"Yes, truly so," conceded the girl. "And in time if the homeache can be assuaged I shall then learn the system—and remain yet a Norwegian."
"Oh, you mean you are a Montessori student?" brightened the Young Doctor.
"Even so," said the girl. "I cannot wait to learn everything. From here, after I have duly studied little Lisa, little Peter, and all the others, whose minds most happily are of a perfect brightness, I must then go on to the sadder64schools, and to that most wonderful place in your Massachusetts where such first brain work of all was made on the little children. It is that in Norway," she winced, "I have a little brother. Our father makes much money," she added with apparent irrelevance. "And spends much and gives much. And once he married him a new wife, and there are many new children. And one of them, this little little brother, so gold, so blue, so pinky, all day long he sits and—isn't," she finished perfectly simply.
"Why—why, that's too bad," said the Young Doctor.
"Yes, very bad," mused the girl. "But some of these ideas here are of a great cleverness. I do not of course get any of it right yet," she acknowledged. "But some of it is quite sporting like a game. With these toys, now," she pointed, "and all glad things like industries, and the live cat, and the dog, and grasses and the flowers, you leave the little child quite loose, it seems, only watching him, watching him very close, one day, two days, a hundred if it seems best. And wherever he shall in finality—in finality—'gravitate,'65is it that you say? to the sweet flowers, or the wood blocks, or the gay, smoothen cat,thereit is that the one big chance of his salvation will most surely be found. But the engine, or the blocks or the smoothen cat must not be forced on him, it is so you understand? Of such there would make no message to his development. But out ofeverything, it is, that he himself must gravitate to it!"
In the tense sweet earnestness of her up turned face, the eager, unconscious nearness of her occasional gesture, the far remoteness of her subject, the sting of the winter night, the glare of electric light over all, it dawned on the Young Doctor a bit startlingly that he was frowning down into the eyes of a particularly beautiful woman, and for some quite unreasonable reason his cheeks began suddenly to burn like fire. It was as though having all his life long for one conscientious reason or another denied himself "wine when it was red," he found himself now, most humiliatingly, withiceitself going to his head. And just because he was so thoroughly unaccustomed to having anything go to his head, it went quite66uproariously in fact, changing for that one moment his whole facial expression. And the instant his facial expression was changed of course he looked like a different man. And the instant he looked like a different man of course he began to act like a different man.
"And does this wonderful theory of yours apply only to poor little children?" he asked with slightly narrowing eyes. "Or am I to infer?" he laughed. "Or am I to infer that after a whole year of flaunting city, a whole year of barren indifference to it, my amazing gravitation to you this evening is positive Montessori proof that with you and you only rests my life's best salvation?"
Then without the slightest intent of doing it, without even the slightest warning to himself that he was going to do it, he swooped down suddenly and kissed her on her lips.
With a little gasp of dismay the girl stumbled to her feet. There was nothing blonde now about her. Towering up on the step just above him she was like a young storm-cloud all flame and shadow!
"Oh, what have I done that you should act thus?" she demanded. With the tears streaming67down her face she lashed him with furious accusations. "You are one of these devils!" she cried. "You are a wild persons! Was it my fault?" she demanded, "that my bundles burst from the car? Was it my fault," she demanded, "that restaurants cannot block foolish women from their food? Was it my fault that I paid for your stupid supper?"
Neither defending himself nor seeking relief in flight, but with a face fully if not indeed more shocked than hers the Young Doctor sank down on the step at her feet, and with his head in his hands sat rocking himself to and fro.
"No, it isn't your fault!" he assured her and reassured her. "Nor is it exactly my fault!" he insisted. "But the fault of that damned piano!"
"The fault of that damned what?" quoted the girl a bit stridently.
But the face that lifted to hers was frankly the face of a stricken man. Only a chill added to repentance could have altered so any human countenance.
"On the honor of a man freezing to death!" he attested. "There is no blame to68be attached to anything in the world— except to a grand piano."
"What is it that you mean?" puzzled the girl. "I am more furious with you than devils. But I must hear everything."
"I mean," sneezed the poor Young Doctor, "that I am looking for a kind home for a grand piano!" Even to himself his words sounded far away and altogether the words of a stranger. It was indeed as though he had been thrust quite unrehearsed into the leading part of a roaring farce which was already halfway through its evening performance. A fearful spirit of bravado seemed really his one chance of making any possible "get-away" with the whole mad situation. But even an irate audience could not have misjudged for a moment the acute distress and anxiety behind the bravado.
"It is just this way," he began all over again. "A perfectly dreadful woman drove me out of my office to-night—with a grand piano!" From the stony expression, however, in the girl's face this did not seem to be just the cue that she was looking for. In the wisest impulse of his life he decided suddenly69to throw himself upon her sense of mercy rather than upon her sense of humor. "Truly it is this way!" He jumped up and implored her to believe him. "I am as new as you almost, in this big city. Equally with you perhaps I suffer what you call homeacheness! It is very hard to get a good start in a strange place. Lots of charity chances and all that. But very little money. I had a real patient once, though!" he bragged ironically. "A very rich woman, awfully nice and all that. But I hate her. Every chance that she gets she torments me. She has a sort of theory, I think, that tormenting is very stimulating to the nervous system. It certainly is. We fight like young cats and dogs! And yet as I say she is awfully nice. And when she went away she paid me not only justly but mighty generously for my brief services. It cancelled almost a year's debts. But she was horridly mad because I wouldn't go with her,—as a kind of a trained, tame attendant you know. But I told her I couldn't leave my office. So she sent me a grand piano, the wretch!" he finished with flaming anger.
To the step just below him the girl tripped70down and turning about stood peering up into his face with a rather disconcerting intensity.
"Here am I," she gasped, "who suffer and languish for a 'grand piano' as you call it. And you?" As though in real pain she began to wring her slim hands together. "And you? A lady gives you a grand piano and you curse her as a wretchedness!"
"Yes, I know," deprecated the Young Doctor. "But you see there isn't room in my office for both the piano and myself! My office is too small, you see. And with the piano filling up the whole center of the room? Why, it's absurd!" he quickened. "It's rotten! Patients who come don't know whether they've come for a music lesson or to be lanced! And besides," he added as his most culminative grievance, "I don't know one note from another! And the woman knew that I didn't! And worse than anything there are hordes of the most indecent little cupids appliquéd or something all over the front of the thing!"
"Surely, something could be done," suggested the girl with a vague sort of farawayness in her blue eyes.71
"Yes, that's just it!" remarked the Young Doctor, flushing. "I've already done it!"
Abjectly with his bared head bowed before her he stood as one awaiting just sentence.
