"DISTRICT NURSE"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1938, Page 10

"DISTRICT NURSE"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

BY

FAITH BALDWIN.

CHAPTER I. Sidewalks. The sidewalks of city streets; the sidewalks of any city; your city; mine. But not of any streets. Not the sidewalks of the manicured boulevards, the wide, three-bordered avenues. Not the sidewalks which lie relatively immaculate, before the doorsteps of the rich; not those lightly trodden upon by eighteen dollar, bench-made shoes, dotted with leashed and high-hat dogs; nor yet the sidewalks decorated by the spotless uniforms of the Generalissimos in the Doorman’s Army. Not these. Just sidewalks, over which the same sky arches, but a sky made vocal with the hoarse shriek of the hurtling L’s, just sidewalks built on a common soil beneath which, like as not, that clamorous mole, the subway, weaves and burrows its vocal path. Just sidewalks, littered with paper, with casual garbage, marked with the pressure of' countless feet, hurrying feet, feet which go unshod, feet protected against heat and cold by the makeshift leathers of the poor. Sidewalks, endless highways, leading to birth to death, to success and to failure; leading to the cold, crowded winding of city rivers, leading out to freer, wider areas, leading—back.

On the sidewalks, people. Children,-playing, quarreling, laughing; lovers kissing, and lovers, parting. Babies, in their mother’s arms. Neat women, slatternly women, women old and young. Men. Sober men, and drunken men. Men who walk upright and fear not man or God, men who lie in gutters; men who creep past in the indifferent shadows of old walls. Boys, on roller skates. Pushcarts loaded with fly-specked fruit. A baby carriage filled with pretzels. Open markets. A group of boys smoking cheap cigarettes outside a stationery store. One goes in, and comes out grinning. He is the first slot machine customer of the day. He has won.

Dogs, chasing each other, chasing their own tails. Dogs, consciously well fed, dogs lean, marked with mange, beset with fleas. Cats. Cats that sit on doorsteps and wash their complacent faces, cats that slink by, their apparent ribs quivering with the memory of heavy boots.

Cars, flashing past. Old cars, new cars, cars on their way up town. Cars with women leaning back against good upholstery, saying to one another, my dear, such stnells! Cars that stop before tenement houses, the cars of, bootleggers, .of other traffickers in forbidden commodities.

Sidewalks, teeming with sunlight, sinister in shadow, the breeding place of life, of death, of tragedy, of romance. Turn a corner. Here are houses which once looked out upon a quiet street, with shuttered and artistocratic eyes. The street is no longer quiet, many of the shutters hang, flapping, on rusty, broken hinges. But the houses remain, brownstone, sombre, four stories, fallen on evil days, dreaming perhaps of past position. They have yards still, in which the grass grows with a feeble tenaciousness, in which are broken asphalt walks and stunted trees striving toward the sun. Some have little gardens.

In such a house, in the first floor back apartment Ellen Adams lived with her mother, and her sister Nancy. It was a small apartment. Two bedrooms, a rather leprous bathroom, a kitchenette, a living room. The living room was large, comfortably furnished, high-ceilinged, bay windowed, with a fire-place which, if it did not draw too; well on windy nights, supported an unusually fine mantlepiece. The breakfast table was laid, one sunny spring morning, in the bay window, as usual. Spring, in the city of sidewalks, heralded its coming by a warmer wind swirling among the strewn papers, by a fragile veil of dusty green on shrub and tree, by roller skates and baseballs, and by, of an evening, people leaving the unknown intimacies of their roofs to sit on steps or drag their broken chairs to the sidewalks itself.

■ “It’s a grand day,” said Ellen, contentedly, one blue eye on the clock. “Golly that coffee smells good.” Mrs Adams, immaculate, small, slender, with apprehensive eyes, a tight, petulant mouth, and very fine hands, looked up from her small, industrious clashing among silver and china. “Nancy’s late again,” she said. “Here she comes,” Ellen answered, walking over to the window, “out of breath, as usual.”

