course it's very kind of you and all that," he conceded with crass sarcasm. "But I have no possible floor space, you understand, beyond my office and the very meager bedroom adjoining it. 38And with a quarter of a ton's worth of wood and wire plunked down thus in the exact center of my office it leaves me, I assure you, an extraordinarily limited amount of elbow-space unless it be a sort of running track that still survives around the extreme edges of the room. And moreover the piano is of rosewood, as you doubtless already know, and all inlaid with cherubim and seraphim snarled up in wreaths of lavender roses. Now Botany I admit, is distinctly out of my line. But the cherubim and seraphim are certainly very weird anatomically.
"And not knowing one note from another,—as indeed I remember telling you quite plainly at an earlier date, well,—excuse me if I seem harsh," he exploded all over again, "but whatever in the world would I do with a piano?"
As ingenuously insolent as a child's retort came Mrs. Tome Gallien's almost immediate reply.
"Yes! What would you do? That's just exactly it! I thought I'd get a rise out of you!" said Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Across my dulled horizon a whole heap of most diverting 39speculations have suddenly begun to flash and brighten. 'Whatever in the world' would you do with a piano?"
"I can at least return it to the warerooms," wrote the Young Doctor with significant brevity.
"Oh, no, you can't!" telegraphed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "Apropos slight defect and large mark-down merchandise rated non- returnable."
While he was yet fuming over this message Mrs. Tome Gallien's special delivery letter overtook her telegram.
"Don't struggle," urged Mrs. Tome Gallien. "After all, my dear young antagonist, when it comes right down to brass tacks, it isn't so much a question of just what you are going to do with the piano as it is of—just what the piano is going to do with you. Because of course, do something it certainly will! And the madder you get of course the more it will do! And the madder you get of course the sooner it will do it! And——
"Oh, lying here flat on my back in all this damp, salty, sea- green stillness,—tides coming, tides going,—sands shifting,—sea-weeds 40floating,—my whole wild heedless Past resolves itself into one single illuminating conviction. It's the giving people appropriate gifts that stultifies their characters so, pampering their vanities, and clogging alike both their impulses and their ink! Yes, sir!
"Why, goodness, Man! If I had crocheted you slippers would it have joggled you one iota out of the rut of your daily life? Or would even the latest design in operating tables have quickened one single heart-beat of your snug, self-sufficient young body? Or for forty stethoscopes do you imagine for one tiny instant that you would have written me twice in five days?
"But if one can only make a person mad instead of glad! Now that's the real kindness! So invigorating! So educative! So poignantly reconstructive! Because if there's one shining mark in the world that Adventure loves it's a—shining mad person. Even you, for instance! Having made no place in your particular rut for 'quarter of a ton of wood and wire' the advent of such a weightage is just plain naturally bound to crowd you out of your rut. And whoever side-steps his 41rut for even an instant? Well, truly, I think you deserved just a wee bit of crowding.
"So Heigho, Cross Laddie! And rustle round as fast as you can to get yourself a new necktie or a hair-cut or a shine! 'Cause something certainly is going to happen to you! Happen right off, I mean! Even now perhaps! Even——"
With a grunt of disgust the Young Doctor jumped up and began to pace his office,—what was left of his office, I mean, around the extreme edges of the room. And the faster he paced the madder he grew.
"Oh, the fantasia of women!" he stormed. "The—the exaggeration!"
He was perfectly right—Mrs. Tome Gallien was often fantastic, and certainly quite exaggerative anent the present situation.
The threatened "adventure" did not happen at once! It didn't happen indeed for at least two hours!
Yet the fact remains, of course, that the big piano was at the bottom of the adventure. Science no doubt would have refuted the connection. But Fancy is no such fool. Surely 42if there hadn't been a big piano the Young Doctor would never have worked himself up into such a bad temper on that particular afternoon. And if he hadn't worked himself up into such a bad temper he never would have flounced himself out into the dreary February streets to try and "walk it off." And if he hadn't tried so hard to "walk it off" he never would have developed such a perfectly ravenous hunger. And if he hadn't developed such a perfectly ravenous hunger he never would have bolted at just exactly six o'clock for the brightest lighted restaurant in sight. And it was on the street right in front of the brightest lighted restaurant that the adventure happened.
Even Fancy, though, would never have boasted that it was anything except a very little adventure. Skies didn't fall, I mean, nor walls topple, nor bags of gold roll gaily to the Young Doctor's feet. Just a car stopped,—a great plain, clumsy everyday electric car, and from the front platform of it a girl with a suitcase in one hand, a hat box in the other, and goodness-knows-what tucked under one elbow, jumped down into the mud.