"Of a personally," said the girl with her own cheeks spotting bright red. "Of a personally—I do not quite see the connection."
"Why the connection is perfectly clear!" insisted the Young Doctor. "She sent me the piano on purpose to crowd me out of my office! She wanted to crowd me out of my own office! She dared to affirm even that I needed to be crowded out of my own office! She tried to make me mad! She wanted to make me mad! She had the cheek to suggest, I mean, that nothing really interesting ever would happen to me until I once did get good and mad!" As though temporarily exhausted by his tirade he sagged back for a moment against the railing of the steps. His face did look a bit white and his teeth were almost chattering. "Well, I certainly did get good and mad this afternoon," he affirmed with a wry sort of apology. "And because I was so blooming mad I dashed out for a tremendous walk. And because I took such a tremendous walk I developed an72appetite like forty tigers. And because I developed an appetite like forty tigers I rushed for the first restaurant I could find. And because I rushed for the first restaurant I could find I happened to see you at the exact moment when——"
"Oh, stop, stop, stop!" laughed the girl with her hands clapped suddenly over her ears. "It is all too much like the— like 'The House that the Jack-Man built!'"
"Well, at least," grinned the Young Doctor, "it seems to be 'The Adventure that the Grand Piano Threatened.'"
"The—the Adventure?" puzzled the girl.
"Why, yes," insisted the Young Doctor. "That's what this Mrs. Tome Gallien prophesied you know, that the piano would bring me an adventure! So you, very evidently, are the——"
"What? I?" stammered the girl. A flush of real pleasure glowed suddenly in her face and faded again as quickly as it had come. "Oh, no!" she said with some hauteur, "You—you——"
"Oh, truly!" begged the Young Doctor. "I'm most awfully sorry for what I did! I73can't think what possessed me! I must have gone quite mad for the moment! Why, really," he flushed, "I don't know whether you'll believe me or not—and maybe it's something anyway to be more ashamed of than to brag about,— but truly now," he floundered, "I haven't kissed a girl before since—since I was very little!" With a sudden quick jerk of sheer awkwardness he snatched a card from his pocket and handed it to her. "There! There's my address!" he cried. "And to-morrow if you'll only send me the word I'll jump off the bridge or throw myself under a truck, or make any other sort of reparation whatever that happens to occur to you. But to-night," he grinned, "I've simply got to get warm!" And started down the steps.
But before he had quite reached the sidewalk the girl had overtaken him and placed a detaining hand on his coat sleeve.
"How old is she?" questioned the girl.
"Who?" said the Young Doctor. "Oh, the woman? She's old enough to be your mother."
"I'm twenty-one," conceded the girl.74
"Well, she's fifty," affirmed the Young Doctor.
Across the girl's translucent face a dozen conflicting emotions seemed surging suddenly. "So?" she laughed. "So?" she repeated experimentally, "If only you had not been so—sobad," she sighed. "Well, about that piano," she ventured with a certain unwonted shyness. "In a world of so much racket is it not a pity that any harmonies should lie dumb? Is it—is it a good piano?" she asked quite abruptly.
"Why, for heaven's sake, how do I know?" demanded the Young Doctor. "It may be a—a Stradivarius!" he floundered wildly. "But it looks to me like the—like the devil!"
"If I could only see it," whispered the girl, "I could tell in a minute of course."
"If you could only see it?" scoffed the Young Doctor. Then, "Well—well—why not?" he acknowledged a trifle tardily, but with indisputable common sense.
"I have an aunt here," mused the girl, "who has a rheumatism in her elbow, I think it is. On Friday afternoon next—if the rheumatism perhaps should be sufficiently75bad?" Flushed with the anticipatory ardor of a musician she lifted her eyes to his.
"Why, capital!" acquiesced the Young Doctor. For the instant the whole suggestion struck him as being extraordinarily apt. "Well, good-by then," he laughed, "until Friday afternoon!" And vanished into the night.
He was still a long, cold distance from home. But by the time he had finally reached there his pulses were ringing with fire rather than with frost. And as soon as he had started a bright roaring flame in his stove, and concocted for himself a most luscious and steamsome drink, and driven his frosted toes into the farthest corners of some moth-eaten old fur slippers, he sat right down in a great spirit of diablerie to tell Mrs. Tome Gallien just what he thought of her.
"I hope you're satisfied!" he began quite abruptly in a firm and emphatic black hand writing. "Driven out into the winter streets by your most charming gift, I have in four short hours walked eleven miles; supped in a conspicuous restaurant with a perfectly76strange girl and at her expense; been branded publicly for all time, first as the girl's beau and later as her husband and the father of certain imaginary children; and have also in due time, still included in the original four hours, you understand, kissed said girl 'Good- night' on her own doorstep in the full glare of a city electric light,—and am now at ten-thirty P. M. of the aforesaid Monday evening waiting patiently in my room until Friday afternoon next when, heavily chaperoned by some kind of a relative with rheumatism, the said Adventure will appear to investigate the piano—and myself.
"Once again, in the language of my opening sentence, and with all due respects, I repeat, 'I hope you're satisfied'!"
Then quite contented both in fancy and in fact he settled down to kill time and cure patients until Friday.
But the intervening days it seemed were not to be bereft entirely of sensations either confusing or bizarre.
On Wednesday night he heard from Mrs. Tome Gallien. And by telegram.77
"Bungler!" wired Mrs. Tome Gallien. "What in creation have you done? The adventure intended for you does not arrive till Saturday, office, four o'clock."
The message happened to be delivered in writing this time, a flaunting yellow page, and, still clutching it tight by one twittering corner, the Young Doctor dropped down into the first chair he could reach, and with his chin dropped low like an old man's on his breast sat staring for an interminable time into his glowing fire.
Then quite suddenly at nine o'clock, with the funny new smile that he seemed to have acquired somewhere recently, he walked over to his telephone, fumbled a minute with the directory, experimented at least two minutes with Central's temper, located Miss Solvei Kjelland, and addressed her in his most formal manner.
"Miss Solvei Kjelland?" he questioned.
"S-o," said the familiar voice at the other end of the wire.
"This is Doctor Kendrue," he growled. "Dr. Sam Kendrue."78
"So?" conceded the voice without a vestige of affright.
"It seems, Miss Kjelland," he stammered, "that there has been some sort of a—of a—well, misunderstanding about Friday afternoon. It is all a mistake, it seems, about your being The Adventure! Mrs. Gallien indeed has just telegraphed to that effect. The 'Real Adventure,' it appears, is not due at my office until four o'clock on Saturday!"
