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White Linen Nurse

<h2 id="id00159" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER III</h2> Like a short-necked animal elongated suddenly to the cervical proportions of a giraffe, the Superintendent of Nurses reared up from her stoop-shouldered desk-work and stared forth in speechless astonishment across the top of her spectacles. Exuberantly impertinent, ecstatically self-conscious, Rae Malgregor repeated her demand. To her parched mouth the very taste of her own babbling impudence refreshed her like the shock and prickle of cracked ice. "I tell you I want my own face again! And my own hands!" she reiterated glibly. "I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders—and the other human expressions!" she explained. "And the nice grubby country hands that go with that sort of a face!" Very accusingly she raised her finger and shook it at the Superintendent's perfectly livid countenance. "Oh, of course I know I wasn't very much to look at. But at least I matched! What my hands knew, I mean, my face knew! Pies or plowing or May-baskets, what my hands knew my face knew! That's the way hands and faces ought to work together! But you? you with all your rules and your bossing and your everlasting 'S—sh! S—sh!' you've snubbed all the know-anything out of my face—and made my hands nothing but two disconnected machines—for somebody else to run! And I hate you! You're a Monster! You're a ——, everybody hates you!" Mutely then she shut her eyes, bowed her head, and waited for the Superintendent to smite her dead. The smite she felt quite sure would be a noisy one. First of all, she reasoned it would fracture her skull. Naturally then of course it would splinter her spine. Later in all probability it would telescope her knee-joints. And never indeed now that she came to think of it had the arches of her feet felt less capable of resisting so terrible an impact. Quite unconsciously she groped out a little with one hand to steady herself against the edge of the desk. But the blow when it came was nothing but a cool finger tapping her pulse. "There! There!" crooned the Superintendent's voice with a most amazing tolerance. "But I won't 'there—there'!" snapped Rae Malgregor. Her eyes were wide open again now, and extravagantly dilated. The cool fingers on her pulse seemed to tighten a little. "S—sh! S—sh!" admonished the Superintendent's mumbling lips. "But I won't 'S—sh—S—sh'!" stormed Rae Malgregor. Never before in her three years' hospital training had she seen her arch-enemy, the Superintendent, so utterly disarmed of irascible temper and arrogant dignity, and the sight perplexed and maddened her at one and the same moment. "But I won't 'S—sh—S—sh'!" Desperately she jerked her curly blonde head in the direction of the clock on the wall. "Here it's four o'clock now!" she cried. "And in less than four hours you're going to try and make me graduate—and go out into the world—God knows where—and charge innocent people twenty-five dollars a week and washing, likelier than not, mind you, for these hands," she gestured, "that don't co-ordinate at all with this face," she grimaced, "but with the face of one of the House Doctors—or the Senior Surgeon—or even you—who may be way off in Kamchatka—when I need him most!" she finished with a confused jumble of accusation and despair. Still with unexplainable amiability the Superintendent whirled back into place in her pivot-chair and with her left hand which had all this time been rummaging busily in a lower desk drawer proffered Rae Malgregor a small fold of paper. "Here, my dear," she said. "Here's a sedative for you. Take it at once. It will quiet you perfectly. We all know you've had very hard luck this past month, but you mustn't worry so about the future." The slightest possible tinge of purely professional manner crept back into the older woman's voice. "Certainly, Miss Malgregor, with your judgment—" "With my judgment?" cried Rae Malgregor. The phrase was like a red rag to her. "With my judgment? Great Heavens! That's the whole trouble! I haven't got any judgment! I've never been allowed to have any judgment! All I've ever been allowed to have is the judgment of some flirty young medical student—or the House Doctor!—or the Senior Surgeon!—or you!" Her eyes were fairly piteous with terror. "Don't you see that my face doesn't know anything?" she faltered, "except just to smile and smile and smile and say 'Yes, sir—No, sir—Yes, sir'?" From curly blonde head to square-toed, commonsense shoes her little body began to quiver suddenly like the advent of a chill. "Oh, what am I going to do," she begged, "when I'm way off alone—somewhere—in the mountains—or a tenement—or a palace—and something happens—and there isn't any judgment round to tell me what I ought to do?" Abruptly in the doorway as though summoned by some purely casual flicker of the Superintendent's thin fingers another nurse appeared. "Yes, I rang," said the Superintendent. "Go and ask the Senior Surgeon if he can come to me here a moment, immediately." "The Senior Surgeon?" gasped Rae Malgregor. "The Senior Surgeon?" With her hands clutching at her throat she reeled back against the wall for support. Like a shore bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree stripped in one second of its leafage, she stood there, utterly stricken of temper or passion or any animating human emotion whatsoever. "Oh, now I'm going to be expelled! Oh, now I know I'm going to be—expelled!" she moaned listlessly. Very vaguely into the farthest radiation of her vision she sensed the approach of a man. Gray-haired, gray-bearded, gray-suited, grayly dogmatic as a block of granite, the Senior Surgeon loomed up at last in the doorway. "I'm