V. V.'s Eyes

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

It had been the intention of Mr. V.V. to call personally at the sick-room before breakfast, to see how Kern liked the arrival and appearance of Writing-Desk. But Miss Masters frustrated him at the door, saying that the child's heart was set upon conveying her thanks by formal note, and she had worried and fretted so over being refused that it seemed best to give her her way, particularly as she did not seem so well to-day. And in his disappointment over these tidings, the doctor presently forgot the desk entirely.

However, Kern's note arrived in the office an hour later, through the Kindness of Miss Masters, as the envelope advised. Mr. V.V. suspended a sentence to one of his sick in the middle to read it:

MY DEAR DR. VIVIAN:
Oh, Mr. V.V., how can I ever thank you for given me this lovely Writen Desk. I greatly appreciate your kind gift. Just putten my hands on it makes me so happy, I could cry, oh the soft feel this Pretty wood has got to it.
Your kind thought of me at this time has indeed pleased me. One is never so appreciative of the thought of one's friends, if I can call you my Friend, Mr. V.V., as when one lies in pain upon a sickbed, th'o I have no pain. It's the lovlyest sweetest dearest Desk ever was Mr. V.V., and how can me and Mommer ever make up for all you done for us. I don't know. I have every hope for a speedy change for the better in my condition, and I never dreamed Id' have a Ladys Writen Desk truly, or haven one would make me oh so Happy. My first note, dear Dr. Vivian, goes to you.
With repeated thanks for your considerate thought of me during my illness, believe me, with kind remembrances,
Yours very cordially,
Your faithful friend CORINNE.

The young man distributed mental italics as he read. He detected at sight the footprints of the Netiquette and Complete Letter Writer. But he did not smile once as he read and reread the odd little mosaic, and folded it at last and put it away in a pigeonhole of its own. No, his stabbing thought was only, Why didn't I do it all long ago?... Why?...

And similar things he thought next morning, and the next and next. For Kern did not get well, no matter what the calendar said, no matter how loyally Writing-Desk stood at her elbow to serve her, as It had said in the Note. Her morning temperature shot up a degree again, and there it stood day after day, and would not go down. Kern obviously grew thinner and weaker. And there came a day when the President of the Settlement Association, Mr. Stewart Byrd, came in person to the Dabney House before ten o'clock, and sent all the workmen away. He said there must be no noise about the place that day....

That relapse passed, but no one could say what a day might bring forth. The young doctor looked back over the past; he bowed beneath the burden that he felt upon him. However, due credit must be given to his friend Samuel O'Neill for assisting him to bring his sober meditations to a focus.

In these days O'Neill, having got his stiff factory law drafted, was becoming concerned with the problem of landing it on the statute-books. The complexion of the incoming legislature, which met in January, promised to be conservative; and the Commissioner, breathing threatenings and slaughter against the waist-coated interests which had so flouted his warnings last winter, had decided that a preliminary press campaign would be needed--beginning, say, November 1st--to arouse public opinion to the needs of reform. The lively "Chronicle," the "labor paper," offered space for a series of contributed articles from the Commission office, always provided that "hot stuff" only was furnished, by which was meant vigorous, if not libelous, assaults upon the existing order.

Now it became the earnest wish of Commissioner O'Neill that these hot-stuff articles should be written for him by his friend V.V., of the reformatory passions and the pen of a ready writer. And, the whole subject having been discussed several times in an indecisive sort of way, O'Neill one night whacked out a jagged argument.

"I had 'em going eight months ago--was starting out for Heth's with an axe--and you asked me to leave 'em to you. I thought you had something--an idea.... Say, V.V., suppose we'd gone and out bagged 'em then, like I wanted--would your friend Corinne be lyin' at death's door now?"

There was, indeed, nothing precisely original in this inquiry; but, put by another, and in so bald a form, it undoubtedly came upon a man somewhat stark and hard. The two men stood talking on a street corner, where they had met by chance, and their conversation here came to an end. V.V.'s reply to Sam's question was indefinite, to say the least of it. He merely observed that he must be getting on back to the office; adding that he didn't like to be absent for any length of time just now. But he didn't say at all, by that annoying habit of reserve he had, whether or not he would agree to write the articles! That was what Samuel O'Neill wanted to know....