"S-o?" conceded Miss Solvei Kjelland. If she seemed to be swallowing rather extra hard once or twice the sound was not sharply discernible certainly from the little fluttering swallow of the telephone instrument. "So?" she repeated blithely. "Well, that is all right. The piano keeps! And the Saturday afternoon is just as good to me as the Friday! And I am all as curious with joy as you to see what it is, this Adventure that is more nice than me! Good night!"
"Good—night!" admitted the Young Doctor.79
THAT the Young Doctor bought himself a new blue serge suit for Saturday was no indication whatsoever that he looked forward to that day with any pleasurable anticipation. Lots of people "doll-up" for disaster who couldn't even be hired to brush their hair for joy.
Quite frankly if anybody had asked him about it, the Young Doctor would have rated Mrs. Tome Gallien as a disaster.
If pressed further for justification of such a rating he would have argued that any rich woman who couldn't sleep was a disaster!
"Oh, it's all well enough for poor people," he would have admitted, "to put in the long night watches mulling over the weird things that they'd like to do. But when a person is actually able to leap up at the first gay crack of dawn and finance the weirdest fancy of his night!
"Oh, of course," he was honest enough to80acknowledge. "Poor Mrs. Tome Gallien would never again while life lasted be able to 'leap up' atanyhour of the day or night! And she doubtless in her fifty eccentric yearshadgiven extravagantly to no end of people who had proved themselves the stingiest sort of receivers! And her sense of humor even in her remotest, happiest youth must have been of course essentially caustic!
"But how any woman could reach a point so sick, so vindictive, so caustic, so rich, that still unable to strip herself of her lifelong passion for giving she should evolve the perfectly diabolic idea of giving people only the things that they didn't want—only the things, indeed, that she was absolutely positive they didn't want? Such as pianos! Grand pianos! Huge rosewood chunks of intricate mechanism and ornate decoration and Heaven knows what expense—crammed down into the meager crowded office of some poor struggling young doctor who didn't know a note from a gnat! Himself of course being the young doctor!
"Thought it was funny, did she? Thought it would really drive him outdoors for sheer81rage into some sort of an enlivening adventure? That was her theory, was it? Well itwasfunny. And ithaddriven him out to meet a rather particularly enlivening sort of adventure! Which adventure in the person of a Miss Solvei Kjelland was now due at his office by her own insistent appointment, on Saturday afternoon at four o'clock. But this Miss Solvei Kjelland, it seems, was not the Adventure which Mrs. Tome Gallien had already arranged for him for Saturday afternoon, same hour, same place?"
Into his muddled mind flashed transiently a half-forgotten line of a novel to the effect: "Heaven help the day when the mate you made for yourself and the mate God made for you happen to meet!"
"Well, if it really came to a show-down between his Adventure and Mrs. Tome Gallien's?"
Quite unexpectedly his mouth began suddenly to twitch at one corner. Speaking of "caustic humor" it was barely possible that the Young Doctor had just a tiny bit of caustic humor himself. When a man smiles suddenly on one side of his mouth it is proof at least82that he sees the joke. Nobody ought to be expected to smile on both sides till he feels the joke as well as sees it.
Certainly the poor Young Doctor was not feeling very much of anything at just this time except a sense of impending doom.
But in this sense of impending doom flickered the one ray of light that at least he knew what his own Adventure was: she was young, lithe, blonde, why as tall as himself, almost! A trifle unconventional, perhaps? Yes, even a good bit amazing! But thoroughly wholesome! And human? Yes that was just it, so deliciously and indisputably human!
But Mrs. Tome Gallien's Adventure? A woman like Mrs. Tome Gallien wouldn't stop at anything! It might be a pair of llamas from Peru! Or a greasy witchy-gypsy to tell his fortune! Or a homeless little jet-black pickaninny with a banjo and—consumption! Or—or an invitation even to lecture on physiology at a girls school! But whatever it proved to be he might just as well realize now that it would be something that he hated. Mrs. Tome Gallien in her present mood would certainly never seek to lull him with a "glad"83as long as she saw any possible chance to rouse him with a "mad"!
"Well, he wouldn't get mad yet, anyway!" he promised himself with unwonted whimsicality. "And if itwasllamas—which perhaps on the whole would be his preference out of the various possibilities anticipated—they would at least, judging from the woolly pictures in the geographies, be free from any possible danger of barking their shins against the sharper edges of the piano. Whereas a committee of any size come to request a series of lectures on——"
Thus with one form or another of light mental exercise did he try to keep his brain clear and his pulse normal for the approaching Saturday.
But Saturday itself dawned neither clear nor normal. Rain, snow, slush, wind, had changed the whole outdoor world into a blizzard.
It was one of those days when anything might blow in. But how in the world would it ever blow out again? With this threat of eternity added to uncertainty the Young Doctor decided quite impulsively to dust his desk, and investigate his ice- chest. To his infinite84relief he found at least very little food in the ice-chest. Whatever happened it could not possibly prove a very long siege! A half pound of butter, a box of rusks, a can of coffee, six or seven eggs, divided up among any kind of a committee, or even between two llamas? At the increasing excitability of his fancies he determined very suddenly to sober himself with hard reading.
With this intent, as soon as he had finished his breakfast he took down from his bookcase a very erudite treatise on "The Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint" and proceeded to devote himself to it. "Now here was something serious. Thoroughly serious. Science! Heaven be praised for Science!"
By noon, indeed, he was so absorbed in "The Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint" that he quite forgot about luncheon. And at three o'clock he looked down with a glance of surprise to see that the toes of his boots were dipping into a tiny rivulet which seemed flowing to him from the farther side of the room. By craning his neck around the corner of the piano he noted with85increasing astonishment that the rivulet sprang essentially from the black ferule of an umbrella, and that just beyond the dripping black ferule of that umbrella was the dripping black ferule of another umbrella, and beyond that, still an other!
Jumping joyously to his feet he made three apologies in one to the group that loomed up before him.
"Why, I beg your pardon," he began to the wheezy old man who sat nearest him. "Really I—I—had no idea," he explained painstakingly to the small freckled boy just beyond. "With all this wind and everything—and the way the rain rattles against the window," he stammered to the crape-swathed woman in the far corner. None of these was presumably Mrs. Tome Gallien's Adventure, but it was surely adventure enough of itself on the old oak settle, where almost no one ever sat even on pleasant days, to behold three patients sitting crowded—and in a blizzard! "I was so absorbed in my book!" he boasted with sudden nonchalance.
"Oh, that's all right, sir," wheezed the Old Man. "I was just waitin' for a car. And it looked drier in here than where I was standin' outdoors."86
87
By craning his neckBy craning his neck around the corner of the piano, he noted with increasing astonishment that the rivulet sprang from the black ferule of an umbrella
By craning his neck around the corner of the piano, he noted with increasing astonishment that the rivulet sprang from the black ferule of an umbrella
88
And "Say, Mister, do you pull teeth?" questioned the small freckled boy.
