IV
One evening Christine decided to make apple fritters. Not that she so little understood Paul as to imagine that fritters, even if made with apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, would move him to tenderness, or that she was so stupid and so gross as to think any sort of cooking a solution for spiritual problems; but he liked the things, and she liked to please him, even in the smallest way.
When he came home, she met him at the door, with the smile and the casual air she knew best suited him. She didn’t ask him to hurry with his interminable routine of washing and changing his clothes, because it did not agree with him to hurry, and he could not, even when he tried. Instead, she wisely made due allowance for that time, and when at last she heard him coming down the stairs, she dropped the first spoonful of batter into the frying pan—
Paul heard her scream, and flew to her, but she had already flung a box of salt into the blazing fat, and she turned toward him, smiling again; only it was a distorted and piteous smile.
“What’s the matter?” he cried. “What happened, Christy, darling?”
“Nothing,” she answered, struggling with an anguish nearly intolerable. “The fat blazed up, and I burned myself a little—that’s all.”
“Let me see!” he demanded.
She held out her pretty arm, cruelly scalded. Paul was beside himself. He tele[Pg 67]phoned for the doctor and then set to work to assuage her pain, with the best intentions in the world, but without much skill. He spilled a great deal of linseed oil on Christine’s frock and on the rug, he put a frightfully thick and clumsy bandage about her arm, and he got cologne into her eyes, while trying to relieve a headache which did not exist.
All the doctors in the world could not have done Christine so much good. She lay on the sofa, and Paul sat beside her, looking into her face with miserable anxiety; and so great was her delight in his awkward tenderness, his terrible concern, that it needed no effort to smile.
“Don’t worry so, Paul, dear,” she entreated.
“I can’t help it, my dearest girl. If we love each other, and share our work and our play, we can’t help sharing each other’s pain. And you know, don’t you, little Christy—”
She could have wept when the telephone rang, because she wanted so dreadfully to hear the rest of that last sentence. She watched Paul cross the room and take down the receiver. Then he turned and dashed toward the hall.
“Miss Banks’s house is on fire!” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll leave the door unlatched for the doctor!”
Off he went. Christine sat up.
“You beast!” she sobbed. “You horrid little beast! You’ve spoiled everything! You did it on purpose—I know you did!”
This was manifestly unjust. Miss Banks might have been capable of burning down a house to attract attention, but she couldn’t have known just the right moment in which to do it. She might have been glad enough to interrupt Paul’s speech, but she couldn’t have managed it so well unless chance had favored her.
Christine, suffering as she was, may well be excused for being unreasonable. Perhaps it would be kinder not to tell you all the things she thought about Miss Banks.
The village fire apparatus went tearing down the road with a noble uproar. Surely that should have released Paul, but still he didn’t come, or the doctor, either, and Christine began to grow alarmed.
“He’ll be hurt!” she thought. “She’ll urge him to do all sorts of dangerous things! He’ll be killed! He’ll be killed, showing off!”
In another instant, regardless of the pain that made her sick and faint, Christine would have run out of the house and down the road, if she hadn’t heard Paul’s voice outside.
“Now, then!” he was saying. “Only a step more! That’s a brave girl!”
Christine threw open the front door, and there he was, supporting a partially collapsed Miss Banks up the steps. Christine forgot all her resentment at the sight of that limp, helpless figure. She forgot her own bandaged arm, forgot everything except the honest sympathy and kindness that made her what she was.
“Oh, you poor child!” she cried. “Is she badly hurt, Paul?”
Paul half carried Miss Banks in, and she dropped face downward on the sofa—a pitiful little figure, with her bright, disheveled hair and her slender body.
“The house,” he said solemnly, “is burned to ashes!”
“But Miss Banks—is she badly hurt?”
“She’s not exactly hurt,” said he, still solemn. “It’s more a nervous shock, I think.”
All sorts of curious things took place in Christine’s mind, but she said not a word. She watched Paul ministering to the nervously shocked one. She watched Miss Banks growing a little better, so that she was able to sob forth a catalogue of the marvelous things she had lost; but never a word did Christine say—not even when Paul sat down on a near-by chair, and wrote lists for the insurance company, dictated by Miss Banks with many sobs.
Suddenly she started up.
“Oh! My photograph of Deccabroni!”
“What’s Deccabroni?” inquired Paul.
“He’s a wonderful patriot—from one of those wonderful, brave little countries—I forgot which. It’s a signed photograph. Oh, I can’t bear to lose it! Not that! Anything but Deccabroni!”
She became hysterical about the lost Deccabroni. When the doctor came, she was in an alarming condition, and was making quite a disturbance. Taking it for granted that this was the patient, and with only a bow for the silent Christine, the doctor advanced to the sofa, and calmly and competently set about tranquillizing her.
He showed little enthusiasm for the task, and perhaps Miss Banks noticed this, for quite suddenly she became tranquil, and explained that the cause of her agitation was the loss of an invaluable photograph.[Pg 68] She even began to relate some of the exploits of Deccabroni, in so interesting a way that the doctor sat down to listen more comfortably. He might have sat there for a long time, if Christine had not fainted.