Smiling a little, she watched Nancy making her dashing way down the street. Nancy was twenty. Ellen twenty-four. Nancy was a blue-eyed brunette, in contrast with Ellen’s hon-ey-coloured fairness. Nancy was teetering along on her high heels, whistling and under her arm she had the newspapers, the giddy, youthful papers she herself perused on the way back from work, also the more sober news sheet affected by her mother. It was after seven in the morning and Nancy was returning from her work at a central telephone office, frorr the 11 p.m. to 7 am. shift. “Hie, family,” said Nancy, a moment later, prancing into the living room dropping her newspapers, casting her purse aside, flinging her small, ridiculous hat on a table. Gosh, I’m hungry! Nancy was always hungry. After breakfast, after hot coffee and rolls and cereal, and maybe an egg, she would clear away and wash the dishes, yawning. Then, she would be sleepy; then she would be dog-tired. Then, she would settle her mother with paper or book or mending, and wander into the bedroom which was hers by day and Ellen’s by night, and wiggle her slim body out of its encasing garments, and pull down the shades and open the windows and sleep, and sleep with the concentration of youth and health until late afternoon.

“How can you read—” began Mrs Adams, as usual, picking up the pa-

pers. She never got any further. Nancy interrupted, gaily: “I can't very well; that’s why I like my reading most pictures. Ellen, did you get the marmalade?” Ellen had. Mrs Adams mentioned, mildly: “Your father always read “The Times.”

He had been dead, these many years. But his opinions were still his widow’s opinions, his newspapers, her newspaper.

They sat down at the table after Ellen had brought the rolls, hot from the little oven. Nancy said, suddenly, with authentic admiration:

“You look like' a million dollars, Sis. How you manage it, in that uniform .”

Ellen looked down at the dark gray of her dress. Her coat was over a chair, nearby. Her uncompromising hat. Her small black bag. She replied amiably:

“Thanks, and district nurses aren’t expected to dress like Follies girls, after all.”

“Okay by me, Miss Nightingale,” said Nancy. “How are the errand's of mercy, by the way? Any murders? You haven’t given me the low-down for a year. By the way, will you be home tonight? Chick’s asked me to go to the' new Garbo picture.”

Up at four, a cup of tea; dinner, early, with the family; out to a show; report for work at 11 p.m. Time between the show and work for a sandwich somewhere. That was Nancy’s usual routine.

. “I’ll be home,” Ellen told her, “but why don't you stay in once in a while? You haven’t gotten rid of your cold, yet, you know.” “I certainly have. I don’t know which was worse, the cold or your treatment,” Nancy told her. “Mustard paste and hot baths, blankets, and boiling lemon juice. And I haven’t grown any skin on my chest yet as it is.” “You don’t take care of yourself,” Ellen told her, absently, borrowing her mother’s papers for a moment, running her wise, grey eyes over the headlines.

“Don’t be professional, darling,”, said Nancy, starting to clear away. Ellen rose and looked down at her mother. She was a slim girl, looking taller in the sedate, severely cut uniform than she really was. Her lovely, heavy hair, paler than gold, warmer than silver, was uncut and curled about her broad temples. There was faint, glowing colour under the clear skin, and her generous, pretty mouth was healthily red, curving easily into smiling or the lines of pure compassion. There was strength in the firm set of her square, small chin, more than a hint of stubborness and, perhaps, quick temper. A moment later and she had kissed her mother and waved a casual affectionate farewell to Nancy, who was out in the kitchenette, slinging dishes loudly, and haphazardly into the sink. Nnacy yawned, “bye,” she said, “don’t catch measles or take any wooden money.” “Aren’t you leaving early?” her mother called after her. Ellen’s reply came faintly through the closing door. “I have to stop at Joe’s” she said.

It was a gorgeous day. She was going toward work she loved with a single, astonishing passion. Her mother had not had a heart attack in four months. The house she had left had always been home; she had known no other. Once the Adams family had owned the house, had spoken with a certain controlled pride of their “neighbourhood.” Now, they rented an apartment in the same house, and the neighbourhood was not as it had been. Ellen sighed a little, remembering her childhood.