in a hurry," he growled. "What's the matter?" Precipitously Rae Malgregor collapsed into the breach. "Oh, there's—nothing at all the matter, sir," she stammered. "It's only—it's only that I've just decided that I don't want to be a trained nurse." With a gesture of ill-concealed impatience the Superintendent shrugged the absurd speech aside. "Dr. Faber," she said, "won't you just please assure Miss Malgregor once more that the little Italian boy's death last week was in no conceivable way her fault,—that nobody blames her in the slightest, or holds her in any possible way responsible." "Why, what nonsense!" snapped the Senior Surgeon. "What—!" "And the Portuguese woman the week before that," interrupted Rae Malgregor dully. "Stuff and nonsense!" said the Senior Surgeon. "It's nothing but coincidence! Pure coincidence! It might have happened to anybody!" "And she hasn't slept for almost a fortnight." the Superintendent confided, "nor touched a drop of food or drink, as far as I can make out, except just black coffee. I've been expecting this break-down for some days." "And-the-young-drug-store-clerk-the-week-before-that," Rae Malgregor resumed with sing-song monotony. Brusquely the Senior Surgeon stepped forward and taking the girl by her shoulders, jerked her sharply round to the light, and, with firm, authoritative fingers, rolled one of her eyelids deftly back from its inordinately dilated pupil. Equally brusquely he turned away again. "Nothing but moonshine!" he muttered. "Nothing in the world but too much coffee dope taken on an empty stomach,—'empty brain,' I'd better have said! When will you girls ever learn any sense?" With searchlight shrewdness his eyes flashed back for an instant over the haggard gray lines that slashed along the corners of her quivering, childish mouth. A bit temperishly he began to put on his gloves. "Next time you set out to have a 'brain-storm,' Miss Malgregor," he suggested satirically, "try to have it about something more sensible than imagining that anybody is trying to hold you personally responsible for the existence of death in the world. Bah!" he ejaculated fiercely. "If you are going to fuss like this over cases hopelessly moribund from the start, what in thunder are you going to do some fine day when out of a perfectly clear and clean sky Security itself turns septic and you lose the President of the United States—or a mother of nine children—with a hang-nail?" "But I wasn't fussing, sir!" protested Rae Malgregor with a timid sort of dignity. "Why, it never had occurred to me for a moment that anybody blamed me for—anything!" Just from sheer astonishment her hands took a new clutch into the torn flapping corner of the motto that she still clung desperately to even at this moment. "For Heaven's sake stop crackling that brown paper!" stormed the Senior Surgeon. "But I wasn't crackling the brown paper, sir! It's crackling itself," persisted Rae Malgregor very softly. The great blue eyes that lifted to his were brimming full of misery. "Oh, can't I make you understand, sir?" she stammered. Appealingly she turned to the Superintendent. "Oh, can't I make anybody understand? All I was trying to say,—all I was trying to explain, was—that I don't want to be a trained nurse—after all!" "Why not?" demanded the Senior Surgeon with a rather noisy click of his glove fasteners. "Because—my—face—is—tired," said the girl quite simply. The explosive wrath on the Senior Surgeon's countenance seemed to be directed suddenly at the Superintendent. "Is this an afternoon tea?" he asked tartly. "With six major operations this morning and a probable meningitis diagnosis ahead of me this afternoon I think I might be spared the babblings of an hysterical nurse!" Casually over his shoulder he nodded at the girl. "You're a fool!" he said, and started for the door. Just on the threshold he turned abruptly and looked back. His forehead was furrowed like a corduroy road and the one rampant question in his mind at the moment seemed to be mired hopelessly between his bushy eyebrows. "Lord!" he exclaimed a bit flounderingly. "Are you the nurse that helped me last week on that fractured skull?" "Yes, sir," said Rae Malgregor. Jerkily the Senior Surgeon retraced his footsteps into the office and stood facing her as though with some really terrible accusation. "And the freak abdominal?" he quizzed sharply. "Was it you who threaded that needle for me so blamed slowly—and calmly—and surely, while all the rest of us were jumping up and down and cursing you—for no brighter reason than that we couldn't have threaded it ourselves if we'd had all eternity before us and—all creation bleeding to death?" "Y-e-s, sir," said Rae Malgregor. Quite bluntly the Senior Surgeon reached out and lifted one of her hands to his scowling professional scrutiny. "Gad!" he attested. "What a hand! You're a wonder! Under proper direction you're a wonder! It was like myself working with twenty fingers and no thumbs! I never saw anything like it!" Almost boyishly the embarrassed flush mounted to his cheeks as he jerked away again. "Excuse me for not recognizing you," he apologized gruffly. "But you girls all look so much alike!" As though the eloquence of Heaven itself had suddenly descended upon a person hitherto hopelessly tongue-tied, Rae Malgregor lifted an utterly transfigured face to the Senior Surgeon's grimly astonished gaze. "Yes! Yes, sir!" she cried joyously. "That's just exactly what the trouble is! That's just exactly what I was trying to express, sir! My face is all worn out trying to 'look alike'! My cheeks are almost sprung with artificial smiles! My eyes are fairly bulging with unshed tears! My nose aches like a toothache trying never to turn up at anything! I'm smothered with the discipline