CHAPTER III
There was a tiny apartment not too far from the hospital that Belinda Melnotte called home for these two years of her hospital training. It was presided over by Aunt Roberta.
Aunt Roberta was a short woman of brown complexion, with a buxom figure laced tightly into corsets that kept her very erect even in a "sleepy hollow" chair. She was always neatly gowned, neatly shod, and displayed well-kept hands and a spotless apron. She did the work of the apartment herself.
One afternoon and evening in each fortnight Belinda spent at home. There was a great contrast in character between aunt and niece. Aunt Roberta was all French; her niece displayed some Teutonic traits of character.
Grandfather Melnotte and Grandfather Genau had both come to America as young men. Belinda, as a second generation American girl, held few prejudices of either nation. But Aunt Roberta had no good word now for the Genaus.
"Alboche," she frequently said. "A brutal, stupid people. Your Grandfather Genau was a gross man—he ate and drank e-nor-mously. He died of an apoplexy."
"Poor man!" sighed her niece.
"And your Grandmother Genau washuge—she suffered of an avoirdupois. She would have won a prize for flesh in a street fair—cer-tain-lee!"
"I fear I may be too stout," Belinda would say mildly.
Aunt Roberta had spent all her girlhood in a French convent at Montreal. Then, for many years, she had lived in Paris. Until of late she had spoken English so seldom that she used the language in a way all her own—not brokenly or with much accent, but with most amusing transpositions. She would have gladly spoken French altogether, only when she undertook to do so Belinda would not reply.
"I am American—American, I tell you, Auntie!" the girl would cry. "We speak English here in New York. That I am both German and French by blood is enough. I will speak neither of those languagesnow—unless I am obliged to."
She had refused to listen to her aunt's diatribes against the Germans since the war had begun; but in truth she felt the two nationalities of her forebears warring within her heart. She pitied both peoples with all her sympathetic nature. She thought much on the unfortunates struggling in the battle lines. Her hospital work broadened her sympathy for all suffering. It is not always so. Some it makes callous.
As the end of Belinda Melnotte's two years of hospital probation drew near, she felt stronger cords drawing her toward those centers of activity, the field hospitals of France and Belgium. But she had not mentioned this feeling to any one.
Those related to her by ties of blood were fighting on both sides in the great struggle. There were two young cousins in the German ranks in Northern France whom she had known and played with when they were all three children—Paul Genau and Carl Baum. Her mother had taken her to Germany several times.
In America Belinda had few relatives now save Aunt Roberta. After her father's death she would have been quite alone had it not been for the brisk, taut littletante. Mr. Melnotte had left no great fortune to his only child; merely a comfortable income from well-placed investments, enough for her simple needs and to spare for Aunt Roberta.
Although Aunt Roberta's tendencies were strongly aristocratic, she admired Belinda's independent and practical nature. She was proud of her niece for taking up a profession. Not that she expected Belinda would remain in the work after obtaining her diploma.
"If we were in our own suffering coun-tree," she sighed frequently, "your training and experience might be of value—yes! The poor soldiers of France! Ah, they need the nurses! This great and rich United States, that owes so much tola belleFrance, doles out a little money and a few blankets to ourpoilus—like giving coals and bread to beggarwomen while France fights the battles of the world!"
Between such opinions as these of Tante Roberta and those expressed by Mrs. Blythe, the hospital matron, Belinda was puzzled. Practical as she was, her temperament was not ordinarily assertive. She was not given to forming logical opinions for herself, save on moral topics.
Aunt Roberta she knew would be delighted to return to France.
"This coun-tree, pah!" the taut little Frenchwoman would say, her gestures vigorous, "is too commercial. There is little art here, nor do the women even know how to dress. Their bonnets—pooh! They are built by the tens of thousands to sell for ten dollars each. Oh,oui, and their gowns! They are sold by the gross, all of one pattern. These Americans have no air about them—nochic."
"I am an American," stoutly maintained Belinda in answer to this.
But she sometimes wondered if, after all, she was truly American. The two hereditary natures within her seemed tugging in opposite ways. She really had but small affiliation (so she thought) with America and its citizenship.
The great milestones of history venerated by Americans of ancient lineage meant little to her. She had journeyed with college friends to Plymouth Rock and felt no thrill. The tall shaft of the Bunker Hill Monument was to her merely an observatory point. The spot where the first American blood was shed in the Revolution inspired her with no pride of race.
