The White Linen Nurse Part 3

Mechanically she raised her hands to her head as though with some silly thought of keeping the horrid pain in her temples from slipping to her throat, her breast, her feet.

"Sure the uniforms are cute," she persisted a bit thickly. "Sure the Typhoid Boy was crazy about me! He called me his 'Holy Chorus Girl,' I heard him--raving in his sleep. Lord save us! What are we to any man but just that?" she questioned hotly with renewed venom. "Parson, actor, young sinner, old saint--I ask you frankly, girls, on your word of honor, was there ever more than one man in ten went through your hands who didn't turn out soft somewhere before you were through with him?

Mawking about your 'sweet eyes' while you're wrecking your optic nerves trying to decipher the dose on a poison bottle! Mooning over your wonderful likeness to the lovely young sister they--never had! Trying to kiss your finger tips when you're struggling to brush their teeth!

Teasin' you to smoke cigarettes with 'em--when they know it would cost you your job!"

Impishly, without any warning, she crooked her knee and pointed at one homely square-toed shoe in a mincy dancing step. Hoydenishly she threw out her arms and tried to gather Helene and Zillah both into their compa.s.s.

"Oh, you Holy Chorus Girls!" she chuckled with maniacal delight.

"Everybody, all together, now! Kick your little kicks! Smile your little smiles! Tinkle your little thermometers! Steady,--there!

One--two--three--One--two--three!"

Laughingly Zillah Forsyth slipped from the grasp. "Don't you dare 'holy'

me!" she threatened.

In real irritation Helene released herself. "I'm no chorus girl," she said coldly.

With a little shrill scream of pain Rae Malgregor's hands went flying back to her temples. Like a person giving orders in a great panic she turned authoritatively to her two room-mates, her fingers all the while boring frenziedly into her temples.

"Now, girls," she warned, "stand well back! If my head bursts, you know, it's going to burst all to slivers and splinters--like a boiler!"

"Rae, you're crazy!" hooted Zillah.

"Just plain vulgar--looney," faltered Helene.

Both girls reached out simultaneously to push her aside.

Somewhere in the dusty, indifferent street a bird's note rang out in one wild, delirious ecstasy of untrammeled springtime. To all intents and purposes the sound might have been the one final signal that Rae Malgregor's jangled nerves were waiting for.

"Oh, I _am_ crazy, am I?" she cried with a new, fierce joy. "Oh, I _am_ crazy, am I? Well, I'll go ask the Superintendent and see if I am! Oh, surely they wouldn't try and make me graduate if I really was crazy!"

Madly she bolted for her bureau, and s.n.a.t.c.hing her own motto down, crumpled its face securely against her skirt and started for the door.

Just what the motto was no one but herself knew. Sprawling in paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face down to the wall for three tantalizing years.

"No you don't!" cried Zillah now, as she saw the mystery threatening so meanly to escape her.

"No you don't!" cried Helene. "You've seen our mottoes--and now we're going to see yours!"

Almost crazed with new terror Rae Malgregor went dodging to the right,--to the left,--to the right again,--cleared the rocking-chair,--a scuffle with padded hands,--climbed the trunk,--a race with padded feet,--reached the door-handle at last, yanked the door open, and with lungs and temper fairly bursting with momentum, shot down the hall,--down some stairs,--down some more hall,--down some more stairs, to the Superintendent's office where, with her precious motto still clutched securely in one hand, she broke upon that dignitary's startled, near-sighted vision like a young whirl-wind of linen and starch and flapping brown paper. Breathlessly, without prelude or preamble, she hurled her grievance into the older woman's grievance-dulled ears.

"Give me back my own face!" she demanded peremptorily. "Give me back my own face, I say! And my own hands! I tell you I want my own hands!

Helene and Zillah say I'm insane! And I want to go home!"

CHAPTER III

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 p.r.i.c.kle 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--s.h.!.+ S--s.h.!.+' 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--s.h.!.+

S--s.h.!.+" 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--G.o.d knows where--and charge innocent people twenty-five dollars a week and was.h.i.+ng, 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 sh.o.r.e bereft in one second of its tide, like a tree stripped in one second of its leaf.a.ge, she stood there, utterly stricken of temper or pa.s.sion 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."