Even so the adventure would never have 43started if the goodness-knows-what hadn't slipped suddenly from the girl's elbow and exploded all over the street into a goodness-knows- how-many! It would have been funny of course if it hadn't been so clumsy. But even while deprecating the digital clumsiness of women, the Young Doctor leaped instinctively to the rescue. There were certainly enough things that needed rescuing! Toys they proved to be. And such a scattering! A brown plush coon under the wheels of a stalled automobile! A flamboyant red-paper rose bush trampled to pulp beneath a cart horse's hoofs! A tin steam engine cackling across a hobbly brick sidewalk! A green-feathered parrot disappearing all too quickly in a fox terrier's mouth! A doll here! A paint box there! And the girl herself standing perfectly helpless in the midst of it all blushing twenty shades of pink and still hanging desperately tight to the leather suitcase in one hand and the big hat box in the other.
"And it isn't at all that I am so—so stupid!" she kept explaining hectically. "But it is that when an accident occurs so in English I cannot think in English what to do! If I 44put down my suitcase!" she screamed, "a dog will bite it! And if I drop my box a trample might get it!"
It was not until the Young Doctor had succeeded in reassembling owner and articles on the safe edge of the curbing that he noticed for the first time how tall the girl was and how shiningly blonde. "Altogether too tall and too blonde to behave like such an idiot!" he argued perfectly illogically. With a last flare of courtesy he sought to end the incident. "Were you going to take another car?" He gestured toward her crowded hands.
"Oh, no," said the girl with a wave of her hat box. "I was going to that restaurant over there."
"Why so was I," said the Young Doctor very formally. "So if you wish I will take your suitcase for you. That will at least help a little."
Without further parleying they crossed the snowy street and still all a-blow and a-glow with the wintry night bore down upon the snug little restaurant like two young guests of the north wind. In fact as well as effect the 45room was brightly crowded and seemed to flare up like a furnace blast into their own chilled faces. A trifle dazzled by the glare perhaps they faltered suddenly in their tracks. For one single conspicuous instant,—blonde as the moon, swarth as a pine tree's shadow,—they stood staring helplessly here, there, everywhere into a blur of frankly upturned faces. Then without an atom's warning a lone woman at the small table just in front of them jumped to her feet.
"Why, of course, you poor dears!" she beamed. "You want to get seats together!" And fled, still beaming, to the one remaining vacant seat at a far table in the corner.
A graven image could scarcely have helped grinning at the absurdity of the incident. And the Young Doctor was by no means a graven image. As for the girl, she giggled out right, and with an impulse scarcely American pulled out the Young Doctor's chair for him before she, herself, darted down into the more crumpled place which the other woman had just vacated. "After all," she conceded shruggingly, "it is not of such a consequence!" 46Only the flaming color in her cheeks belied her nonchalance.
With his left hand reaching for the menu and his right hand exploring his pockets, the Young Doctor sought to show that he also was perfectly nonchalant.
"It—it's been a—a very cold day, hasn't it?" he essayed experimentally.
From her own frowning contemplation of the card before her the girl lifted her amazingly blue eyes.
"No-o," she said. "I think the chicken soup would be more of a taste than the bouillon."
"What I remarked," persisted the Young Doctor, "was that the weather—the weather—" With his right hand still in his pocket, a most curious expression of shock passed suddenly over his face. His pocketbook was gone! Quite desperately he studied the distance to the telephone booth, the quickest path to the door,—any direction, any excuse that would snatch him soonest out of the horrid predicament of finding himself penniless at a perfectly strange restaurant in the company of 47a perfectly strange girl. Yet if he did bolt thus without explanation, as was certainly his most immediate impulse, what possible inference could the girl draw, except something crudely harsh and derogatory to her own frankly guileless personality. With a quite unwonted flush at his cheek bones he decided to make explanations. "Excuse me," he grinned with a sharp edging back of his chair, "but it will not be my pleasure after all to—to sample the chicken soup with you. Some mutt back there—while I was picking up those cursed toys—" Quite frantically again he began to rummage through all his pockets. "Some mutt has pinched my pocketbook," he finished perfectly simply.