But the Crape-Swathed Lady was a real patient. Though goodness knows the Young Doctor would gladly have drawn either the old man or the small boy in her place. All his life long he had particularly disapproved of "mourning." It was false, spiritually, he thought. It was bad, psychologically. Everybody knew of course that it was unwise hygienically. But worst of anything perhaps the woman before him now made him think of a damp black cat.
It was perfectly evident, however, that the lady herself cherished no such unpleasant self-consciousness.
With perfect complacency at his request she came forward to the light, or at least to such light as the storm-lashed window allowed and, still swathed as blackly from view as any harem lady, stated her case.
"I have such a pain—here," she pointed with black-gloved hand toward her black-veiled face.89
Did she also take him for a tooth puller? mused the Young Doctor. With all haste he sought to settle the matter at once. "If you will kindly remove your—er—bonnet—is it that you call it?" he asked.
Compliantly the unpleasant black-gloved hands busied themselves for a moment with pin or knot until emerging slowly from its dank black draperies there lifted at last to the Young Doctor's gasping stare the most exquisitely- featured, dreamy-eyed young brunette face that he had ever seen outside a Salon catalogue.
"Here! Just here is the pain!" pointed the black-gloved finger to a spot right in front of the most absurd little ear.
"Bony Ankylosis of the Temporomandibular Joint!" gasped the Young Doctor just like a swear. Even as scientifically as he touched the pain-spot he felt his own wrist wobble most unscientifically with the contact. It was no wonder perhaps that the dark eyes before him dilated with a vague sort of alarm.
"Is it—is it as bad as that?" faltered his patient.
"Why, it isn't that at all!" hastened the90Young Doctor with a sudden resumption of sagacity. "It's probably just a sort of rheumatism. What made me cry out so was just a mere funny coincidence. This particular kind of pain being a subject that I—that I—if I may say so—have been giving rather special attention to lately."
"Oh, then I trust that I have come to just the right person," smiled the dark eyes with a kindling surface-sweetness that seemed nevertheless quite frankly bereft of any special inner enthusiasm.
"We will certainly hope so!" flushed the Young Doctor. "How about this pain—?" he began quite abruptly.
"It hurts me when I eat," said the girl. Her voice was very low and soft and drawling. "And when I drink. And when I talk," she confided. "But especially when I sing."
"Oh, you sing?" questioned the Young Doctor.
"Yes!" said the girl. For the first time her classic, immobile little face was quick with a very modern emotion.
"Personally," confessed the Young Doctor, "I should like very much to try a little91experiment on you if you don't mind. It will help me, even if it hurts you."
"As you wish," acquiesced the girl with the same imperturbable little smile.
From his precipitous retreat into the other room he returned after due delay with a plate of rusks and a steaming hot cup of coffee.
"It's such a horrid day," he said. "And you look so wet and cold, perhaps a taste of coffee wouldn't come in altogether amiss. But it's these rusks that I'm really interested in. I want you to bite down hard on them. And then presently perhaps I will ask you to sing so that I may watch the—Oh, by the way," he interrupted himself irrelevantly. "I neglected, I think, to ask your name."
"My name," said the girl, "is Kendrue."
"What?" questioned the Young Doctor. "Why that is my name," he smiled.
"Yes, I know," murmured the girl. "Coincidences of that sort are certainly very strange. It was one of the first things my aunt spoke of when I asked her advice about what physician to go to. I am a comparative stranger in the city," she added a bit shiveringly. "But didn't my aunt tell you I was92coming?" she quickened suddenly. "Didn't my aunt, Mrs. Tome Gallien, write you—or something—that I was coming?"
"Mrs. Tome Gallien?" jumped the Young Doctor. Chaotically through his senses quickened a dozen new angers, a dozen new resentments. A girl? So this was Mrs. Tome Gallien's threatened "Adventure," was it? Of all the spiteful possibilities in the world, now wasn't this just like the amiable lady in question to foist another girl into a situation quite sufficiently embarrassed with "girl" as it was! "Is—is Mrs. Tome Gallien your—aunt?" he demanded with such sudden stentorious sternness that even the most bona fide blood-relation would hardly have acquiesced without pausing an instant to reconsider the matter.
"Well, not of course, not exactly a real aunt," admitted the girl. "But I have always called her my aunt. We have always been very intimate. Or rather perhaps I should say she had always been very, very kind to me. And now, since my father—" With the unmistakable air of one who strives suddenly to suppress an almost overwhelming emotion she pointed irrelevantly to the piano and waved93off the plate of rusks and the cup of coffee which the Young Doctor still stood proffering. "You must excuse me if I—if I—seem distrait," she stammered. "But in addition to the very real annoyance that this little pain in my jaw is giving me I am—I am so bewildered about that piano! Where did you get it?" she asked quite bluntly.
"Why it came from Such-and-Such warerooms I believe," admitted the Young Doctor with as much frankness as he could summon at the moment.
With a little soft sigh the girl reached out and touched the dark, gleaming woodwork.
"I thought so," she whispered. "And—oh, how you must love it! It is certainly the most beautiful instrument that I ever saw in my life! The most melodious, I mean! The most nearly perfect sounding-board! An utter miracle of tone and flexibility as an accompanist to the human voice!"
"U—m—mmmm," said the Young Doctor.
"For two months," persisted the girl, "I have been haunting the warerooms you speak of! For two months I have been moving94heaven and earth in an effort to possess it! But my means being temporarily tied up," she shivered again ever so slightly, "I was not able immediately to—" With that odd, inert little smile she reached out for the plate of rusks and took one as the Young Doctor had requested. "Yes, here is the pain," she explained conscientiously. "But only last week," she winced, "on my birthday it was! I had every reason in the world to believe that Mrs. Tome Gallien was going to give the piano to me! She has given me so many wonderful things! But she sent me instead the deed to a duck blind down somewhere on the South Carolina coast,—shooting, you know? And dreadful guns! And dogs! And all that! I, who wouldn't even hurt a sparrow, or scare a kitten!"
With his hands clapped to his head the Young Doctor swung around suddenly and started for the window.
"Was this a comic opera? A farce? A phantasy of not enough work and too much worry? Was every mention of Mrs. Tome Gallien's name to be ascream?As long as life lasted? As long as—?" Startled by a tiny gasp he turned to find his little visitor95convulsed with tears but still struggling bravely to regain her self-possession. "Oh, please don't think I'm always as—as weak as this," she pleaded through her sobs. "But with pain and disappointment and everything happening so all at once. And with my big loss so recent——"
"How long ago did you lose your father?" asked the Young Doctor, very gently.