of it! I'm choked with the affectation! I tell you—I just can't breathe through a trained nurse's face any more! I tell you, sir, I'm sick to death of being nothing but a type. I want to look like myself! I want to see what Life could do to a silly face like mine—if it ever got a chance! When other women are crying, I want the fun of crying! When other women look scared to death, I want the fun of looking scared to death!" Hysterically again with shrewish emphasis she began to repeat: "I won't be a nurse! I tell you, I won't! I won't!" "Pray what brought you so suddenly to this remarkable decision?" scoffed the Senior Surgeon. "A letter from my father, sir," she confided more quietly. "A letter about some dogs." "Dogs?" hooted the Senior Surgeon. "Yes, sir," said the White Linen Nurse. A trifle speculatively for an instant she glanced at the Superintendent's face and then back again to the Senior Surgeon's. "Yes, sir," she repeated with increasing confidence. "Up in Nova Scotia my father raises hunting-dogs. Oh, no special fancy kind, sir," she hastened in all honesty to explain. "Just dogs, you know,—just mixed dogs,—pointers with curly tails,—and shaggy-coated hounds,—and brindled spaniels, and all that sort of thing,—just mongrels, you know, but very clever; and people, sir, come all the way from Boston to buy dogs of him, and once a man came way from London to learn the secret of his training." "Well, what is the secret of his training?" quizzed the Senior Surgeon with the sudden eager interest of a sportsman. "I should think it would be pretty hard," he acknowledged, "in a mixed gang like that to decide just which particular dog was suited to what particular game!" "Yes, that's just it, sir," beamed the White Linen Nurse. "A dog, of course, will chase anything that runs,—that's just dog,—but when a dog really begins to care for what he's chasing he—wags! That's hunting! Father doesn't calculate, he says, on training a dog on anything he doesn't wag on!" "Yes, but what's that got to do with you?" asked the Senior Surgeon a bit impatiently. With ill-concealed dismay the White Linen Nurse stood staring blankly at the Senior Surgeon's gross stupidity. "Why, don't you see?" she faltered. "I've been chasing this nursing job three whole years now—and there's no wag to it!" "Oh Hell!" said the Senior Surgeon. If he hadn't said "Oh Hell!" he would have grinned. And it hadn't been a grinning day, and he certainly didn't intend to begin grinning at any such late hour as that in the afternoon. With his dignity once reassured he relaxed then a trifle. "For Heaven's sake, what do you want to be?" he asked not unkindly. With an abrupt effort at self-control Rae Malgregor jerked her head into at least the outer semblance of a person lost in almost fathomless thought. "Why I'm sure I don't know, sir," she acknowledged worriedly. "But it would be a great pity, I suppose, to waste all the grand training that's gone into my hands." With sudden conviction her limp shoulders stiffened a trifle. "My oldest sister," she stammered, "bosses the laundry in one of the big hotels in Halifax, and my youngest sister teaches school in Moncton. But I'm so strong, you know, and I like to move things round so,—and everything,—maybe—I could get a position somewhere as general housework girl." With a roar of amusement as astonishing to himself as to his listeners, the Senior Surgeon's chin jerked suddenly upward. "You're crazy as a loon!" he confided cordially. "Great Scott! If you can work up a condition like this on coffee,—what would you do on," he hesitated grimly, "malted milk?" As unheralded as his amusement, gross irritability overtook him again. "Will—you—stop—rattling that brown paper?" he thundered at her. Innocently as a child she rebuffed the accusation and ignored the temper. "But I'm not rattling it, sir!" she protested. "I'm simply trying to hide what's on the other side of it." "What is on the other side of it?" demanded the Senior Surgeon bluntly. With unquestioning docility the girl turned the paper around. From behind her desk the austere Superintendent twisted her neck most informally to decipher the scrawling hieroglyphics. "Don't—Ever—Be—bumptious!" she read forth jerkily with a questioning, incredulous sort of emphasis. "Don't ever be bumptious?" squinted the Senior Surgeon perplexedly through his glasses. "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 bumptious—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—bumptious—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, sturdy, 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 assuage 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 superstition, 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. Embarrassment was in the laugh, and anger, and a fierce, fiery sort of resentment against both the embarrassment and the anger,—but no possible trace of amusement. 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 amusement. "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 reassuring, but sometimes on the brink of asserting 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 shiveringly 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 class. 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 class 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 Class 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 brass with their hair frizzed tight as a nigger 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 hoarse, "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 damned 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 passed Rae Malgregor without a sign of recognition. "God! 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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