Dizzily, with her stubby finger-tips prodded deep into every jaded facial muscle that she could compass, she staggered toward the air and, dropping down into the first friendly chair that bumped against her knees, sat staring blankly out across the monotonous city roofs that flanked her open window, trying very, very hard, for the first time in her life, to consider the general phenomenon of being a trained nurse.
All about her, as inexorable as anæsthesia, horrid as the hush of tomb or public library, lurked the painfully unmistakable sense of institutional restraint. Mournfully to her ear from some remote kitcheny region of pots and pans a browsing spoon tinkled forth from time to time with soft muffled resonance. Up and down every clammy white corridor innumerable young feet, born to prance and stamp, were creeping stealthily to and fro in rubber-heeled whispers. Along the somber fire-escape just below her windowsill, like a covey of snubbed doves, six or eight of her classmates were cooing and crooning together with excessive caution concerning the imminent graduation exercises that were to take place at eight o’clock that very evening. Beyond her dreariest ken of muffled voices, beyond her dingiest vista of slate and brick, on a far, faint hillside, a far, faint streak of April green went roaming jocundly skyward. Altogether sluggishly, as though her nostrils were plugged with warm velvet, the smell of spring and ether and scorched mutton-chops filtered in and out, in and out, in and out, of her abnormally jaded senses.
Taken all in all, it was not a propitious afternoon for any girl as tired and as pretty as the White Linen Nurse to be considering the general phenomenon of anything except April.
In the real country, they tell me, where the young spring runs as wild and bare as a nymph through every dull-brown wood and hay-gray meadow, the blasé farmer-lad will not even lift his eyes from the plow to watch the pinkness of her passing. But here in the prudish brick-minded city, where the young spring at her friskiest is nothing more audacious than a sweltering, winter-swathed madcap who has impishly essayed some fine morning to tiptoe down street in her soft, sloozily, green-silk-stockinged feet, the whole hobnailed population reels back aghast and agrin before the most innocent flash of the rogue’s green-veiled toes. And then, suddenly snatching off its own cumbersome winter foot-habits, goes chasing madly after her in its own prankish, varicolored socks.
Now, the White Linen Nurse’s socks were black, and cotton at that, a combination incontestably sedate. And the White Linen Nurse had waded barefoot through too many posied country pastures to experience any ordinary city thrill over the sight of a single blade of grass pushing scarily through a crack in the pavement, or a puny, concrete-strangled maple-tree flushing wanly to the smoky sky. Indeed, for three hustling, square-toed, rubber-heeled city years the White Linen Nurse had never even stopped to notice whether the season was flavored with frost or thunder. But now, unexplainably, just at the end of it all, sitting innocently there at her own prim little bedroom window, staring innocently out across indomitable roof-tops, with the crackle of glory and diplomas already ringing in her ears, she heard instead, for the first time in her life, the gaily daredevil voice of the spring, a hoidenish challenge flung back at her, leaf-green, from the crest of a winter-scarred hill.
“Hello, White Linen Nurse!” screamed the saucy city Spring. “Hello, White Linen Nurse! Take off your homely starched collar, or your silly candy-box cap, or any other thing that feels maddeningly artificial, and come out! And be very wild!”
Like a puppy-dog cocking its head toward some strange, unfamiliar sound, the White Linen Nurse cocked her head toward the lure of the green-crested hill. Still wrestling conscientiously with the general phenomenon of being a trained nurse, she found her collar suddenly very tight, her tiny cap inexpressibly heavy and vexatious. Timidly she removed the collar, and found that the removal did not rest her in the slightest. Equally timidly she removed the cap, and found that even that removal did not rest her in the slightest. Then very, very slowly, but very, very permeatingly and completely, it dawned on the White Linen Nurse that never while eyes were blue, and hair was gold, and lips were red, would she ever find rest again until she had removed her noble expression.
With a jerk that started the pulses in her temples throbbing like two toothaches, she straightened up in her chair. All along the back of her neck the little blond curls began to crisp very ticklingly at their roots.
Still staring worriedly out over the old city’s slate-gray head to that inciting prance of green across the farthest horizon, she felt her whole being kindle to an indescribable passion of revolt against all hushed places. Seething with fatigue, smoldering with ennui, she experienced suddenly a wild, almost incontrollable, impulse to sing, to shout, to scream from the house-tops, to mock somebody, to defy everybody, to break laws, dishes, heads—anything, in fact, that would break with a crash.
And then at last, over the hills and far away, with all the outraged world at her heels, to run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and laugh, till her feet raveled out, and her lungs burst, and there was nothing more left of her at all—ever, ever, any more!