"What?" cried the girl. "What?" With her eyes still staring blue and wide, she reached out a slim, strong detaining hand to his sleeve. "You mean that you cannot thus have any supper?" she frowned. "And the night also so dark and so cold? Why, what nonsense!" she beamed suddenly. "I have moneys to drown! No? Is it 'to burn' that you say?" she corrected herself. And thrust her own purse at him. Chucklingly like 48a child she began to rock herself to and fro. "Certainly it is all of a very great fatedness!" she reveled. "First you pick up my shoppings for me! And now it is that I pick up your supper for you! What? No?" she stammered as the Young Doctor quite curtly refused the purse and rose very definitely to his feet. Across the translucent blondness of her upturned face astonishment, incredulity, glowered suddenly like a dark shadow. "What? No? Is it then so correct?" she protested. "Is it kind? Is it senselike? That for so small a trifle you should—'snub' is it that you say, a stranger in a strange land? Certainly it was not of my boldness," she quickened. "But of the boldness of that demented woman yonder, that I sit here!" Then as suddenly as it had come all the shadow vanished from her face leaving just laughter again and a vaguely provocative sort of challenge. "Oh, go if it seems most best to be of such a silliness!" she said. "But if you go I shall certainly laugh! Laugh with loudness, I mean! Right out! And like this, with the handles of my knife and fork," she threatened to illustrate, "I will beat upon the table while 49I laugh! Bah!" she gesticulated encouragingly towards the deserted chair, "What is the price of a supper between two gentlemans?"
"Oh, of course, if you feel like that!" conceded the Young Doctor as he slipped back into his seat. "Quite frankly," he admitted, "I should hate to be even the innocent cause of your beating upon the table with the handles of your knife and fork. So if you really and truly think I look honest," he confided with an exaggerated resumption of interest in the bill of fare. "Let me see. Sixty cents, is it? And the tip? And two cents for a postage stamp? Yes, I surely ought to be able to return that much by at least noon to-morrow." Without a flicker of expression he lifted his dark eyes to hers.
Without a flicker of expression she resumed the conversation at the exact point apparently where she had been most reluctant to leave it off.
"And so," she brightened. "After the chicken soup, would it not seem to you, for instance, that turkey would be infinitely more chic than—than corned beef?"
Quite regardless of his possible negative she 50turned quickly and summoned a heavy-faced waitress to her.
"Behold it is now a dinner party!" she confided blithely to the perfectly indifferent woman. "The soup, the turkey, the best of your salads, the blackest of your coffee! Everything very chic!"
"Very what?" queried the waitress.
"Very quick!" interposed the Young Doctor.
Once again without a flicker of expression the dark eyes and the blue challenged each other across the narrow width of white table cloth.
Then the owner of the blue eyes reached out and drained her glass of ice water at a single draught.
"Ah!" she shivered. "I also am in more hurry than you. But it would not seem to me polite to nag about it."
"Oh, I beg your pardon," stammered the Young Doctor, and retreated in turn to his own glass of ice water. It was not until the soup course was almost over that he succumbed to any further conversational impulse, and even then indeed it was formality rather than 51sociability that drove him to the effort. "Seeing that you are so kind," he succeeded in enunciating. "And so—so trusting," he relaxed ever so slightly, "the least I can do certainly is to identify myself. My name is Sam Kendrue. And I am a doctor."
"So-o?" conceded the girl without enthusiasm. Quite frankly she made it clear that the waitress approaching with the turkey was the only fact in the world that concerned her at that immediate moment. Yet as one who would conscientiously acknowledge on second thought that no honest bit of information was ever really to be scoffed at, she laid down her knife and fork presently and surveyed the Young Doctor with a slightly reviving interest. "Sam? Sam Kendrue?" she repeated painstakingly. "My name is Solvei Kjelland!" she announced with brisk matter-of-factness, and resumed her eating.
"Your name is—what?" puzzled the Young Doctor.
"Solvei Kjelland," she smiled ever so faintly. "S-o-l-v-e-i," she spelled out as one quite familiarly accustomed to such a task. "K-j-e-l-l-a-n-d. I am a Norwegian!" she 52 flared up suddenly with the ecstatic breathlessness of one who confides a really significant surprise.
"A Norwegian?" rallied the Young Doctor. For the first time, behind the quick shield of his hand, a little teasing smile began to twitch. "Really, you—you surprise me!" he recovered with an almost instantly forced gravity. "From your accent now, I had supposed all along that you were—er—Celtic!"
"Celtic?" queried the girl. Then with one shrewd glance at the Young Doctor's immobile face she burst out laughing. It was not a loud laugh. It was indeed a very little laugh, and most distinctly musical. But in that instant the whole attention of the room seemed to focus itself suddenly on that one helpless little table.
"Is there anything specially peculiar looking about us, I wonder?" bristled the Young Doctor. "Or rather, about me, I should say?" he corrected himself quickly. "Even that—that philanthropic woman," he fumed, "who vacated this table for us! Well, of course I wouldn't say exactly that she was climbing up on the rungs of her chair, but——" 53
"Oh, that's nothing," said the girl with unruffled nonchalance. "She's been staring at us all of the evening. Everybody's been staring at us all of the evening," she added amiably. Very daintily, but none the less expeditiously, as she spoke, she began to turn her attention to the crisp green salad at her plate. "It is because we are both so tall and fine," she confided without an atom of self-consciousness.