"My father?" stammered the girl. White now as the death she mourned she lifted her stricken face to his. "Why it wasn't father I was talking about," she gasped. "It was my husband."
"Your husband?" cried the Young Doctor. Two minutes ago wasthisthe situation that he had cursed out as a farce, a comic opera? This poor, stricken, exquisite, heartbroken little widow, tagged out by Mrs. Tome Gallien as an "Adventure" and foisted on his attention like some gay new kind of a practical joke? It was outrageous! he fumed. "Inexcusably brutal!"
"Colorado—is where it happened," he had to bend his head to hear. "Almost a year and a half ago," strangled the poor little voice,96"and we hadn't been married a year. Lung trouble it was, something dreadfully acute. Mrs. Tome Gallien did everything. She's always done everything. It's something about my father I think. Oh, ages and ages ago they were lovers it seems. But—but she chose to make a worldier marriage. And later, my father—why she bought my whole trousseau for me!" suffered the sweet voice afresh. "Went to Paris herself for it, I mean!"
Across the Young Doctor's memory a single chance sentence came flashing back "The daughter of a man who once meant something to me in my youth." So this was the girl? The little "Stingy Receiver"? Among all Mrs. Tome Gallien's so- called "stingy receivers" the one unquenchable pang in an otherwise reasonably callous side? Precious undoubtedly, poignant, eternally significant, yet always and forever the flesh that was not of her flesh nor the spirit quite of her spirit. Familiar eyes—perhaps? An alien mouth? A dimple that had no right, possibly, haunting a lean, loved cheek line? Fire, flame, ice, ashes? A torch to memory, a scorch97to hope! But whose smile was it, anyway? That maddeningly casual and inconsequent little "Thank You" smile searing its way apparently with equal impartiality across chiffon or crape,— a proffered chair, or eagerest promise of relief from pain? Had Mrs. Tome Gallien's life, by chance, gone a-wreck on just that smile? And why in Heaven's name, if people loved each other, did they let anything wreck them? And back of that— what did people want to love each other for anyway? What good was it? All this old loving-and-parting-and-marrying-some- one-else fretting its new path now all over again into chiffon-and-crape! "Bony-Ankylosis-of-the-Temporomandibular- Joint!" At the very taste of the phrase his mind jumped out of its reverie and back to the one real question at hand. "If you please, now!" he implored his visitor. "Just a little of the coffee! Just a crunch or two of the rusk!" Urgently as he spoke he began proffering first one and then the other. "And this crying?" he persisted. "Does this also hurt you?"
From the doorway beyond him he sensed suddenly the low sound of footsteps and looked98up into Solvei Kjelland's laughing face. Blue as a larkspur in a summer hail-storm, crisp, shimmery, sparkling with frost, even her blonde hair tucked into a larkspur-blue storm hat, she stood there shaking a reproachful finger at both the Young Doctor and his patient.
"Oh, Ho! For what a pity!" she laughed. "If you had but told me that Mrs. Tome Gallien's adventure was to be a picnic then I also could have brought the food!"
99
Excuse me, Miss Kjelland"Excuse me, Miss Kjelland," he said; "but this is not a picnic—it is a clinic"
"Excuse me, Miss Kjelland," he said; "but this is not a picnic—it is a clinic"
100
"Picnic?" frowned the Young Doctor. Before the plaintive bewilderment in the dark eyes that lifted at just that instant to his an unwonted severity crisped into his voice. "Excuse me, Miss Kjelland," he said; "but this is not a picnic—it is a clinic."
"So? Who is a clinic?" cried Solvei Kjelland perfectly undaunted, and swished bluely forward to join them. "It is not of course of a propriety, Doctor Kendrue," she laughed, "that I should come thus without the sick aunt! But in a storm so unwholesome for aunt is it not best that I buy some good medicine?" In a shimmer of melting snowflakes she perched herself on the arm of the101first chair she could reach, and extracting the familiar little purse from her big blue pocket handed the Young Doctor a one-dollar bill. "Medicine for the sick aunt!" she commandeered gaily. Then with only the most casual glance at the piano she whirled around to scrutinize the desolate little figure before her. If she noticed the tears she certainly gave no sign of it.
"Ah! It is as I thought!" she triumphed. "Most surely in my mind did I say that you would be a girl!" In one sweeping blue-eyed glance she seemed to be appraising suddenly every individual tone and feature of the dark, exquisite little face that lifted so bewilderedly to hers. Then quite unexpectedly a most twinkling smile flickered across her own sharply contrasted blondeness and like a fine friendly child she held out her hand in greeting. "Most certainly," she conceded, "you are more cute than I! But also in some ways," she beamed, "I am of course more cute than you!"
While the Young Doctor waited for the skies to fall, he saw instead, to his infinite amazement, that the little brunette though still bewildered was returning the handshake with102unquestionable cordiality. "Awfully well-bred women were like that," he reasoned quickly. "No matter how totally disorganized they might be by silly things like mice or toads you simply couldn't faze them when it came to a purely social emergency." And in a situation which had thus precipitously reached a point so hopelessly non-professional there seemed after all but one thing left for him to do.
"Miss Kjelland!" he essayed with a really terrifying formality, "This is Mrs. Kendrue!" The instant the phrase had left his lips his very ears were crimsoning with the one possible implication which Miss Solvei Kjelland would draw from such an announcement, and more panic-stricken than any woman would have been with a mouse he turned and fled for his medicine cabinet in the very farthest corner of the room.
"Your wife?" faltered Solvei Kjelland in frank astonishment. "S—o?" she laughed. "And I have only just come! Mix me a quarter's worth more of the good medicine, Mr. Doctor!" she called back over her shoulder, and dropped down on the low stool103at the other girl's feet. "Now about this piano!" she began precipitously.
"I am not Doctor Kendrue's wife!" protested the little black figure bewilderedly. "Why—why I thought you were his wife," she confided with increasing confusion.
From the direction of the medicine cabinet the sound of some one choking was distinctly audible. Both girls rose instinctively to meet—only the Young Doctor's perfectly inscrutable face.
"Who now is eating a Miss—mis-apprehension?" beamed Solvei.
"Mrs. Kendrue is a patient of mine," affirmed the Young Doctor with some coldness.
"O-h," conceded the Norse girl with equal coldness. "A patient? That is most nice. But—" As though suddenly muddled all over again by this latest biographical announcement she threw out her hands with a frank gesture of despair. "If this should be a patient," she implored, "who then is the 'Other Adventure'?"
