Leerie Part 13

Chapter V

THE LAST OF THE SURGICAL

Things have a way of beginning casually, so casually that you think they are bound to spin themselves out into airy nothings. The first inkling you have to the contrary is that headlong plunge into one of the big moments of your life, perhaps the biggest. But you never cease to wonder at the innocent, inconsequential way it began. These are the moments when you can picture Fate, sitting like an omnipotent operator before some giant switchboard, playing with signals and the like. I dare say he grins like a mischievous little boy who delights in turning things topsy-turvy whenever he has a chance.

Fate had been busy at this for some time when the sanitarium, quite oblivious of any signal connection, set itself to the glorious business of getting Sheila O'Leary married. Grief, despair, disappointment came often to the San, death not infrequently, but happiness rarely, and there had never before been such a joyous, personal happiness as this one. Small wonder that the San should gather it close to its heart and gloat over it!

Was not Sheila one of its very own, born under its portals, trained in its school, placed above all its nurses, and loved beyond all else? And Peter Brooks. Had not the San given him his life and Sheila? It certainly was a time for rejoicing. As Hennessy had voiced it:

"Sure, half the weddin's ye go to ye sit miserable, thinkin' the man isn't good enough for the la.s.s, or the la.s.s is no mate for the man. But, glory be to Pether! here's a weddin' at last that G.o.d Almighty might be cryin'

the banns for."

They were to be married within the month. Every one was agreed to this, from the superintendent down to Flanders, the bus-driver--yes, and even the lovers themselves. The San forgot its aches and sorrows in the excitement of planning an early summer wedding.

"We'll make the chapel look lovely," chirped the Reverend Mrs. Grumble, clasping and unclasping her hands in a fidget of antic.i.p.ation. "There'll be enough roses and madonna lilies in the gardens to bank every pew and make an arch over the chancel."

"Well, if Leerie's married in the chapel, half of us can't get in." And Madam Courot shook her head in emphatic disapproval. "She'd better take the Congregational church. That's the only place large enough to hold everybody who will want to come."

A mutinous murmur rose and circled the patients on the veranda. Not married at the San! It was unthinkable. So this point and the final date Sheila settled for them.

"We'll have the wedding in the gardens, save all the fuss and waste of picking the flowers, be ever so much prettier, and everybody and his neighbor can come."

When Hennessy heard of it he s.h.i.+rred his mouth into a pucker and whistled ecstatically. "'Tis like her, just! Married out-o'-doors wi' the growin'

things to stand up wi' her and the blessed sun on her head. Faith, Hennessy will have to be scrubbin' up the swans an' puttin' white satin bows round their necks."

Sheila chose the hour before sunset on an early day of June, and the San speedily set itself to the task of praying off the rain and arranging the delightful details of attendants, refreshments, music, and all the other non-essentials of a successful wedding. Miss Maxwell, the superintendent of nurses, took the trousseau in hand and portioned out piles of napery and underwear to the eager hands of the nurses to embroider. The whole sanitarium was suddenly metamorphosed into a Dorcas Society; patients forgot to be querulous, and refused extra rubbings and all unnecessary tending, that more st.i.tches might be taken in the twenty-four hours of the hospital day. A great rivalry sprang up between the day and night nurses as to which group would finish the most, and old Mr. Crotchets, the cynical bachelor with liver complaint and a supposedly atrophied heart, offered to the winning s.h.i.+ft the biggest box of candy New York could put up.

Through the first days of her happiness Sheila walked like a lambent being of another world, whose radiance was almost blinding. Those who had known her best, who had felt her warmth and beauty in spite of that bitterness which had been her s.h.i.+eld against the hurt she had battled with so long, looked upon her now with unfathomable wonder. And Peter, who had wors.h.i.+ped her from the moment she had taken his hand and led him back to the ways of health, watched her as the men of olden times must have watched the G.o.ddesses that occasionally graced their earth.

"Beloved, you're almost too wonderful for an every-day, Sunday-edition newspaper-man like me," Peter whispered to her in the hush of one twilight, as they sat together in the rest-house, watching Hennessy feed the swans.

"Every woman is, when the miracle of her life has been wrought for her.

Man of mine," and Sheila reached out to Peter's ever waiting arms, "wouldn't G.o.d be n.i.g.g.ardly not to let me seem beautiful to you now?"

Peter laughed softly. "If you're beautiful now, what will you be when--"

Sheila hushed him. "Listen, Peter, our happiness frightens me, it's so tremendous for just two people--almost more than our share of life. I know I seem foolish, but long ago I made up my mind I should have to do without love and all that goes with it, and now that it has come--sorrow, death, never frightened me, but this does."

"Glad I have the courage for two, then. Look here, Leerie, the more happiness we have the more we can spill over into other lives and the brighter you can burn your lamp for the ones in the dark. This old world needs all the happiness it can get now. So?"

Sheila smiled, satisfied. "You always understand. If I ever write out a prescription for love, I shall make understanding one-third of the dose.

Let's go into partners.h.i.+p, Brooks and O'Leary, Distillers and Dispensers of Happiness."

"All right, but the firm's wrong. It's going to be Brooks and Brooks," and Peter kissed her.

"There is one thing," and Sheila gently disentangled herself. "There are days and days before the wedding, and if everybody thinks I am going to do nothing until then, everybody is very much mistaken. I'm going in this minute to sign up for my last case in the Surgical."

It must have been just at this moment that Fate turned on an arbitrary signal-light and changed a switch. I should like to think that back of his grin lurked a tiny shadow of contrition.

