The White Linen Nurse Part 5

"Don't ever be b.u.mptious?" squinted the Senior Surgeon perplexedly through his gla.s.ses.

"Yes," said Rae Malgregor very timidly. "It's my--motto."

"Your motto?" sniffed the Superintendent.

"Your motto?" chuckled the Senior Surgeon.

"Yes, my motto," repeated Rae Malgregor with the slightest perceptible tinge of resentment. "And it's a perfectly good motto, too! Only, of course, it hasn't got any style to it. That's why I didn't want the girls to see it," she confided a bit drearily. Then palpably before their eyes they saw her spirit leap into ineffable pride. "My Father gave it to me," she announced briskly. "And my Father said that, when I came home in June, if I could honestly say that I'd never once been b.u.mptious--all my three years here,--he'd give me a--heifer! And--"

"Well I guess you've lost your heifer!" said the Senior Surgeon bluntly.

"Lost my heifer?" gasped the girl. Big-eyed and incredulous she stood for an instant staring back and forth from the Superintendent's face to the Senior Surgeon's. "You mean?" she stammered, "you mean--that I've--been--b.u.mptious--just now? You mean--that after all these years of--meachin' meekness--I've lost--?"

Plainly even to the Senior Surgeon and the Superintendent the bones in her knees weakened suddenly like knots of tissue paper. No power on earth could have made her break discipline by taking a chair while the Senior Surgeon stood, so she sank limply down to the floor instead, with two great solemn tears welling slowly through the fingers with which she tried vainly to cover her face.

"And the heifer was brown, with one white ear; it was awful cunning,"

she confided mumblingly. "And it ate from my hand--all warm and sticky, like--loving sandpaper." There was no protest in her voice, nor any whine of complaint, but merely the abject submission to Fate of one who from earliest infancy had seen other crops blighted by other frosts.

Then tremulously with the air of one who, just as a matter of spiritual tidiness, would purge her soul of all sad secrets, she lifted her entrancing, tear-flushed face from her strong, st.u.r.dy, utterly unemotional fingers and stared with amazing blueness, amazing blandness into the Senior Surgeon's scowling scrutiny.

"And I'd named her--for you!" she said. "I'd named her--Patience--for you!"

Instantly then she scrambled to her knees to try and a.s.suage by some miraculous apology the horrible shock which she read in the Senior Surgeon's face.

"Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn't scientific!" she pleaded desperately. "Oh, of course, sir, I know it isn't scientific at all! But up where I live, you know, instead of praying for anybody, we--we name a young animal--for the virtue that that person--seems to need the most.

And if you tend the young animal carefully--and train it right--!

Why--it's just a superst.i.tion, of course, but--Oh, sir!" she floundered hopelessly, "the virtue you needed most in your business was what I meant! Oh, really, sir, I never thought of criticizing your character!"

Gruffly the Senior Surgeon laughed. Embarra.s.sment was in the laugh, and anger, and a fierce, fiery sort of resentment against both the embarra.s.sment and the anger,--but no possible trace of amus.e.m.e.nt.

Impatiently he glanced up at the fast speeding clock.

"Good Lord!" he exclaimed, "I'm an hour late now!" Scowling like a pirate he clicked the cover of his watch open and shut for an uncertain instant. Then suddenly he laughed again, and there was nothing whatsoever in his laugh this time except just amus.e.m.e.nt.

"See here, Miss--Bossy Tamer," he said. "If the Superintendent is willing, go get your hat and coat, and I'll take you out on that meningitis case with me. It's a thirty mile run if it's a block, and I guess if you sit on the front seat it will blow the cobwebs out of your brain--if anything will," he finished not unkindly.

Like a white hen sensing the approach of some utterly unseen danger the Superintendent seemed to bristle suddenly in every direction.

"It's a bit--irregular," she protested in her most even tone.

"Bah! So are some of the most useful of the French verbs!" snapped the Senior Surgeon. In the midst of authority his voice could be inestimably soft and rea.s.suring, but sometimes on the brink of a.s.serting said authority he had a tone that was distinctly unpleasant.

"Oh, very well," conceded the Superintendent with some waspishness.

Hazily for an instant Rae Malgregor stood staring into the Superintendent's uncordial face. "I'd--I'd apologize," she faltered, "but I--don't even know what I said. It just blew up!"

Perfectly coldly and perfectly civilly the Superintendent received the overture. "It was quite evident, Miss Malgregor, that you were not altogether responsible at the moment," she conceded in common justice.

Heavily then, like a person walking in her sleep the girl trailed out of the room to get her coat and hat.

Slamming one desk-drawer after another the Superintendent drowned the sluggish sound of her retreating footsteps.

"There goes my best nurse!" she said grimly. "My very best nurse! Oh no, not the most brilliant one, I didn't mean that, but the most reliable!

The most nearly perfect human machine that it has ever been my privilege to see turned out,--the one girl that week in, week out, month after month, and year after year, has always done what she's told,--when she was told,--and the exact way she was told,--without questioning anything, without protesting anything, without supplementing anything with some disastrous original conviction of her own--_and look at her now_!" Tragically the Superintendent rubbed her hand across her worried brow. "Coffee, you said it was?" she asked skeptically. "Are there any special antidotes for coffee?"