Behind the little black figure's back the Young Doctor lifted a quick warning finger to his lips.104
"S-s-h!" he signaled beseechingly to her.
On Solvei Kjelland's forehead the incongruous frown deepened from perplexity into something very like impatience.
"Well certainly," she attested. "You are of a great sobriety in your office, but most wild on the doorstep. As for me," she confided, "it is of the piano and the piano only that I care!"
"That's just it," said the Young Doctor, "it is of the piano and the piano only that Mrs. Kendrue cares!"
With her finger-tips already touching the ivory keys the Norse girl swung sharply around.
"What is that?" she demanded.
With a sudden impish conviction that Mrs. Tome Gallien, being already responsible for so many awkward situations in the world, might just as well now be responsible for everything, the Young Doctor gathered breath for his latest announcement.
"Mrs. Kendrue," he smiled with studied calm, "is the niece,— as it were, of the lady who gave me the piano."105
"What," stammered both girls in a single breath.
But it was the little widow's turn this time to be the most dumfounded. "What," she repeated with a vague new sort of pain. "What? You mean that Mrs. Tome Gallien gaveyouthe piano—when—when she knew how I had been longing for it all these months? Been haunting the warerooms day after day!" she explained plaintively over her black shoulder to the other girl. "Why—why doyoulove music so?" she demanded with sudden vehement passion of the Young Doctor. "Are you a real musician, I mean?"
"On the contrary," bowed the Young Doctor, "I am as tender- hearted about pianos as you are about ducks. Nothing under Heaven would induce me to lay my rough, desecrating hand upon a piano." In an impulse of common humanity he turned to allay the new bewilderment in Solvei Kjelland's face. "This allusion about ducks," he explained, "concerns another little idiosyncrasy of Mrs. Tome Gallien's."
"Yes!" quickened the little widow. "When she sent Doctor Kendrue this wonderful piano106she sent me a—a dreadful duck blind—way down somewhere in South Carolina!"
"What is that?" puzzled Solvei Kjelland.
"Why a place to shoot!" snapped the Young Doctor. "Wild ducks, you know! 'Quack-Quack!' A—a sporting camp!" His whole face was suddenly alight.
"O-h! And this little Mrs. Kendrue does not sport," reflected Solvei. In another instant her own face was all alight too. "Oh, of what a nonsense!" she laughed. "Of what a silliness! It is of course a mistake, most funny, most conflictable! In some way it is that the gifts should get mixed in the mails!"
"Oh, no!" wagged the Young Doctor's head. "Oh, no!" he reiterated with some emphasis. "Careless as I assure you many of the post-offices are there is very little likelihood of a grand piano and a duck blind getting mixed in the mails."
"O-h," subsided the Norse girl, but only for an instant. "What my idea should be," she resumed cheerfully, "and what the idea of my aunt should be, is that if you would let us take the piano—one month, two months,107three, we would in return give you some lessons in this music, either in the piano or of the vocal."
"U-m-m," said the Young Doctor, "Yes—yes, of course that would undoubtedly be very humanizing and all that, but with so much unexpected competition, as it were, one must move very,—er—slowly in the matter. Just what—just what would be your idea, Mrs. Kendrue?" he turned and asked quite abruptly.
"My idea?" flushed the little widow. "Why—why, of course I didn't have any idea because I didn't even know that you possessed the piano until just now. But if you are still willing to part with it after—after the estate is settled," she hurried with evident emotion, "why, then—perhaps—I—" Yearningly as she spoke she stepped forward to the piano and fingered out one chord after another, soft, vibrant, experimental, achingly minor, a timid, delicate nature's whole unconscious appeal to life for help, love, tenderness.
"Dear me!" mused the Young Doctor.
"Oh! Do you play?" cried Solvei Kjelland ecstatically.108
"Oh, no," deprecated the little widow. "I just sing. Doyousing?" she in turn demanded as though her very heart jumped with the question.
"Oh, no," said Solvei Kjelland, "I just play." Yearningly she in turn stepped forward and struck a single chord. But there was nothing soft or minor about this one chord. Sharp, clear, stirring as a clarion call it rang out through the dingy room.
"Oh, dear!" thought the Young Doctor.
And as though flaming then and there with the musical fervor so long suppressed the Norse girl swung impetuously round upon her companion. "You do not play! And I do not sing! So let us!" she cried excitedly and dropping down on the piano stool seemed literally melting her fluent finger-tips into ivory-key and melody.
Indefinitely for a brilliant, chaotic moment or two, chord heaped upon chord and harmony upon harmony, and then suddenly to the Young Doctor's musically untutored mind it seemed as though the crashing waves of sound were literally parting on either side to let a little tune come through. And such a "pleasant109familiar tune" he rated it delightedly. He didn't remember that Verdi wrote it. He didn't stop to consider that it was from Trovatore. All he cared was that it was a tune, and a tune that said things, and a tune that always said the same things whether you heard it chopped through a hurdy- gurdy on an asphalt pavement or roared stentoriously by a band at the beach. "Home to our Mountains!" was what it said, and oh, other things too, undoubtedly, but that was all that really mattered, "Home to our Mountains!"
It was perfectly evident, though, that the little widow cared who wrote it, and what it was from, and where it was going to! With thrilling sweetness, astonishing technique, and most amazing volume, her rich contralto voice rang suddenly through the room. And in the precipitous jump of his heart was it any wonder that the poor Young Doctor couldn't have told for the life of him whether the mischief was all in one girl's voice or another girl's finger-tips, or partly in the voice and partly in the finger-tips—or—? "Home to our Mountains," soared the lovely voice, then quivered suddenly, like some wounded thing,110and with her hands pressed tightly to her cheek, the little singer sank weakly down in the first chair she could reach.
"Why, what is it!" jumped the Young Doctor.
Through a haze of tears the dark eyes lifted to his. "Oh, nothing special," faltered the little singer. "Just everything!"
With an irrelevant crash of chords Solvei Kjelland swung sharply round from the piano.
"Who is this Mrs. Tome Gallien, anyways?" she demanded fiercely. "And where is her habit? And what good is she? To hold back from people thus the things they want and stuff them all choke-up with what they don't want,—it is a scandal I say! It is a monstrosity!" With a quick, jerky sort of defiance she rose to her feet and commenced straightening her blue hat and tightening up her blue collar. "I am a failure as One Adventure," she laughed. "And I also get nothing! Neither the piano, nor the medicine for the sick aunt. Give me the address of this woman," she demanded. "And I will write to her in my leisure and tell her what my thoughts of her should be!"111
"Do!" urged the Young Doctor. "Nothing would please her more! When a woman has the ego that Mrs. Tome Gallien has there's nothing in the world that tickles her vanity so as to hear just what people think of her, be it good, bad, or indifferent." With deliberate malice he tore a leaf from his notebook, scribbled the desired address on it and handed it to the Norse girl. "If it doesn't do anything else," he commended her with mock gravity, "it may at least draw the fire!"