"And what am I going to do?" Peter called dolefully after her.

"Oh, I don't know. You might write an article on the dangers and uncertainties of marrying any woman in a profession." And she blew him a farewell kiss.

The train from the city, that night, brought a handful of patients, and one of these wore the uniform and insignia of a lieutenant of the Engineers. His mother came with him. She had been an old patient, and because of extraordinary circ.u.mstances--I use the government term--she had obtained his discharge from a military hospital and had brought him to the San to mend.

"The wounds are slow in closing, and there's some nervous trouble," Miss Maxwell explained to Sheila. "The boy's face is rather tragic. Will you take the case?"

She accepted with her usual curt nod and a hasty departure for her uniform. A half-hour later she was back in the Surgical, her fear as well as her happiness forgotten in the call of another human being in distress.

The superintendent of nurses was right: the boy's face was tragic, and a frail little mother hovered over him as if she would breathe into his lungs the last breath from her own. She looked up wistfully, a little fearsomely, as Sheila entered; then a smile of thanksgiving swept her face like a flash of sunlight.

"Oh, I'm so glad! I remember you well. I hoped--but it hardly seemed possible--I didn't dare really to expect it. When I was here before, you were always so needed, and my boy--of course there is nothing serious--only--" and the shaking voice ended as incoherently as it had begun.

The nurse took the withered hands held out to her in her young, warm ones.

In an instant she saw all that the little mother had been through--the renunciation months before when she had given her boy up to his country; the long, weary weeks of learning to do without him; the schooling it had taken to grow patient, waiting for the letters that came sparingly or not at all; and at last the news that he was at the front, under fire, when the papers published all the news there was to be told. Sheila saw it all, even to her blind, frantic groping for the G.o.d she had only half known and into whose hands she had never wholly given the keeping of her loved ones. And after that the cable and the waiting for what was left of her boy to come home to her. As she looked down at her, Sheila had the strange feeling that this frail little mother was dividing the care of her boy between G.o.d and herself, and she smiled unconsciously at this new partners.h.i.+p.

Gently she laid her hand on the lean, brown one resting on the coverlet; the boy opened his eyes. "It's going to be fine to have a soldier for a patient; I expect you know how to obey orders. You are our first, and we're going to make your getting well just the happiest time in all your life, the little mother and I."

The boy made no response. He looked at his mother as if he understood, and then with a groan of utter misery he turned away his head and closed his eyes again. "Ah-h-h!" thought Sheila, and a little later she drew the mother into the corridor beyond earshot.

"There's something ailing him besides wounds. What is it?"

"Clarisse." The promptness of the answer brought considerable relief to the nurse. It was easy to deal with the things one knew; it was the hidden things, tucked away in the corners of the subconscious mind or the super-sensitive soul, that never saw the light of open confession, that were the baffling obstacles to nursing. Sheila never dreaded what she knew.

"Well, what's the matter with Clarisse?" she asked, cheerfully.

The little mother hesitated. Evidently it was hard to put it into words.

"They're engaged, she and Phil, and Phil doesn't want to see her, shrinks from the very thought of it. That's what's keeping him from getting better, I think. She's very young and oh, so pretty. They were both young when Phil went away--but Phil--" She stopped and pa.s.sed a fluttering hand across her forehead; her lips quivered the barest bit. "Phil has come back so old. That's what war does for our boys; in just a few months it turns them into old men, the serious ones--and their eyes are older than any living person's I ever saw."

"And Clarisse is still young. I think I understand."

"That's why I brought him here. In the city there would have been no reason for her not coming to the hospital, but she couldn't come here unless we sent for her--could she?" Again the fluttering hand groped as if to untangle the complexity of thoughts and feelings in the poor confused head. "I write her letters. I make them just as pleasant as I can. I don't want to hurt her; she's so young."

Sheila nodded. "Does he love her?" That was the most important, for to Sheila love was the key that could spring the lock of every barrier.

"He did, and I think she loves him--I think--"

Sheila went back to her patient and began the welding of a comrades.h.i.+p that only such a woman can weld when her heart is full with love for another man. Day by day she made him talk more. He told her of his soldiering; apparently everything that had happened before held little or no place in his scheme of life, and he told it as simply and directly as if he had been a child. He made her see the months of training in camp, when he grew to know his company and feel for the first time what the brotherhood of arms meant. He told of the excitement of departure, the spiritual thrill of marching forth to war with the heart of a crusader in every boy's breast. His eyes shone when he spoke of their renunciation, of the glory of putting behind them home and love until the world should be made clean again and fit for happiness.

Sheila winced at this, but the boy did not notice; he was too absorbed in the things he had to tell.

He told of the days of waiting in France, with the battle-front before them like a mammoth drop-curtain, screening the biggest drama their lives would ever know. "There we were, marking time with the big guns, wondering if our turn would come next. That was a glorious feeling, worth all that came afterward--when the curtain went up for us."

He raised himself on an elbow and looked into Sheila's cool, gray eyes with eyes that burned of battle. "G.o.d! I can't tell you about it. There have been millions of war books written by men who have seen more than I have and who have the trick of words--and you've probably read them; you know. Only reading isn't seeing it; it isn't _living it_." He turned quickly, shooting out a hand and gripping hers hard. "Tell me; you've seen all sorts of operations--horrible ones, where they take out great pieces of malignant stuff that is eating the life out of a man. You've seen that?"

The nurse nodded.