But things had turned out all right, after all. She had been able to go through training after high school, had been able to do and do well the work she had always wanted to do, among the people with whom she had grown up. Nancy was happy enough in her own work. She wished Nancy needn’t work on the night shift. But it was better so; better than one of the girls be always within call, within reach of the frail elderly woman around whom their lives were centred; Ellen at night, Nancy by day. It couldn’t have been done any other way. If Coral hadn’t gone away. Ellen shrugged her slim sholders in the dark coat and amended it to . . if Coral would come back.'

No use thinking of Coral, lost to them for nearly a decade. But somehow Ellen remembered her, in the spring.

She swung around a corner and hurried on to Joe’s. Joe was in a basement. There he sat at his window and watched the feet of the world pass by. Watched the shoes, new shoes, old shoes, shoes run over at the heels, shoes smart and shoes dejected.' Sooner or later they all came to him —the shoes.

Ellen produced a package. “Hello. Joe—resole these for me?” she asked.

Joe stood up, a short squat man in a leather apron and took the shoes ip hands more like leather than leather itself. “Sure. I feex ’em, he told her heartily. He regarded the sturdy, scuffed shoes she had given him, with their heavy soles and low rubber heels. “You sure walka a lot,” he chuckled “That’s my job,” said Ellen.

After she had left him he put the shoes away. Niza girl. Real lady. Nancy gooda keed, too. But Ellen. Joe was sentimental about Ellen. Had she not come and helped the time the last bambino was born. Sure, fine girl. Lookit her shoes now, worn out running around helping people. Not like the other sister, the one who had run away, how many years, six years, eight years? Joe had forgotten her name, but he remembered her dark hair with th& rod lights in it, and her impatience . . . “Aren’t my shoes ready yet, Joe, for heaven’s sake, what do you do with

your time?” He’d mending so many of her shoes, stilt-heels, flimsy shoes bat-, tered with dancing in strange company, their heedless way through life . . . Ellen made her way through the increasing crowds toward the sub-sta-tion of the Visiting Nurse Association where she would presently make her reports and get her calls for the morning. On the corner she saw Herman, the small son of the man known to the neighbourhood as Accordian Al. Herman was trotting along at his father’s side, suiting his schoolboy pace to the stiff halting gait of his companion’s wooden leg. On the corner, up against Mr Lippinsky’s stationery store newsstand, Accordion Al would unfold his camp stool and sit down to play and sing through the long hours, unmolested. He'd been quite affluent once when he’d had the ferry boat concession. Not| now. Ellen stopped to speak to the! pair, and as she went on she heard Al’s husky, fairly true voice lifted in that song he was always singing. Where had he gotten it, she wondered . . it had a charming, ratner melancholy melody and was a simple lyric. Some day she must ask him. She hummed it now under her breath, hurrying toward the sub station. How did it go? “Life is like a city street. Where the tides of traffic beat, Tears and laughter, shade and sun, Long day ending, new begun . . Kiss and quarrel, dream and die,

Life’s a street of passersby You and I—you and I—” “Hello,” said Jim at the door of the sub station, lounging against it, broad shoulders a little slouched, hands in pockets. “Hello yourself,’' replied Ellen, smiling at him, “how come you're up so early?” “Big deal,” sail Jim solemnly. They laughed together standing there in the bright, warm sunlight. Jim was taller than Ellen, and very dark. His eyes were brown, heritage from a mother who had left her South European home to come to a far country, and fall in love with a gay, hard living young Irishman who had, not much later, deserted her. Mrs O’Conner was dead now. Jim lived with his fathers devout maiden sister, a block or two from Ellon. They had grown up together, they had attended the same schools, several classes apart. Ellen couldn’t remember the time when, in the eyes of the neighbourhood, she hadn’t been “Jim’s girl.” Jim’s small real estate and insurance office wasn’t far from the sub station. He rented flats and lofts, he had a finger in the various neighbourhood pies. A few years older than herself, part of her life, part of her background. “How about a movie tonight?” he was asking.

(To be Continued.)