"'Draw the fire'?" repeated the Norse girl a bit perplexedly. Then as though to shrug all perplexity aside she turned suddenly to the young widow. "As for you—" she beamed. "You are a cunning little thing! And I loves you!" With unmistakable tenderness she stooped and kissed the astonished little singer on the forehead. "And I hope you will soon be of a perfect wellness," she coaxed. "And sing the perfectly whole songs to whatever piano it is that you should love the best! As for me?" she called briskly to the Young Doctor. "It is that you understand I am perfectly resigned?"112
"Resigned to what?" frowned the Young Doctor.
"Oh, this language!" laughed Solvei. "Do you know your own words? To? Of? It is thefromthat I would say! Completefromthe Adventure I am resigned!"
"S-s-h! S-sh!" warned the Young Doctor's frowning face once more. Almost anxiously he accompanied her to the door. "S-sh—s-s-h!" he implored her. "The poor little girl must never know of Mrs. Tome Gallien's audacity in sending her here as an 'Adventure.' With all the sorrow she's in just now, and the pain—"
"Yes, quite so," acquiesced Solvei Kjelland with perfect docility. Then all of a blue-blonde flutter in the open doorway she turned to call back her blithe "Good-by."
"Good-by, Doctor and Mrs. Kendrue!" she called. "What?No?" she flushed at the very evident consternation in both uplifted faces. "Good-by then, Mrs. and Doctor Kendrue!" she revised her adieus hastily. "What?N-o?" she flared with her first real sign of impatience. "Well then, good-by, Mrs. andnotDoctor Kendrue!" she finished113triumphantly, and vanished into the snowstorm. Turning back to his somber office and his sad little patient it seemed suddenly to the Young Doctor as though the first blue bird had fled, leaving only a single black iris bud to presage spring for the garden. "Blue birds were darlings!" quickened the Young Doctor. "And yet?" Poignantly to his memory revived a misty May time years and years ago when he had sat cross-legged in the grass a whole day through—to watch the unfolding miracle of a black iris bud!
In consideration of the particular speed and energy which Solvei Kjelland applied that afternoon to her homeward plunge through jostling traffic and resonant subways it is of interest to note that the first thing she did on reaching her room was to sit right down in her Larkspur-Blue coat and hat and investigate the word "leisure" in her English Dictionary. Out of all the various definitions given, "vacancy of mind" seemed to suit her fancy best. "In the vacancy of my mind is it that I have promised for this writing?" she questioned. "Of a very good wellness then!114When else should my mind or my heart be more vacated than now?"
True to this impulse she sat down that very evening to tell Mrs. Tome Gallien just exactly what she thought of her. On some very pale, pale yellow note paper, with the blue ink which she adored, and in the spirited handwriting so characteristic of her nationality, the very page was a blonde flare of personality.
MRS. TOME GALLIEN,
DEAREST MADAM (she wrote):
How do you do's. And I know all! Do not do it, I say. Do not do it. They do not like it and if you so persist in thus teasing of them you will most certainly defeat the one object which I am of an inclination to suspect that you have tucked away in one side of the mind. Is it not so?
You are of course very clever and of much wealthiness and some pain. And, it is of course very diverting and most droll lying thus to plan how one may yet motivate the destinies, is it, that you say?
And it is doubtless as you well think—the little widow lady has mourned too long, and115is too delicate of the indoors, and moons too much over the singing-voice. And this Young Doctor in his own turn he also is a mistake, so sarcasms, so severe, and hates all womans and all pianos both, except for minutes. And you have thought that if thus across the little pain in the lady's bone these two could be brought to scold about the pianos and the blind ducks much good might yet come and of a most loving adjustingment?
But no, Madam it is a great mistake! These people are not at all as bright as you think. And also in their hearts is there none of that most happy greed which makes all comical things as they come one joke! No! It is only that they see in your gifts one great make-them-mad which if you persist in so doing with other comics will make them cold with hate and humiliation for each other. And when you tag the poor little lady as an Adventure you have yet outraged complete the chivalries of the Young Doctor so that he cannot even see in his sense that even so little a widow may yet be a very great Adventure.
Do not do it, I say! Do not do it! It is116cruel. And there is no law but your own honor that can stop it.
If the malice is so formed that you cannot stop it but must persist in this most foolish custom of giving people the things what they do not want I would respectfully suggest that you send them to me.
I am young. I am strong. And very laughing. If you can find anything in the world at just this time that I do not wantI dare you to send it to me!
Yours very truly,
SOLVEI KJELLAND.
Being satiate then with justice and the English language Solvei reverted once more to the pursuit of juvenile pedagogics and the general discussion of human events with her own aunt and in her own tongue.
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, nothing except pedagogics and the aunt even remotely threatened her horizon. And by Thursday every gesture of her fine young body, every changing expression of her fine young face, seemed frankly indicative of some seething inner triumph that as yet remained117unspoken. By Friday night, however, even this self-control slipped its leash, and she closed her eyes for sleep with a very distinct and definite expression of emotion. "Ah!" she laughed, "that Gallien lady down yonder is good and fixed! Yes!"
It was not until Saturday night, late, by special delivery, that Mrs. Tome Gallien's answer came.
Stumbling sleepily down the stairs just be fore midnight to answer the doorbell that no one else seemed awake to answer, Solvei Kjelland received the insignificant looking envelope into her own hands. Small as it was, heavily overshadowed by special delivery postage, and almost quaveringly directed in a pale, fine writing it might well have suggested to anybody a suppliant for mercy, or at least for pity.
With a first faint twinge of remorse Solvei tore it open to discover no contents whatever—except a railroad ticket to the little mainland town in South Carolina where Mrs. Tome Gallien had established her official address.
Scowlingly for a moment and in dumb perplexity the girl stood shifting from one slippered118foot to another in a really desperate effort to decipher each word, phrase, comma, asterisk, in the momentous little document be fore her. Then quite suddenly a smile that was by no means mirthful flashed brilliantly across her blue eyes and her gleaming teeth.
"Stinged!" said Solvei Kjelland, and gathering her big gray blanket wrapper a little bit closer around her fled back precipitously to her bed.
With the first faint ray of morning light perhaps she might have waked to an instant's reassuring conviction that the whole ticket episode was a dream if only her subconscious deductions from that episode had not waked first on her lips like a wry taste. "The one things in the world that I did not want—at just this time? That lady is a witchess!" was the phrase that waked on her lips.