"Oh, well, really, speak for yourself!" flushed the Young Doctor.
"For myself?" she repeated a bit speculatively. Once again, in a moment of temporary arrestment, she laid down her knife and fork to scrutinize the Young Doctor's face. "Oh, no," she reassured him almost at once. "You are most tall and fine too! And so brune to my blonde!" she confided as she took up her fork again. "Certainly it is most striking of us," she mused at last more to the lettuce than to the Young Doctor. "But that poor womans over there?" she rallied transiently. "Everywhere one goes it is the same. 'Old—old maid' is it that you call her? So sad! So neglected! So 'romanticks' is it 54that you say? Everybodys she sees she thinks it is young lovers! But personally," said the girl, "I am still very hungry. Let us take what dessert is proffered."
"Oh, of course," acquiesced the Young Doctor. "If I've got to be—if we've got to be—stared at, I mean, it would certainly be quite as comfortable to have something to do."
"Perfectly," smiled the girl. "So as we wait for the ices and the pies let us see what is survived of the toys." And before the Young Doctor could dissuade her she had lifted her awkwardly retied bundle to the level of the table, and was earnestly studying out the relative damages of the green- feathered parrot and the tiny tin railroad train. To confirm apparently what was her own suspicion in the matter she handed the railroad train to the Young Doctor for investigation.
And because the Young Doctor was naturally and sincerely inquisitive about anything that was broken he bent his dark head to the task with a sudden real gasp of relief, and for the next five minutes at least all possible awkwardness between them seemed merged, then 55and there, into the easy give-and-take argument of a thoroughly familiar and accustomed association.
Once again their small table became the cynosure of all eyes. The dark Young Doctor alone was quite sufficiently striking looking. And the girl in her Norse glow and blondness would have been a marked figure anywhere. But together? And now? At this very minute? So anxious, so painstaking, so brooding? If the room had thought them shy "young lovers" a scant half hour before, goodness knows what it thought them now!
The woman in the corner had most certainly reconstructed her original impressions. On the way out from her own unsocial supper she stopped impulsively just behind the Young Doctor's chair to watch his rather surprising manipulation of the fractured toy engine wheel. Her face was by no means unpleasant, but almost exaggeratedly friendly in a plaintive, deprecating sort of way.
From their focus on the Young Doctor's hands her pale eyes lifted suddenly to the girl's glowing face, and she held out a small paper bagful of pink-frosted cakes. 56
"Take those home," she said, "instead of the poor broken toys!"
"Why—why, thank you!" laughed the girl.
"How—how old are your little ones?" asked the woman quite irrelevantly.
"Eh?" jerked the Young Doctor. From his joggled hands the little tin railroad train crashed down into his plate.
With her hands clapped playfully to her ears the girl looked thoughtfully up at her accoster.
"Why, Lisa is four," she said quite simply. "And Jonathan is six, and——"
"Oh, have you got a 'Jonathan'?" kindled the woman. Her sallow face was suddenly quite transfigured with light. "And does he look like you?" she cried. "Or," sweeping the table with another deprecating glance, "or does he take after his father?"
"Take after his father?" repeated the girl in frank perplexity. Her own sweeping glance of her companion's face did not seem somehow to elucidate the mystery. "'Take?' 'Take after his father?'" she flamed. "I do not know the idiot—the idio—the—idiom!" she corrected herself triumphantly. 57
A little bit perplexed herself, the amiable stranger began suddenly to button up her coat. "Well, good night!" she beamed. "Good night! Good night! I hope you may both live to enjoy to the uttermost the full merits of your little family!"
"Eh?" jumped the Young Doctor. White as a sheet he was suddenly on his feet, and for the first time that evening a real-looking smile had twisted itself across at least one side of his thin-lipped mouth.
"Madam!" he bowed, "neither this young lady here nor I have ever laid eyes on each other before! Nor is it remotely probable indeed that in the normal course of events we should ever lay eyes on each other again! But if you persist so," he bowed, with a purely nervous glance at his watch, "but if you persist so—in your—in your—" he floundered futilely. "We shall doubtless be lying in the same grave by midnight!"
Without even a gasp then he snatched up the girl's purse, her suitcase, her hat box, his own coat and hat, and bolted for the cashier's desk.
Close behind him, clasping her scattered toys 58as best she might to her breast, followed the blonde Norse girl.
Even when they had finally reached the electric light post on the farthest corner of the street, the color was only just beginning to flush back into the Young Doctor's cheek bones.
