Read Ebook: The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine August 1913 Vol. LXXXVI. New Series: Vol. LXIV. May to October 1913 by Various

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~Washington, Fresh Light on~ 635

VERSE

~Limericks.~ Text and pictures by Oliver Herford.

THE WHITE LINEN NURSE

HOW RAE MALGREGOR UNDERTOOK GENERAL HEARTWORK FOR A FAMILY OF TWO

BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

IN THREE PARTS: PART ONE

The White Linen Nurse was so tired that her noble expression ached.

Incidentally her head ached and her shoulders ached and her lungs ached, and the ankle-bones of both feet ached excruciatingly; but nothing of her felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression. Like a strip of lip-colored lead suspended from her poor little nose by two tugging, wire-gray wrinkles, her persistently conscientious sick-room smile seemed to be whanging aimlessly against her front teeth. The sensation was very unpleasant.

Impulsively she sprang for the prim white mirror that capped her prim white bureau, and stood staring up into her own entrancing, bright-colored Nova Scotian reflection with tense, unwonted interest.

Except for the unmistakable smirk which fatigue had clawed into her plastic young mouth-lines, there was nothing special the matter with what she saw.

All along the back of her neck little sharp, prickly pains began to sting and burn.

"Silly--simpering--pink-and-white puppet!" she scolded squintingly, "I'll teach you how to look like a real girl!"

Very threateningly she raised herself to her tiptoes and thrust her glowing, corporeal face right up into the moulten, elusive, quicksilver face in the mirror. Pink for pink, blue for blue, gold for gold, dollish smirk for dollish smirk, the mirror mocked her seething inner fretfulness.

Furtively with the tip of her index-finger she started to search her imperturbable pink cheek for the spot where Joe Hazeltine's kiss had formerly flamed.

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 anaesthesia, 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 blas? 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.

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.

Discordantly into this rapturously pagan vision of pranks and posies broke one of her room-mates all a-whiff with ether, a-whir with starch.

Instantly with the first creak of the door-handle, the White Linen Nurse was on her feet, breathless, resentful, grotesquely defiant.

"Get out of here, Zillah Forsyth!" she cried furiously. "Get out of here quick, and leave me alone! I want to think."

Perfectly serenely the new-comer advanced into the room. With her pale, ivory-tinted cheeks, her great limpid, brown eyes, her soft dark hair parted madonna-like across her beautiful brow, her whole face was like some exquisite composite picture of all the saints of history. Her voice also was amazingly tranquil.

"Oh, fudge!" she drawled. "What's eating you, Rae Malgregor? I won't either get out. It's my room just as much as it is yours. And Helene's just as much as it is ours. And, besides," she added more briskly, "it's four o'clock now, and, with graduation at eight and the dance afterward, if we don't get our stuff packed up now, when in thunder shall we get it done?" Quite irrelevantly she began to laugh. Her laugh was perceptibly shriller than her speaking-voice. "Say, Rae," she confided, "that minister I nursed through pneumonia last winter wants me to pose as 'Sanctity' for a stained-glass window in his new church! Isn't he the softy?"

"Shall you do it?" quizzed Rae Malgregor, a trifle tensely.

"Shall I do it?" mocked the new-comer. "Well, you just watch me! Four mornings a week in June at full week's wages? Fresh Easter lilies every day? White silk angel-robes? All the high souls and high paints kowtowing around me? Why, it would be more fun than a box of monkeys. Sure I'll do it."

Expeditiously as she spoke, the new-comer reached up for the framed motto over her own ample mirror, and yanking it down with one single tug, began to busy herself adroitly with a snarl in the picture-cord. Like a withe of willow yearning over a brook, her slender figure curved to the task. Very scintillatingly the afternoon light seemed to brighten suddenly across her lap. "You'll Be A Long Time Dead!" glinted the motto through its sun-dazzled glass.

Still panting with excitement, still bristling with resentment, Rae Malgregor stood surveying the intrusion and the intruder. A dozen impertinent speeches were rioting in her mind. Twice her mouth opened and shut before she finally achieved the particular opprobrium that completely satisfied her.

"Bah! you look like a--trained nurse!" she blurted forth at last with hysterical triumph.

"So do you," said the new-corner, amiably.