It was not until early the following week, however, that she called up the Young Doctor to tell him the news.
"How do you do?" she telephoned. "This is Solvei Kjelland. And I am to say good-by."
"Good-by? Why, what do you mean?"119questioned the Young Doctor's frankly surprised voice.
"It is that I am going away," said Solvei, "on a little—what it is you would call a trip."
"Oh," said the Young Doctor. "Where?"
If the statement could ever be made that a Person "shrugged" his voice Solvei certainly "shrugged" hers.
"Oh, through the tunnel!" she said. "And then off!"
"Yes, but where?" persisted the Young Doctor.
"Oh, to the Southern Carolines to visit this Mrs. Tome Gallien," sing-songed the girl as one who had rehearsed the line even to the point of monotony.
"What?" cried the Young Doctor. "Why—why, what do you mean?"
"Mean?" bridled Solvei instantly. "For why should it be a meanness? Is not this Mrs. Tome Gallien as fine a lady as I? Am I not as fine a lady as Mrs. Tome Gallien? For why if two ladies like to visit it should not be so? Have I not explain it all to the sick aunt?"120
"Yes, but do you really mean that you wrote to Mrs. Tome Gallien?" stammered the Young Doctor. "What did you say? For Heaven's sake what did you say?"
"What I did say should be sealed in my own heart," affirmed Solvei with some coldness.
"Yes, but my dear child!" protested the Young Doctor. "You don't seem to have any idea of just what you're going to! It's not at all a cheerful sort of place you understand. Why even its name you know is 'Gloom of the Sea.'"
"Even so," said Solvei, "there is no special pain in that. In my time have I not already seen several Glooms of the Land? Why then should I not, for sheer geography, start out to investigate a 'Gloom of the Sea'?"
"Yes, but it's a—it's a Desert Island, you know!" persisted the Young Doctor.
"So-o?" brightened Solvei. "And will there then be camels? N-o?" With a soft sigh of regret her whole personality seemed to fade for a moment into the indeterminate blur and buzz of crossed telephone wires. Then clear as a bell her voice rang out again.121"And have you seen the little sad lady once more?" she asked.
"Why she's here in my office now," said the Young Doctor. "She has to come almost every day."
"So?" mused the Norse girl. "And will it take the long time perhaps to mend the little pain in the bone?"
"I certainly hope so!" laughed the Young Doctor. And for the first time since she had heard it there was no irony in the laugh but sheer boyish happiness.
"You do not seem quite to get the ideas of this little trip that I should make," she reproached him briskly. "It is not just that I go! But that I stay! It is not just for the once it would seem but for the all time that this lady so desires me! The ticket that she so kindly sends is but one-sided. It does not return."
"Ticket?" exclaimed the Young Doctor. "Why, this is preposterous! You don't really mean it, surely? There's nothing that can make you go, you know!"
"So?" said Solvei. "Did I not make the dare to her? Should I not pay? Is it not122then as you say? I have drawn the fire!" Across the astonishing gravity of her tone a most joyous laugh broke suddenly. "Your words are of such a mixedness," she laughed. "Drawn? Drawn? Is it not rather as the strong banks would say, Miss Solvei Kjelland by one lady from the South has been withdrawn from the circulations? But I adore this America!" she confided blithely. "Always around every corner there is something that you did not first expect when you curled that corner."
"Yes, I know," admitted the Young Doctor. "But what about all this Montessori study and everything? Are you going to chuck it? And the little brother? The little lad who isn't?" he asked with real regret.
"It will all keep," said Solvei. "It is only what is, it would seem, that should pass."
"Oh, but Miss Kjelland," insisted the Young Doctor, "this whole thing is absurd! I—I believe you're making it all up, just for a joke! If you're going to be home next Sunday afternoon couldn't I come around and—and laugh the thing out with you?"
"Next Sunday afternoon?" mused Solvei,123with the manner of one who pauses for an instant to count the days on the fingers. "And this now, this minute, is a Tuesday?" she questioned, still speculatively.
"Yes," agreed the Young Doctor.
"No! It will not be possible!" said Solvei. "I leave!"
"Yes, but when?" asked the Young Doctor.
"Now," said Solvei. "Already it is that I can hear the taxicab adding at the door."
"What?" cried the Young Doctor.
"Under the river!" waved Solvei's clear young voice. "Under the river, Dr. Sam Kendrue!"
Like a gigantic gray-brown wonder bulb the northern winter is dumped down thus at will into the sunny, plushy forcing frame of a New York Pullman to bloom in perfect scent and glory only one day, two days, three days later in some welcoming Southland.
If Solvei Kjelland was astonished, however, at the first bland sights that met her blizzard-habituated eyes it is only fair to say that Mrs.124Tome Gallien in all her years of experience in every kind of a Southland had never seen any thing that astonished her as much as the sight of Solvei Kjelland.
Fuming helplessly in her great mahogany bed with its weird- carven bed-posts of pirate and sailor and siren, the sick woman lay staring blankly from the ceiling to the piazza railing and from the piazza railing to the dull gray sea when the vision first burst upon her.
"Why—why—Martha!" she screamed to her deaf woman. "There is a bright blue girl in the wrangle boat! And nobody is wrangling! They are coming right along, I mean! Scudding! And the girl is running the engine!"
From her own quick glance at the scene the deaf woman's answering voice came back as calm, as remote, as de- magnetized as the voice of an old letter.
"You sent for a girl to come, I believe," said the deaf woman.
"Yes, I know," fumed Mrs. Tome Gallien. "But I hardly dreamed for a moment that she really would!"125
"What?" said the deaf woman.
"Never—dreamed—that—she—would!" repeated Mrs. Tome Gallien as economically as she could.
"Most things that you send for—seem to come," monotoned the deaf woman by no means unamiably. "There's no room left in the storeroom now for the last box of Japanese bric-a-brac, or the French wedding gown or the new-fangled fireless cooker. Where shall we put the girl?"
"In the fireless cooker!" snapped Mrs. Tome Gallien.
From the vague acquiescent smile on Martha's face it was evident that she sensed the spirit if not the words of the suggestion.
The next direction however was startlingly clear. With a quite unmistakable gesture Mrs. Tome Gallien pointed toward the stairs.
"Martha! Go to it!" she screamed.
To a person lying in bed voices travel so much quicker than do the owners of the voices. Through what seemed an eternity then of time and noise, boat-keels grounding, men grumbling, boys shouting, women chattering, the sick woman waited in the lonely hush of her immediate surroundings with a very perceptible shiver of nervousness flashing from moment to moment across her spine.126
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