VII
A Miller waiting in a shop! No! It was too much!
“I won’t do it!” Benedicta thought, angry tears in her eyes. “I’ll leave his horrible, vulgar shop! I never want to see him again! So this is what he calls something worth doing! In a year he’ll pay back Mr. Wilkinson and be standing on his own feet—”
Somehow the phrase arrested her. Standing on his own feet! Working honestly and faithfully and happily, proud of his work, confident of success, looking forward, instead of back—standing on his own feet!
Benedicta was at the door, with her hand on the latch, but she could not open it. It was as if a crowd of new ideas were holding it fast, keeping her in there. This bright, neat little place, where something was done, instead of remembered—this thing that was being built up, instead of falling into ruins—what had she ever had in her life one-half so fine? After all, wasn’t it an adventure, wasn’t it a worthy thing to do, to stand on his own feet?
The door was pushed open then, and the next instant the daughter of the Millers was confronted by a customer. Suddenly a strange new desire came over her—a desire to do something, instead of just being herself, a fierce determination to make even the smallest sort of individual effort.
In an instant, Benedicta knew all sorts of things she wasn’t aware of knowing. She understood the arrangement of the stock. She knew how to talk to this strange man. She was calm, reasonable, efficient. He wavered, and said he didn’t think he would take anything that morning; and she persuaded him! She made a sale!
She wrapped up the book and took the money for it. She kept the coins in her hand and stared at them. The shop was an entirely different place. The whole world was changed. She walked thoughtfully about, she saw improvements that could be made.
“Got it!” cried Dumall boyishly.
“Got what?” asked Benedicta, turning with a slight, preoccupied frown.
“The agency. I’m sorry I had to leave you, Benedicta. I ought to have some sort of assistant, but that’ll have to wait. Now, then, dear girl, let’s go out to lunch!”
“And leave the shop?” she inquired.
“I’ll close it for an hour. I often do, you know. No one’s likely to come in.”
“Some one did come in, just now,” said Benedicta, “and bought a book.” She handed him the money. “So you see,” she went on quite sternly, “if there’d been no one here—”
“But I have to. We’ll only be gone—”
“I’ll stay here while you have lunch.”
“But, Benedicta!” he objected. “I want to be with you. Never mind the shop!”
“Francis, I’m ashamed of you!” said she. “The shop shan’t be left alone. I—I love it!”
“Love the shop?” he asked. “Is that all?”
“Well, anyhow—I’d like to help you, Francis,” she murmured. “I’d be glad to come every day until—until you don’t need me any more.”
Young Dumall looked at her.
“I don’t think you know what you’re undertaking, Benedicta,” he said. “If you’re going to come until I don’t need you, it’s a life job!”
“Do run along and get your lunch!” replied Benedicta, dignified in spite of very flushed cheeks. “I—I believe a job was just what I always wanted, Francis![Pg 138]”
MUNSEY’S
MAGAZINE
FEBRUARY, 1924
Vol. LXXXI NUMBER 1
Nickie and Pem
THE STORY OF A YOUNG WOMAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO WASTE HER LIFE
By Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
“PEM, you’re too darned good!” said Nickie.
“I don’t call it being good,” replied Miss Pembroke. “I call it simply being self-respecting.”
This was the sort of thing her friends found objectionable, and Nickie began to object now.
“Lord!” said she. “Don’t we work hard enough to deserve a little fun now and then? It won’t hurt your precious self-respect to speak to a man now and then, will it? I can’t—”
“Oh, that’s all nonsense!” interrupted Miss Pembroke. “I see enough of men, and I put up with enough from them. When I’m off duty, I don’t have to put up with anything, and I won’t!”
“Nobody wants you to. The boys who are coming this evening are awfully nice boys. If you’d just come in and speak to them—”
Miss Pembroke closed her book sharply.
“Nickie,” she said, “I’m very fond of you; but I don’t like your friends—not any of them—and I wish you’d let me alone.”
“Certainly,” replied Nickie, in a haughty and offended tone.
She turned all her attention upon the process of manicuring, but neither the haughtiness nor the silence reassured Miss Pembroke, who knew that they wouldn’t last. It was hardly worth while to open her book again, for Nickie would be sure to interrupt.
“It’s getting to be too much of a good thing,” she reflected. “I needed a good rest after that last case, but I’ll never get it while Nickie’s here. This whole thing was a mistake. I ought to have taken a room somewhere by myself, where I couldn’t be bothered.”
This was by no means the first time she had regretted her present domestic arrangements. It was all Nickie’s fault, of course. Nickie had told her what a fine thing it would be to join with three other graduate nurses in taking a flat.
“A nice little home of our own,” Nickie had said, “where we can rest when we want to, and entertain our friends, and keep all our things. The other girls are simply great. You’ll like them.”
Miss Pembroke had said that five girls were too many.