"If you will now give me the address," he said tersely, "to which I can forward the supper money, I will put you on a street car."
"Oh, the address of course is of perfect simplicity," conceded the girl. "But I do not care for you to put me on a street car, thank you!"
"Why, certainly I shall put you on a street car!" insisted the Young Doctor. He was really quite sharp about it. "Almost every thing goes by here—if you only wait long enough," he shifted a bit uneasily, as he set down both box and suitcase with a most decided thump.
Silently then for what seemed to him an interminable time they stood there on the icy, wind-swept curbstone staring out into the passing green, red, yellow, lights.
"Pretty, is it not!" commented the girl at last. 59
"'Pretty?'" shivered the Young Doctor. "Why, yes, of course, suppose so. But which car?" he laughed impatiently. "For Heaven's sake, don't you know where you want to go?"
"Of course I know where I want to go!" flared the girl. With a little light touch on his sleeve she pointed off to another electric light post on a side street. "There!" she said. "That little pleasant fifth house from the end! That is where I am at boarding!"
"Well, why didn't you say so!" flushed the Young Doctor. Very vehemently once more he snatched up her suitcase and her hat box.
With a shrug of her fine athletic shoulders the girl laughed right out loud into his frowning eyes.
"When a man is of such a positiveness as you are," she confided impishly, "it is a privilege to reduce his national characteristics. Ever for one single instant do you ask me, 'Have you finish your food?' or, 'Do you want to be put on a car?' But always at your first wish you hurry out and scoot, crying, 'I put you on a car! I put you on a car!'" With a little sniff of scorn she turned on her 60heel and started off at a fine stride toward the house to which she had just pointed.
It was the Young Doctor now who followed precipitously after.
The street was certainly a quaint, old-fashioned one, and the boarding house in question by no means lacking in a fine though dingy sort of dignity.
But the doorbell that the girl rang and rang brought no reassuring answer. Fumbling anxiously in her purse for a moment, she threw out her hands with a little gesture of dismay.
"It is that I must also have mislaid my key," she frowned. Then like a flash of pale sunshine her smile seemed to drive every possible shadow from her mind. "Oh, well," she cried. "It is after all only a scarce seven o'clock. Some one in not many minutes will surely come. And meanwhile," she glowed. "Of such a fine night! I will just sit down here very happy and take the air!"
"Take the air?" gasped the Young Doctor. Quite unconsciously as he spoke he reached up and drew his fur collar a little bit closer about his neck.
But already the girl had dropped casually 61down on the top step and opened the throat of her own dark-fur red coat as one who was fairly thirsting for air.
"Good night!" she said briskly.
"Good-by!" said the Young Doctor. Before he had even reached the lower step he was congratulating himself that the incident was now safely ended,—"comfortably ended," he meant, instead of awkwardly, as it might so easily have been. "Foreigners were often so irrational," he considered. Even as he considered, he turned in spite of himself to investigate the sudden unmistakable rustle of a paper bag. His suspicion was frankly confirmed.
"See!" brandished the girl triumphantly. "The little pink cake of the foolish woman!" With an unmistakable chuckle of joy her white teeth met through the treasure.
In the flash of a second, the perfectly idiotic impulse of a joke, the Young Doctor lifted a warning finger at her.
"You realize of course that you are eating a—a misapprehension?" he admonished her with really terrifying severity.
"A misapprehension?" jumped the girl. Very painstakingly then and there she began to 62 explore the remaining piece of cake in her hand, tugging at its sponginess, peering under its frostedness. Then suddenly with a little quick gasp of relief she popped the sweet morsel into her mouth and smacked her lips upon it "Oh, no," she beamed. "It tastes perfectly all right to me!"
Like a word slipping hopelessly down a poem toward whatever chosen rhyme its Poet has already in mind, the Young Doctor suddenly found himself bumping rather perilously close to the one big wild hoot of laughter that had evidently been lurking for him in the situation even from the very first. In a really desperate effort to fend himself as long as possible from such an undignified disaster he hastened in all sincerity to rewrap himself in his stiffest professional manner.
"Well, what about this 'Lisa' and 'Jonathan' business?" he questioned with unmistakable reproach.
"Oh, shucks!" shrugged the girl. "This tiresome Lisa and Jonathan, their whole parents are bakers! But as for me," she lowered her voice, and thrust out her hands with a soft, appealing gesture. "But as for me, until 63to-night, for four whole weeks I cry such salt into my food I cannot eat! Homesickness, yes!" she nodded with a quick little catch of her breath. "In all the world no one to speak with except one fat lady and one thin lady and Lisa and Jonathan and Peter, and—" In an extra impulse of confidence not unmixed evidently with a certain flare of pride she slid forward a little on the step. "I am Montessori!" she said.