With a little gasp of dismay, Rae Malgregor sprang suddenly forward. Her eyes were flooded with tears.

"Why, that's just exactly what's the matter with me!" she cried. "My face is all worn out trying to look like a trained nurse! O Zillah, how do you know you were meant to be a trained nurse? How does anybody know? O Zillah! save me! Save me!"

Languorously Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work and laughed. Her laugh was like the accidental tinkle of sleigh-bells in midsummer, vaguely disquieting, a shiver of frost across the face of a lily.

"Save you from what, you great big overgrown, tow-headed doll-baby?" she questioned blandly. "For Heaven's sake, the only thing you need is to go back to whatever toy-shop you came from and get a new head. What in creation's the matter with you lately, anyway Oh, of course you've had rotten luck this past month but what of it? That's the trouble with you country girls. You haven't got any stamina."

With slow, shuffling-footed astonishment Rae Malgregor stepped out into the center of the room. "Country girls!" she repeated blankly. "Why, you're a country girl yourself."

Slowly, with a soft-snuggling sigh of contentment, she raised her slim white fingers to coax her dusky hair a little looser, a little farther down, a little more madonna-like across her sweet, mild forehead, then, snatching out abruptly at a convenient shirt-waist, began with extraordinary skill to apply its dangly lace sleeves as a protective bandage for the delicate glass-faced motto still in her lap, placed the completed parcel with inordinate scientific precision in the exact corner of her packing-box, and then went on very diligently, very zealously, to strip the men's photographs from the mirror on her bureau. There were twenty-seven photographs in all, and for each one she had there already cut and prepared a small square of perfectly fresh, perfectly immaculate, white tissue wrapping-paper. No one so transcendently fastidious, so exquisitely neat in all her personal habits, had ever before been trained in that particular hospital.

Very soberly the doll-faced girl stood watching the men's pleasant paper countenances smoothed away one by one into their chaste white veilings, until at last, quite without warning, she poked an accusing, inquisitive finger directly across Zillah Forsyth's shoulder.

Deeply into Zillah Forsyth's pale, ascetic cheek dawned a most amazing dimple.

"Sort of jarred you girls some, didn't it," she queried, "to see me strutting round with a photo of the Senior Surgeon?" The little cleft in her chin showed suddenly with almost startling distinctness. "Well, seeing it's you," she grinned, "and the year's all over, and there's nobody left that I can worry about it any more, I don't mind telling you in the least that I--bought it out of a photographer's show-case. There, are you satisfied now?"

With easy nonchalance she picked up the picture in question and scrutinized it shrewdly.

"Lord! what a face!" she attested. "Nothing but granite. Hack him with a knife, and he wouldn't bleed, but just chip off into pebbles." With exaggerated contempt she shrugged her supple shoulders. "Bah! how I hate a man like that! There's no fun in him." A little abruptly she turned and thrust the photograph into Rae Malgregor's hand. "You can have it if you want to," she said. "I'll trade it to you for that lace corset-cover of yours."

Like water dripping through a sieve the photograph slid through Rae Malgregor's frightened fingers. With nervous apology she stooped and picked it up again, and held it gingerly by one remote corner. Her eyes were quite wide with horror.

"Oh, of course I'd like the--picture well enough," she stammered, "but it wouldn't seem--exactly respectable to--to trade it for a corset-cover."

"Oh, very well," drawled Zillah Forsyth; "tear it up, then."

Expeditiously, with frank, non-sentimental fingers, Rae Malgregor tore the tough cardboard across, and again across, and once again across, and threw the conglomerate fragments into the waste-basket. And her expression all the time was no more, no less, than the expression of a person who would vastly rather execute his own pet dog or cat than risk the possible bungling of an outsider. Then, like a small child trotting with great relief to its own doll-house, she trotted over to her bureau, extracted the lace corset-cover, and came back with it in her hand, to lean across Zillah Forsyth's shoulder again and watch the men's faces go slipping off into oblivion. Once again, abruptly, without warning, she halted the process with a breathless exclamation.

Chucklingly, Zillah Forsyth withdrew the special photograph from its half-completed wrappings.

"Oh, him?" she said. "Oh, that's a chap I met on the train last summer. He's a brakeman or something. He's a--"

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