With a queer little quirk to his mouth the gruff Senior Surgeon jerked his glance back from the open window where with the gleam of a slim torn-boyish ankle the frisky young Spring went scurrying through the tree-tops.

"What's that you asked?" he quizzed sharply. "Any antidotes for coffee?

Yes. Dozens of them. But none for Spring."

"Spring?" sniffed the Superintendent. A little s.h.i.+veringly she reached out and gathered a white knitted shawl around her shoulders. "Spring? I don't see what Spring's got to do with Rae Malgregor or any other young outlaw in my graduating cla.s.s. If graduation came in November it would be just the same! They're a set of ingrates, every one of them!"

Vehemently she turned aside to her card-index of names and slapped the cards through one by one without finding one single soothing exception.

"Yes, sir, a set of ingrates!" she repeated accusingly. "Spend your life trying to teach them what to do and how to do it! Cram ideas into those that haven't got any, and yank ideas out of those who have got too many!

Refine them, toughen them, scold them, coax them, everlastingly drill and discipline them! And then, just as you get them to a place where they move like clock-work, and you actually believe you can trust them, then graduation day comes round, and they think they're all safe,--and every single individual member of the cla.s.s breaks out and runs a-muck with the one dare-devil deed she's been itching to do every day the past three years! Why this very morning I caught the President of the Senior Cla.s.s with a breakfast tray in her hands--stealing the cherry out of her patient's grape fruit. And three of the girls reported for duty as bold as bra.s.s with their hair frizzed tight as a n.i.g.g.e.r doll's. And the girl who's going into a convent next week was trying on the laundryman's derby hat as I came up from lunch. And now, now--" the Superintendent's voice went suddenly a little hoa.r.s.e, "and now--here's Miss Malgregor--intriguing--to get an automobile ride with--_you!_"

"Eh?" cried the Senior Surgeon with a jump. "What? Is this an Insane Asylum? Is it a Nervine?" Madly he started for the door. "Order a ton of bromides!" he called back over his shoulder. "Order a car-load of them!

Saturate the whole place with them! Drown the whole d.a.m.ned place!"

Half way down the lower hall, all his nerves on edge, all his unwonted boyish impulsiveness quenched noxiously like a candle flame, he met and pa.s.sed Rae Malgregor without a sign of recognition.

"G.o.d! How I hate women!" he kept mumbling to himself as he struggled clumsily all alone into the torn sleeve lining of his thousand dollar mink coat.

CHAPTER IV

Like a train-traveler coming out of a long, smoky, smothery tunnel Into the clean-tasting light, the White Linen Nurse came out of the prudish-smelling hospital into the riotous mud-and-posie promise of the young April afternoon.

The G.o.d of Hysteria had certainly not deserted her! In all the full effervescent reaction of her brain-storm,--fairly bubbling with dimples, fairly foaming with curls,--light-footed, light-hearted, most ecstatically light-headed, she tripped down into the suns.h.i.+ne as though the great, harsh, granite steps that marked her descent were nothing more nor less than a gigantic, old, h.o.r.n.y-fingered hand pa.s.sing her blithely out to some deliciously unknown Lilliputian adventure.

As she pranced across the soggy April sidewalk to what she supposed was the Senior Surgeon's perfectly empty automobile she became conscious suddenly that the rear seat of the car was already occupied.

Out from an unseasonable snuggle of sable furs and flaming red hair a small, peevish face peered forth at her with frank curiosity.

"Why, h.e.l.lo!" beamed the White Linen Nurse. "Who are you?"

With unmistakable hostility the haughty little face retreated into its furs and its red hair. "Hus.h.!.+" commanded a shrill childish voice. "Hush, I say! I'm a cripple--and very bad-tempered. Don't speak to me!"

"Oh, my Glory!" gasped the White Linen Nurse. "Oh my Glory, Glory, Glory!" Without any warning whatsoever she felt suddenly like Nothing-At-All, rigged out in an exceedingly shabby old ulster and an excessively homely black slouch hat. In a desperate attempt at tangible tom-boyish nonchalance she tossed her head and thrust her hands down deep into her big ulster pockets. That the bleak hat reflected no decent featherish consciousness of being tossed, that the big threadbare pockets had no bottoms to them, merely completed her startled sense of having been in some way blotted right out of existence.

Behind her back the Senior Surgeon's huge fur-coated approach dawned blissfully like the thud of a rescue party.

But if the Senior Surgeon's blunt, wholesome invitation to ride had been perfectly sweet when he prescribed it for her in the Superintendent's office, the invitation had certainly soured most amazingly in the succeeding ten minutes. Abruptly now, without any greeting, he reached out and opened the rear door of the car, and nodded curtly for her to enter there.

Instantly across the face of the little crippled girl already ensconced in the tonneau a single flash of light went zig-zagging crookedly from brow to chin,--and was gone again. "h.e.l.lo, Fat Father!" piped the shrill little voice. "h.e.l.lo,--Fat Father!" Yet so subtly was the phrase mouthed, to save your soul you could not have proved just where the greeting ended and the taunt began.

There was nothing subtle however about the way in which the Senior Surgeon's hand shot out and slammed the tonneau door bang-bang again on its original pa.s.senger. His face was crimson with anger. Brusquely he pointed to the front seat.

"You may sit in there, with me, Miss Malgregor!" he thundered.