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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Ebook has 1496 lines and 92114 words, and 30 pages

"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--"

Perfectly unreluctantly Rae Malgregor dropped the fluff of lace and ribbons into Zillah's lap and reached out with cheerful voraciousness to annex the young man's picture to her somewhat bleak possessions. "Oh, I don't care a rap who he is," she interrupted briskly; "but he's sort of cute-looking, and I've got an empty frame at home just that odd size, and mother's crazy for a new picture to stick up over the kitchen mantelpiece. She gets so tired of seeing nothing but the faces of people she knows all about."

Sharply Zillah Forsyth turned and stared up into the younger girl's face, and found no guile to whet her stare against.

For the first time an expression not altogether dollish darkened across Rae Malgregor's garishly juvenile blondness.

With a palpable flicker of interest Zillah Forsyth looked back across her shoulder.

"Engaged? How many times?" she asked bluntly.

As though the whole monogamous groundwork of civilization was threatened by the question, Rae Malgregor's hands went clutching at her breast.

Convulsively Zillah Forsyth began to rock herself to and fro.

"Oh, Lordy!" she chuckled. "Oh, Lordy! Lordy! Why, I've been engaged four times just this past year." In a sudden passion of fastidiousness, she bent down over the particular photograph in her hand and, snatching at a handkerchief, began to rub diligently at a small smutch of dust in one corner of the cardboard. Something in the effort of rubbing seemed to jerk her small round chin into almost angular prominence. "And before I'm through," she added, at least two notes below her usual alto tones--"and before I'm through, I'm going to get engaged to every profession that there is on the surface of the globe." Quite helplessly the thin paper skin of the photograph peeled off in company with the smutch of dust. "And when I marry," she ejaculated fiercely--"and when I marry, I'm going to marry a man who will take me to every place that there is on the surface of the globe. And after that--"

It was the other room-mate this time. The only real aristocrat in the whole graduating class, high-browed, high-cheek-boned, eyes like some far-sighted young prophet, mouth even yet faintly arrogant with the ineradicable consciousness of caste, a plain, eager, stripped-for-a-long-journey type of face--this was Helene Churchill. There was certainly no innocuous bloom of country hills and pastures in this girl's face, nor any seething small-town passion pounding indiscriminately at all the doors of experience. The men and women who had bred Helene Churchill had been the breeders also of brick and granite cities since the world was new.

Like one vastly more accustomed to treading on Persian carpets than on painted floors, she came forward into the room.

"Hello, children!" she said casually, and began at once without further parleying to take down the motto that graced her own bureau-top.

Indeed among all the thirty or more varieties of noble expression which an indomitable Superintendent had finally succeeded in inculcating into her graduating class, no other physiognomies had responded more plastically perhaps than these three to the merciless imprint of the great hospital machine which, in pursuance of its one repetitive design, discipline, had coaxed Zillah Forsyth into the semblance of a lady, snubbed Helene Churchill into the substance of plain womanhood, and, still uncertain just what to do with Rae Malgregor's rollicking rural immaturity, had frozen her face temporarily into the smugly dimpled likeness of a fancy French doll rigged out as a nurse for some gilt-edged hospital fair.

With characteristic desire to keep up in every way with her more mature, better educated classmates, to do everything, in fact, so fast, so well, that no one would possibly guess that she hadn't yet figured out just why she was doing it at all, Rae Malgregor now, with quickly reconventionalized cap and collar, began to hurl herself into the task of her own packing. From her open bureau drawer, with a sudden impish impulse toward worldly wisdom, she extracted first of all the photograph of the young brakeman.

"See, Helene! My new beau!" she giggled experimentally.

"Well, it's mine now," snapped Rae Malgregor, with unexpected edginess. "It's mine now, all right. Zillah said I could have him. Zillah said I could--write to him--if I wanted to," she finished a bit breathlessly.

Wider and wider Helene Churchill's eyes dilated.

"Write to a man whom you don't know?" she gasped. "Why, Rae! Why, it isn't even very nice to have a picture of a man you don't know."

Mockingly to the edge of her strong white teeth Rae Malgregor's tongue crept out in pink derision.

Like a smoldering fuse the rambling query crept back into the inner recesses of her brain, and fired once more the one great question that lay dormant there. Impetuously she ran forward and stared into Helene Churchill's face.

With a startled frown, Helene Churchill jerked back out of reach.

"What's the matter with you, Rae?" she quizzed sharply, and then, turning round casually to her book-case, began to draw from the shelves one by one her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, Robert Browning. "Oh, I did so want to go to China," she confided irrelevantly; "but my family have just written me that they won't stand for it. So I suppose I'll have to go into tenement work here in the city instead." With a visible effort she jerked her mind back again to the feverish question in Rae Malgregor's eyes. "Oh, you want to know where I got my motto?" she asked. A flash of intuition brightened suddenly across her absent-mindedness. "Oh," she smiled, "you mean you want to know just what the incident was that first made me decide to devote my life to humanity?"

"Yes," snapped Rae Malgregor.

A little shyly Helene Churchill picked up her copy of Marcus Aurelius and cuddled her cheek against its tender morocco cover.

"Really?" she questioned with palpable hesitation--"really, you want to know? Why, why--it's rather a--sacred little story to me. I shouldn't exactly want to have anybody--laugh about it."

"I'll laugh if I want to," attested Zillah Forsyth, forcibly, from the other side of the room.

Like a pugnacious boy's, Rae Malgregor's fluent fingers doubled up into two firm fists.

