After a long series of "weekly trials" which usually ended in a day or two with a demand for unearned wages, impudence, and vulgar insults from the "weighed and found wanting," a ménage was eventually established, comprising a red-haired cook, who, under a bland and benevolent exterior, was a calculating robber of the most cold-blooded description, and who, while despising her mistress for a "soft fool of a greenhorn," congratulated herself on the circumstance and resolved to take full advantage of it; a couple of housemaids one of whom was raw from minding goats on the Kerry hills, and the other recommended herself by a modest demand to be allowed to go to confession every Friday night. (The last had subsequently to be dismissed in spite of her holiness because, according to her story, she had been "ordered by her dochtor" to take an egg in brandy for her breakfast every morning and several times during the day, and faithfully followed the prescription except that she omitted the egg.) There was also a furnace and general utility man who fought with both cook and maids, and in the end stole Westenra's bicycle from the cellar; and a laundry woman who by arrangement "took two dollars a day," and appeared to spend most of her time seated at the kitchen table taking heavy meals as well.
Fortunately event and sequence rarely occur together, so that Val was not flooded out all at once by these disquieting things; they fell upon her from day to day like the gentle drips of water that wear away the stone. But life began to press and gibber in a strangely nightmare fashion round the vagabond journalist, and sometimes there would creep into the smoke-coloured eyes that loved so much to look upon colour and wide spaces, and "watch the silences," an expression slightly reminiscent of a wild thing caught in a trap--a trap full of pots and pans and daily menus, and weekly bills, and fighting cooks and shirking housemaids, and domestic problems,--such a trap as almost every woman finds herself caught in when she engages upon the career of wife to a professional man, and one in which few find success unless specially endowed with an ability for management, economy, and order. Poor Val's endowments were not of this kind. Well she knew it, but would not admit the fact even to herself.
She had dreamed of a little space of time between the date of their settling in with their servants about them and the opening of the hospital--a little space like the clearing in the midst of a tangled forest, where she could pitch a tent and rest for awhile with the thought of her wonderful happiness that Westenra's child was to be hers. She meant to recapture into their lives the magic air of that happy week in the Bronx woods. Once more they would adjust and gather about them the fabric of comradeship and love that was to be the veil between themselves and the world, and that somehow in the last few weeks of rushing turmoil had been mishandled and torn.
But the dream was vain. No sooner did the domestic mechanism of the house begin to work, creaking and straining like an old ship with an amateur hand at the wheel, when cases for operation were hurried in, the place was filled with nurses, other doctors and students bustled up and down the stairs, and there were endless comings and goings of patients' friends. The strangely disquieting scent of ether came stealing down like a living presence from the upper floor into the atmosphere of home Val was trying to establish in the rooms she and her husband occupied in the big house. It seemed to her, too, that other shadows came in and lingered around; that when operations were in progress pain-troubled spirits wandered through the house, hiding in corners, waiting fearfully. In the fight against these illusions, as well as with the complicated problems of housekeeping and management, life began to resolve itself into something very like Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens."
The burden of fifty-dollar-a-week nurses, rude and arrogant and of a self-reverence amazing, who fought like cannibals with the servants, and made turmoil all round them except in the splendid silence of the sick room. The burden of telephone bells that sounded from morning till night with the injurious sayings of waiting patients. The burden of bitter cold, as the winter came on, and Val suffered as only a tropical bird or flower can suffer in a bleak climate--the grim December dawns when the quiet of three feet of snow lay on the city, unbroken save by the jingle of the bells on the milkman's sleigh, or the shriek of the first car upon the frozen metals! The burden of the elevated railway in the avenue close by; the hideous rush of it through the night, like some monstrous winged beast on a ceaseless quest for its prey--the ferocity of its approach, the sinister melancholy of its receding cry! The burden of "bathroom extensions" where the water-pipes burst every night, dislocating the business of the house for hours--of frozen cisterns, and New York plumbers! Of a cellar furnace that would not heat the house, or, acting on some æsthetic principle of its own turned the bathrooms into ovens, while the patients were in cold-storage and in the operating-room the sponges froze to the tables! The burden of snow on the sidewalk, and policemen knocking at the front door to say it must be cleared, or that some one had fallen down and broken something, and compensation would have to be paid later by the householder!