"What?" snapped the Young Doctor. "Why, what nonsense!" he said. "Why, what are you talking about? 'Montessori' is a—a system! And she's an Italian, too, I mean."
"Yes, truly so," conceded the girl. "And in time if the homeache can be assuaged I shall then learn the system—and remain yet a Norwegian."
"Oh, you mean you are a Montessori student?" brightened the Young Doctor.
"Even so," said the girl. "I cannot wait to learn everything. From here, after I have duly studied little Lisa, little Peter, and all the others, whose minds most happily are of a perfect brightness, I must then go on to the sadder 64schools, and to that most wonderful place in your Massachusetts where such first brain work of all was made on the little children. It is that in Norway," she winced, "I have a little brother. Our father makes much money," she added with apparent irrelevance. "And spends much and gives much. And once he married him a new wife, and there are many new children. And one of them, this little little brother, so gold, so blue, so pinky, all day long he sits and—isn't," she finished perfectly simply.
"Why—why, that's too bad," said the Young Doctor.
"Yes, very bad," mused the girl. "But some of these ideas here are of a great cleverness. I do not of course get any of it right yet," she acknowledged. "But some of it is quite sporting like a game. With these toys, now," she pointed, "and all glad things like industries, and the live cat, and the dog, and grasses and the flowers, you leave the little child quite loose, it seems, only watching him, watching him very close, one day, two days, a hundred if it seems best. And wherever he shall in finality—in finality—'gravitate,' 65is it that you say? to the sweet flowers, or the wood blocks, or the gay, smoothen cat, there it is that the one big chance of his salvation will most surely be found. But the engine, or the blocks or the smoothen cat must not be forced on him, it is so you understand? Of such there would make no message to his development. But out of everything, it is, that he himself must gravitate to it!"
In the tense sweet earnestness of her up turned face, the eager, unconscious nearness of her occasional gesture, the far remoteness of her subject, the sting of the winter night, the glare of electric light over all, it dawned on the Young Doctor a bit startlingly that he was frowning down into the eyes of a particularly beautiful woman, and for some quite unreasonable reason his cheeks began suddenly to burn like fire. It was as though having all his life long for one conscientious reason or another denied himself "wine when it was red," he found himself now, most humiliatingly, with ice itself going to his head. And just because he was so thoroughly unaccustomed to having anything go to his head, it went quite 66uproariously in fact, changing for that one moment his whole facial expression. And the instant his facial expression was changed of course he looked like a different man. And the instant he looked like a different man of course he began to act like a different man.
"And does this wonderful theory of yours apply only to poor little children?" he asked with slightly narrowing eyes. "Or am I to infer?" he laughed. "Or am I to infer that after a whole year of flaunting city, a whole year of barren indifference to it, my amazing gravitation to you this evening is positive Montessori proof that with you and you only rests my life's best salvation?"
Then without the slightest intent of doing it, without even the slightest warning to himself that he was going to do it, he swooped down suddenly and kissed her on her lips.
With a little gasp of dismay the girl stumbled to her feet. There was nothing blonde now about her. Towering up on the step just above him she was like a young storm-cloud all flame and shadow!
"Oh, what have I done that you should act thus?" she demanded. With the tears streaming 67down her face she lashed him with furious accusations. "You are one of these devils!" she cried. "You are a wild persons! Was it my fault?" she demanded, "that my bundles burst from the car? Was it my fault," she demanded, "that restaurants cannot block foolish women from their food? Was it my fault that I paid for your stupid supper?"
Neither defending himself nor seeking relief in flight, but with a face fully if not indeed more shocked than hers the Young Doctor sank down on the step at her feet, and with his head in his hands sat rocking himself to and fro.
"No, it isn't your fault!" he assured her and reassured her. "Nor is it exactly my fault!" he insisted. "But the fault of that damned piano!"
"The fault of that damned what?" quoted the girl a bit stridently.
But the face that lifted to hers was frankly the face of a stricken man. Only a chill added to repentance could have altered so any human countenance.
"On the honor of a man freezing to death!" he attested. "There is no blame to 68be attached to anything in the world— except to a grand piano."
"What is it that you mean?" puzzled the girl. "I am more furious with you than devils. But I must hear everything."
"I mean," sneezed the poor Young Doctor, "that I am looking for a kind home for a grand piano!" Even to himself his words sounded far away and altogether the words of a stranger. It was indeed as though he had been thrust quite unrehearsed into the leading part of a roaring farce which was already halfway through its evening performance. A fearful spirit of bravado seemed really his one chance of making any possible "get-away" with the whole mad situation. But even an irate audience could not have misjudged for a moment the acute distress and anxiety behind the bravado.
