To add to his original concentration, the Senior Surgeon’s linen collar began to chafe him maddeningly under his chin. The annoyance added two scowls to his already blackly furrowed face, and at least ten miles an hour to his running time, but nothing whatsoever to his conversational ability.
“Father,” the Little Girl whimpered with faltering courage. Then panic-stricken, as wiser people have been before her, over the dreadful spookish remoteness of a perfectly normal human being who refuses either to answer or even to notice your wildest efforts at communication, she raised her waspish voice in its shrillest, harshest war-cry.
“Fat Father! Fat Father! F-A-T F-A-T-H-E-R!” she screeched out frenziedly at the top of her lungs.
The gun-shot agony of a wounded rabbit was in the cry, the last gurgling gasp of strangulation under a murderer’s reeking fingers, catastrophe unspeakable, disaster now irrevocable.
Clamping down his brakes with a wrench that almost tore the insides out of his engine, the Senior Surgeon brought the great car to a staggering standstill.
“What is it?” he cried in real terror. “For God’s sake, what is it?”
Limply the Little Girl stretched down from the White Linen Nurse’s lap till she could nick her toe against the shiniest woodwork in sight. Altogether aimlessly her small chin began to burrow deeper and deeper into her big fur collar.
“For God’s sake, what do you want?” demanded the Senior Surgeon. Even yet along his spine the little nerves crinkled with shock and apprehension. “For God’s sake, what do you want?”
Helplessly the child lifted her turbid eyes to his. With unmistakable appeal, her tiny hand went clutching out at one of the big buttons on his coat. Desperately for an instant she rummaged through her brain for some remotely adequate answer to this most thunderous question, and then retreated precipitously as usual to the sacristy of her own imagination.
“All the birds were there, Father!” she confided guilelessly.