All that had followed in the later decades of United States history after all seemed of small moment to Belinda Melnotte. The years of struggle to maintain the Union and to free from slavery the whites as well as the blacks of the South were merely incidents she had read about in school. Her two grandfathers had come to the country while the Civil War was in progress; but the struggle had meant nothing to them save as it offered greater opportunity to make money. And it meant little now to Belinda.
This country—these United States of ours—is indeed a melting pot for the nations of the earth; but the fire under the pot sputters like a handful of green thorns and the brew of citizenship infuses slowly. Love of country seldom develops solely from gratitude; it is when one is called upon to give that one learns to love. And Belinda Melnotte had never given much of even her thought to this, her native land.
She felt a strange and growing unrest as the time of her graduation from the hospital drew near. She secretly feared, however, that this uncertainty and indecision had something to do with her interest in the private patient she was nursing.
The Aero Club had ordered everything done for Sanderson that could be done to make comfortable a person in his situation. When he was well enough to have visitors there were several men who came to see the aviator who were either fellow-airmen or were interested in flying.
Belinda suspected that Sanderson was one of a number of courageous young men who were schooling themselves for aviation work of a particular character and for a particular purpose. Just what this special work was she did not know, for Sanderson and his friends were secretive.
She found these visitors to Room A-a very interesting, however; and they made much of Sandy's pretty nurse. Gay as she was with them, Belinda kept a sharp oversight of her patient; and if she saw him growing tired she hurried the visitors out without much ado.
One of the young aviator's brothers, who lived near enough to visit the patient on more than one occasion, intimated he suspected Frank of feeling more than a passing interest in the nurse. She, however, was not supposed to overhear the observation.
"Who wouldn't?" Frank Sanderson stoutly responded.
"Look out!" his brother warned him. "If Stella hears of it——"
"Stella! What Stella doesn't know will never trouble her," the man in bed said quickly, and in no very pleasant tone. "By the way, how is she—and the kiddies?"
"All right. Hasn't she been to see you?"
"I should hopenot!" The nurse at the window, busy with the work in her lap, covertly glanced at her patient. His face was flushed and beclouded. "I won't have her come here—now remember that, Jim! But you might assure her that I am all right."
"Humph! Play buffer for you, is it?"
"Well, give a look in at the kiddies, anyway. They are not to blame."
"Right-o!" agreed Jim, and soon departed.
From that hour Sanderson found his nurse not quite the same as she had been. He soon recovered his usual cheery manner. Not so Belinda. She had raised a certain barrier between them, and that barrier he was unable to surmount.
Still sick, he peevishly laid it to the influence of the black-browed surgeon. Or was it that, now he was better, the nurse was merely following her usual method of "freezing" a too ardent patient?
He ventured a query to Miss Trivett one night; for although one could not really like the night nurse, she was trustworthy.
"I don't know what I've done to offend Miss Melnotte," Sanderson said honestly. "But she keeps me at a distance——"
"Oh, my! Little-boy-crying-for-the-moon!" the nurse said, half in scorn and half in sympathy. "Are you going to prove yourself no wiser than the rest of them? And you an aviator! Bah!"
"Well, I'm hanged if that ugly Dutchman's half good enough for her, even if he did fix me up!" Sanderson growled.
"Of course he isn't. What man is ever good enough for a woman?" was the tart rejoinder.
"The Lord help the fellow who gets you, Miss Trivett!" Sanderson said with feeling.
"No. You are wrong. I know my own weakness," sighed the wise, if plain, nurse. "If Ishouldmarry, I would love him so much that he might walk upon me if he wished."
It was not by any determined and set method that Belinda Melnotte kept Sanderson at a distance. She merely followed the calm path of her duty as usual, betraying nothing to her fellow-nurses of what fretted her spirit.
A few days more and The Head would put into her hand the certificate for which she had served two hard years. A dozen besides Sue Blaine and herself were to be graduated.
As there was some operating-room work to be done, Belinda was excused from attendance on the convalescent in Room A-a. Sanderson discovered this when another nurse came to his call in the morning. She was a probationer and had a year yet to serve.
"Say, where's Miss Melnotte?" he demanded.
"She's busy." The nurse told him why.
"Isn't she coming back to me?"
"I don't suppose so. She's not going to work in this hospital any more."
The aviator spent a gloomy forenoon. Then he wrote some letters, called for Mrs. Blythe, and arranged with her for his departure from the hospital the next day.
When Belinda stopped at Room A-a the second evening to learn how he was getting on, the room was empty save for the attendant who was cleaning up. Sanderson had been gone an hour.