"It is just this way," he began all over again. "A perfectly dreadful woman drove me out of my office to-night—with a grand piano!" From the stony expression, however, in the girl's face this did not seem to be just the cue that she was looking for. In the wisest impulse of his life he decided suddenly 69to throw himself upon her sense of mercy rather than upon her sense of humor. "Truly it is this way!" He jumped up and implored her to believe him. "I am as new as you almost, in this big city. Equally with you perhaps I suffer what you call homeacheness! It is very hard to get a good start in a strange place. Lots of charity chances and all that. But very little money. I had a real patient once, though!" he bragged ironically. "A very rich woman, awfully nice and all that. But I hate her. Every chance that she gets she torments me. She has a sort of theory, I think, that tormenting is very stimulating to the nervous system. It certainly is. We fight like young cats and dogs! And yet as I say she is awfully nice. And when she went away she paid me not only justly but mighty generously for my brief services. It cancelled almost a year's debts. But she was horridly mad because I wouldn't go with her,—as a kind of a trained, tame attendant you know. But I told her I couldn't leave my office. So she sent me a grand piano, the wretch!" he finished with flaming anger.
To the step just below him the girl tripped 70down and turning about stood peering up into his face with a rather disconcerting intensity.
"Here am I," she gasped, "who suffer and languish for a 'grand piano' as you call it. And you?" As though in real pain she began to wring her slim hands together. "And you? A lady gives you a grand piano and you curse her as a wretchedness!"
"Yes, I know," deprecated the Young Doctor. "But you see there isn't room in my office for both the piano and myself! My office is too small, you see. And with the piano filling up the whole center of the room? Why, it's absurd!" he quickened. "It's rotten! Patients who come don't know whether they've come for a music lesson or to be lanced! And besides," he added as his most culminative grievance, "I don't know one note from another! And the woman knew that I didn't! And worse than anything there are hordes of the most indecent little cupids appliquéd or something all over the front of the thing!"
"Surely, something could be done," suggested the girl with a vague sort of farawayness in her blue eyes. 71
"Yes, that's just it!" remarked the Young Doctor, flushing. "I've already done it!"
Abjectly with his bared head bowed before her he stood as one awaiting just sentence.
"Of a personally," said the girl with her own cheeks spotting bright red. "Of a personally—I do not quite see the connection."
"Why the connection is perfectly clear!" insisted the Young Doctor. "She sent me the piano on purpose to crowd me out of my office! She wanted to crowd me out of my own office! She dared to affirm even that I needed to be crowded out of my own office! She tried to make me mad! She wanted to make me mad! She had the cheek to suggest, I mean, that nothing really interesting ever would happen to me until I once did get good and mad!" As though temporarily exhausted by his tirade he sagged back for a moment against the railing of the steps. His face did look a bit white and his teeth were almost chattering. "Well, I certainly did get good and mad this afternoon," he affirmed with a wry sort of apology. "And because I was so blooming mad I dashed out for a tremendous walk. And because I took such a tremendous walk I developed an 72 appetite like forty tigers. And because I developed an appetite like forty tigers I rushed for the first restaurant I could find. And because I rushed for the first restaurant I could find I happened to see you at the exact moment when——"
"Oh, stop, stop, stop!" laughed the girl with her hands clapped suddenly over her ears. "It is all too much like the— like 'The House that the Jack-Man built!'"
"Well, at least," grinned the Young Doctor, "it seems to be 'The Adventure that the Grand Piano Threatened.'"
"The—the Adventure?" puzzled the girl.
"Why, yes," insisted the Young Doctor. "That's what this Mrs. Tome Gallien prophesied you know, that the piano would bring me an adventure! So you, very evidently, are the——"
"What? I?" stammered the girl. A flush of real pleasure glowed suddenly in her face and faded again as quickly as it had come. "Oh, no!" she said with some hauteur, "You—you——"
"Oh, truly!" begged the Young Doctor. "I'm most awfully sorry for what I did! I 73can't think what possessed me! I must have gone quite mad for the moment! Why, really," he flushed, "I don't know whether you'll believe me or not—and maybe it's something anyway to be more ashamed of than to brag about,— but truly now," he floundered, "I haven't kissed a girl before since—since I was very little!" With a sudden quick jerk of sheer awkwardness he snatched a card from his pocket and handed it to her. "There! There's my address!" he cried. "And to-morrow if you'll only send me the word I'll jump off the bridge or throw myself under a truck, or make any other sort of reparation whatever that happens to occur to you. But to-night," he grinned, "I've simply got to get warm!" And started down the steps.