“But we’ll never all be home at the same time,” Nickie had assured her. “Lots of times you and I will have the place to ourselves.”
In the course of a year this had happened only once. When Nickie was at home, Pem was off on a case. When Pem came home, instead of finding her faithful[Pg 140] Nickie, one of the other girls would be there, or sometimes two of them; and Pem didn’t like them. She didn’t like their “parties,” or their conversation, or their cheerful, careless style of housekeeping.
She herself was never careless, and, though she was even-tempered and polite, she wasn’t often cheerful. As a nurse, she was matchless. Doctors wanted to send her to their most troublesome and exacting patients, because not only was she quick, capable, and intelligent, but she could hold her tongue and keep her temper, and she had a cool, quiet way with her that kept her patients in good order.
But this cool, quiet way of which doctors so highly approved was not at all pleasing to her housemates. Even Nickie thought it deplorable.
“Pem,” she had said to her once, “you could be young and beautiful, if you’d only learn how!”
There was truth in that observation. Miss Pembroke had both youth and beauty, and somehow managed to disguise them, so that they often went unnoticed. People would say that she was “impressive,” or “dignified,” or something of that sort, because they never saw her off guard, as Nickie saw her now. She was a tall, slender, dark-haired girl, with an austere, fine-bred face—not the sort of face one would turn to look after in the street, but a face which patients—above all, male patients—found very, very hard to forget. Her slender hands were clasped about one knee, and her clear amber eyes were staring thoughtfully before her. She was, thought Nickie, engaged in daydreams of some mysterious and enchanting kind unknown to more ordinary girls. But in reality—
“Nickie’s getting coarse,” Miss Pembroke was reflecting.
There was no coarseness to be seen in Miss Nicholson’s rosy, jolly face, nor to be observed in her manners and conversation. Indeed, no one but Miss Pembroke had yet seen any trace of it; but Pem was by nature critical, and just at this moment she was jaded and dispirited after six weeks of a ferocious typhoid patient, who had fallen in love with her in a very trying and ill-tempered way. Moreover, she was mortally weary of Nickie’s persistence.
“I’m sick and tired of men,” she thought. “All Nickie ever thinks of is men, and going to parties, and having what she calls a good time.”
Now this was not quite doing justice to Nickie. When she was not working, she was undeniably very fond of playing; but when you consider how very short and infrequent were her play times, and how very hard and exhausting was her work; when you consider that this lively, warm-hearted young creature had to witness every sort of human agony and wretchedness; when you bear in mind the tremendous responsibilities she so faithfully accepted; her generous readiness to do more than she needed to do, her charity, her sympathy, her sturdy courage—when you think of all this, it is not difficult to forgive her for being somewhat frivolous during her little hours of freedom.
There were weeks at a time when men, parties, and having a good time gave her mighty little concern. Just now, however, her mind was entirely given to such matters; and, as Pem expected, she couldn’t help trying again to persuade her friend.
“Oh, Pem!” she said coaxingly. “Just this once! Come in and speak to the boys, and if you don’t like them—”
“No!” said Pem.
But she did, and, by doing so, she changed the course of three lives.
She had no intention of seeing Nickie’s friends. In fact, she came nearer to quarreling with Nickie than she had ever yet come, and she retired to her own room with flushed cheeks and a frown on her calm brow. She was not in the habit of losing her temper, and this unusual annoyance disturbed her. She was restless, and couldn’t settle down to read or sew.
Her neat little room seemed all at once too neat and too little, and she wanted to get out of it. It was a clear, fine night. A walk, even a solitary and aimless one, wouldn’t be bad. She had put on her hat and coat, and was just about to open her door, when—when Nickie’s party arrived.
Impossible to go out now! In order to reach the front door, she would have to pass by the sitting room, and Nickie would see her and stop her.
“Nickie has absolutely no pride!” she thought, angrier than ever. “Even after what I said to her, she’d try to drag me in there!”
She took off her hat and flung it on the bed.
“I’ll read,” she decided.
She couldn’t read. The party disturbed her too much. They were laughing and[Pg 141] talking, and presently some one began to play the piano and sing. It was an idiotic song, but it was delivered in a hearty, boyish voice that was somehow very touching.
There was violent applause when the singer finished, and after a few minutes he began again.
Pem came nearer to the door, her face grown very pale. “Keep the Home Fires Burning!” Some one else sang that—one night in Montreal—the night before the troop ship went out—a boy in a lieutenant’s uniform. Pem snapped the light and stood listening in the dark, her hands clenched, her eyes closed.
“So turn the dark clouds inside out,
Till the boys come home.”
“Oh, God!” whispered Pem; for that boy would never come home, and the Pem who had listened to his gallant young voice was gone, too.
The singing stopped, only not for Pem. It went on sounding in her ears. The voice that she would never hear again and the living voice mingled together until she could bear it no longer. She must go in and see this other one—see with her own eyes that he was a stranger, in no way like—any one else.