"I'll punch her if she even looks as though she wanted to," she signaled surreptitiously to Helene.

Shrewdly for an instant the city girl's narrowing eyes challenged and appraised the country girl's desperate sincerity. Then quite abruptly she began her little story.

"Why, it was on an Easter Sunday, oh, ages and ages ago," she faltered. "Why, I couldn't have been more than nine years old at the time." A trifle self-consciously she turned her face away from Zillah Forsyth's supercilious smile. "And I was coming home from a Sunday-school festival in my best white muslin dress, with a big pot of purple pansies in my hand," she hastened somewhat nervously to explain. "And just at the edge of the gutter there was a dreadful drunken man lying in the mud, with a great crowd of cruel people teasing and tormenting him. And because--because I couldn't think of anything else to do about it, I--I walked right up to the poor old creature, scared as I could be, and--and I presented him with my pot of purple pansies. And everybody of course began to laugh--to scream, I mean--and shout with amusement. And I, of course, began to cry. And the old drunken man straightened up very oddly for an instant, with his battered hat in one hand and the pot of pansies in the other, and he raised the pot of pansies very high, as though it had been a glass of rarest wine, and bowed to me as reverently as though he had been toasting me at my father's table at some very grand dinner. And 'Inasmuch,' he said. Just that--'Inasmuch.' So that's how I happened to go into nursing," she finished as abruptly as she had begun. Like some wonderful phosphorescent manifestation her whole shining soul seemed to flare forth suddenly through her plain face.

With honest perplexity Zillah Forsyth looked up from her work.

Quite against all intention, Helene Churchill laughed. She did not often laugh. Just for an instant her eyes and Zillah Forsyth's clashed together in the irremediable antagonism of caste, the plebeian's scornful impatience with the aristocrat equaled only by the aristocrat's condescending patience with the plebeian.

It was no more than right that the aristocrat should recover her self-possession first.

"Never mind about your understanding, Zillah dear," she said softly. "Your hair is the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life."

Along Zillah Forsyth's ivory cheek an incongruous little flush of red began to show. With much more nonchalance than was really necessary she pointed toward her half-packed trunk.

Almost imperceptibly her breath began to quicken.

For one reason or another along the exquisitely chaste curve of her cheek a narrow streak of red began to show again.

"And he went away very sudden at the last," she finished hurriedly. "It seems he was married all the time." Blandly she turned her wonderful face to the caressing light. "And--I hope he goes to hell," she added.

With a little gasp of astonishment, shock, suspicion, distaste, Helene Churchill reached out an immediate conscientious hand to her.

"O Zillah," she began, "O poor Zillah dear! I'm so sorry! I'm so--"

Absolutely serenely, through a mask of insolence and ice, Zillah Forsyth ignored the proffered hand.

"I don't know what particular call you've got to be sorry for me, Helene Churchill," she drawled languidly. "I've got my character, same as you've got yours, and just about nine times as many good looks. And when it comes to nursing--" Like an alto song pierced suddenly by one shrill treble note, the girl's immobile face sharpened transiently with a single jagged flash of emotion. "And when it comes to nursing? Ha! Helene Churchill, you can lead your class all you want to with your silk-lined manners and your fuddy-duddy book-talk; but when genteel people like you are moping round all ready to fold your patients' hands on their breasts and murmur, 'Thy will be done,' why, that's the time that little 'Yours Truly' is just beginning to roll up her sleeves and get to work."

As abruptly as it came, the passion faded from her face, leaving every feature tranquil again, demure, exaggeratedly innocent. With saccharine sweetness she turned to Rae Malgregor.

"Why, Zillah," gasped the country girl--"why, I think you're perfectly awful! Why, Zillah Forsyth! Don't you ever say a thing like that again! You can joke all you want to about the flirty young internes,--they're nothing but fellows,--but it isn't--it isn't respectful for you to talk like that about the Senior Surgeon. He's too--too terrifying," she finished in an utter panic of consternation.

"I didn't, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine," stormed Rae Malgregor, explosively. Backed up against her bureau, eyes flaming, breast heaving, little candy-box cap all tossed askew over her left ear, she stood defying her tormentor. "I didn't, either, jilt Joe Hazeltine," she reasserted passionately. "It was Joe Hazeltine that jilted me; and we'd been going together since we were kids! And now he's married the dominie's daughter, and they've got a kid of their own 'most as old as he and I were when we first began courting each other. And it's all because I insisted on being a trained nurse," she finished shrilly.

With an expression of real shock, Helene Churchill peered up from her lowly seat on the floor.

"You mean," she asked a bit breathlessly--"you mean that he didn't want you to be a trained nurse? You mean that he wasn't big enough, wasn't fine enough, to appreciate the nobility of the profession?"

"Nobility nothing!" snapped Rae Malgregor. "It was me scrubbing strange men with alcohol that he couldn't stand for, and I don't know as I exactly blame him," she added huskily. "It certainly is a good deal of a liberty when you stop to think about it."

Quite incongruously her big childish blue eyes narrowed suddenly into two dark, calculating slits.

"What? What?" pleaded Helene Churchill. "Say it again! What?"

"Shucks yourself!" scoffed Zillah Forsyth. "What's a silly beau or two up in Nova Scotia to a girl with looks like you? You could have married that typhoid case a dozen times last winter if you'd crooked your little finger. Why, the fellow was crazy about you. And he was richer than Croesus. What queered it?" she demanded bluntly. "Did his mother hate you?"

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