But before he had quite reached the sidewalk the girl had overtaken him and placed a detaining hand on his coat sleeve.
"How old is she?" questioned the girl.
"Who?" said the Young Doctor. "Oh, the woman? She's old enough to be your mother."
"I'm twenty-one," conceded the girl. 74
"Well, she's fifty," affirmed the Young Doctor.
Across the girl's translucent face a dozen conflicting emotions seemed surging suddenly. "So?" she laughed. "So?" she repeated experimentally, "If only you had not been so—so bad," she sighed. "Well, about that piano," she ventured with a certain unwonted shyness. "In a world of so much racket is it not a pity that any harmonies should lie dumb? Is it—is it a good piano?" she asked quite abruptly.
"Why, for heaven's sake, how do I know?" demanded the Young Doctor. "It may be a—a Stradivarius!" he floundered wildly. "But it looks to me like the—like the devil!"
"If I could only see it," whispered the girl, "I could tell in a minute of course."
"If you could only see it?" scoffed the Young Doctor. Then, "Well—well—why not?" he acknowledged a trifle tardily, but with indisputable common sense.
"I have an aunt here," mused the girl, "who has a rheumatism in her elbow, I think it is. On Friday afternoon next—if the rheumatism perhaps should be sufficiently 75bad?" Flushed with the anticipatory ardor of a musician she lifted her eyes to his.
"Why, capital!" acquiesced the Young Doctor. For the instant the whole suggestion struck him as being extraordinarily apt. "Well, good-by then," he laughed, "until Friday afternoon!" And vanished into the night.
He was still a long, cold distance from home. But by the time he had finally reached there his pulses were ringing with fire rather than with frost. And as soon as he had started a bright roaring flame in his stove, and concocted for himself a most luscious and steamsome drink, and driven his frosted toes into the farthest corners of some moth-eaten old fur slippers, he sat right down in a great spirit of diablerie to tell Mrs. Tome Gallien just what he thought of her.
"I hope you're satisfied!" he began quite abruptly in a firm and emphatic black hand writing. "Driven out into the winter streets by your most charming gift, I have in four short hours walked eleven miles; supped in a conspicuous restaurant with a perfectly 76strange girl and at her expense; been branded publicly for all time, first as the girl's beau and later as her husband and the father of certain imaginary children; and have also in due time, still included in the original four hours, you understand, kissed said girl 'Good- night' on her own doorstep in the full glare of a city electric light,—and am now at ten-thirty P. M. of the aforesaid Monday evening waiting patiently in my room until Friday afternoon next when, heavily chaperoned by some kind of a relative with rheumatism, the said Adventure will appear to investigate the piano—and myself.
"Once again, in the language of my opening sentence, and with all due respects, I repeat, 'I hope you're satisfied'!"
Then quite contented both in fancy and in fact he settled down to kill time and cure patients until Friday.
But the intervening days it seemed were not to be bereft entirely of sensations either confusing or bizarre.
On Wednesday night he heard from Mrs. Tome Gallien. And by telegram. 77
"Bungler!" wired Mrs. Tome Gallien. "What in creation have you done? The adventure intended for you does not arrive till Saturday, office, four o'clock."
The message happened to be delivered in writing this time, a flaunting yellow page, and, still clutching it tight by one twittering corner, the Young Doctor dropped down into the first chair he could reach, and with his chin dropped low like an old man's on his breast sat staring for an interminable time into his glowing fire.
Then quite suddenly at nine o'clock, with the funny new smile that he seemed to have acquired somewhere recently, he walked over to his telephone, fumbled a minute with the directory, experimented at least two minutes with Central's temper, located Miss Solvei Kjelland, and addressed her in his most formal manner.
"Miss Solvei Kjelland?" he questioned.
"S-o," said the familiar voice at the other end of the wire.
"This is Doctor Kendrue," he growled. "Dr. Sam Kendrue." 78
"So?" conceded the voice without a vestige of affright.
"It seems, Miss Kjelland," he stammered, "that there has been some sort of a—of a—well, misunderstanding about Friday afternoon. It is all a mistake, it seems, about your being The Adventure! Mrs. Gallien indeed has just telegraphed to that effect. The 'Real Adventure,' it appears, is not due at my office until four o'clock on Saturday!"
"S-o?" conceded Miss Solvei Kjelland. If she seemed to be swallowing rather extra hard once or twice the sound was not sharply discernible certainly from the little fluttering swallow of the telephone instrument. "So?" she repeated blithely. "Well, that is all right. The piano keeps! And the Saturday afternoon is just as good to me as the Friday! And I am all as curious with joy as you to see what it is, this Adventure that is more nice than me! Good night!"