The burden of a beloved man who, when things went wrong in office or operating-room, came roaring like a tiger in pain to his mate. For alas! Garrett Westenra was no Angel in the House! That was one of the strangest of all burdens to be borne, for Val always wanted to laugh at it, and yet she knew it was no laughing matter. Westenra at work and Westenra at play were two very different persons.
Val had been aware from the moment of their return to New York of a great nervous change in her husband's mentality. It seemed to her that as soon as they got into their new home he became all nerves and torment, and difficult and exigeant as a child. It had not taken her long to find that he possessed all the easily roused devils of the easy-going Irishman. At first she was amazed by this discovery, then confused, but in the end she loved him the better for it. Only it always seemed to her madly funny that a man with such width and height of mind should be no better than a cross-grained baby about some of the ordinary vexing trifles of everyday life. It was hard to believe that a medical scientist of the first water could fall into a state of fury over a wrongly entered telephone message, a mislaid stethoscope, or because a careless housemaid had misplaced something in his office; that a man who had nothing small or mean about him should swear vividly over the fact that some one had put a used tampon into his waste-paper basket instead of burning it or thrown a burnt-out match into his fireplace.
There was a dumb-waiter that travelled on a rope up and down between Val's sitting-room on the first floor and a little surgery at the back of Westenra's consulting-room, and never a day passed but that rope was rattled violently for Val to come to her little opening and receive some furious complaint concerning a negligent maid or a stupid nurse. Many a time and oft Westenra's special swear--a peculiar combination of his own--rang up the shaft.
"Hell's blood and blazes! What has that girl from the Kerry hills done with my stethoscope? How dare she touch it? She must have touched it--it's not on my desk.--Where are those No. 1 bandages?--Who has moved my note-book?--Will you find out from Nurse Soames why there are no tampons made?--Hell's bells!--Is this a doctor's house?--What kind of a doctor's house?"
The dumb-waiter travelled no farther than Val's room, and she issued orders that no one was to answer the rattle of the rope but herself. She realised that it was Westenra's safety-valve in moments of intense irritation. It gave her a spasm of painful merriment, even in the midst of her greatest weariness and worries, to hear her signal to come to the shaft and receive the storm. Later, when the stress of the day was over, she might laugh at him, and he, first furious, then ashamed, would finally laugh himself and beg her pardon like a generous and hot-tempered boy. But at the time she always gravely listened, and without comment put the trouble right as swiftly as she could. She realised only too clearly that the hospital was on his nerves as well as her own, and that his irritation came from a multiplicity of cares pressing on him, rather than from the one small incident that caused the explosion. Indeed, life was pressing hard on Westenra. He was working like a dog, and the dollars were rustling in, but the sound of their rustling gave him no great joy. His heart was elsewhere, in other work which must stand still, or perhaps, which was worse, be done by some one else. The hospital hemmed him in it too. He, quite as much as Val, felt caged. His work, his private life, all his interests for the moment seemed narrowly centralised into one street, one house, an affair of grubbing within four walls. Something in him rebelled at that, and not less because he himself had so arranged it. It irked him terribly to be mixed up with the machinery of this hospital, and his reserved nature chafed under the lack of privacy in the place that should have been his home. There were nurses everywhere. Val and he were never together for five minutes without being intruded upon by some one wanting something. Val had no control over the nurses; they did and said what they chose, having fear of no one but the doctor. He knew she had trouble with them every day, but he would not go into the matter. It was not his province to wrangle with women; he had told her so from the first when she came to him for advice. She must manage that part of the scheme by herself, he said; he had his own share of trouble and could not undertake hers as well. She had recoiled wonderingly before his unsympathetic attitude, but never again worried him about anything in the house. But he was aware that she was having a stiff time, and from his heart he pitied her. But what was to be done? They were in it now for loss or gain. His fortune was pledged to this thing and they had got to do or die by it. And he did not mean it to be die! Westenra was no quitter. It hurt Val to see the way he worked. She had never realised before what a dog's life is a doctor's. Her husband was at every one's beck and call but her own, and never could be sure of a peaceful hour to himself.