"DISTRICT NURSE"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 January 1939, Page 10

"DISTRICT NURSE"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

BY

FAITH BALDWIN.

CHAPTER IV. —Continued.

She would she said. She’d like to. He bent his tall dark head—

“Kiss Jim good night?” he asked persuasively. She laughed. He was ridiculous. She got so angry at him; she wouldn t marry him, ever, although he’d asked her a hundred times. She wasn’t in love with him.- But she did love him in a way; he was part of her life —part of her background. And she’d kissed him before. A good many times. Not, you understand, seriously. Like this. She reached up—he was so much taller —and brushed her cool red lips to his cheek, a smoothly shaven dark cheek. His arm went out and held her fast.

“That’s all right for a starter,” he muttered, “but . . Ellen, I’ve been patient —you can’t say I haven’t been patient. Couldn’t you learn —I mean, won’t you let me teach you ?” But she was very strong for all her look of fragility. She twisted out of his grasp, laughing a little. “Go home,” she ordered, “and leave me alone. Perhaps I don’t want to learn!”

He was not, however, to be put off so easily. Which was unusual for Jim. For a good many years now he had kept their friendship balanced rather delicately between comradeship and sentiment . . now and then, as when he proposed to her, the balance dipped. But usually she could handle him. It couldn’t be—just because he had seen her with Frank Bartlett? She’d known other men . . . other men had taken her around, liked her, one or two had more than liked her. Old Dr Travers* son, for instance, now practicing somewhere in the suburbs for himself as he refused to come down into the neighbourhood with his father, and his father refused to leave it. She’d liked Mel Travers, had been ever a little crazy about him, but his decision, “What’s in a dump like this for me? I want to make money, want human patients. These people, I give you my word, Ellen, they’re half animals,” had ended it for her. That was while she’d been in training, while he'd been an interne at the same hospital. Now the telephone rang in the apartment. She could hear it through the door. She pulled herself away from Jim for the second time.

“Please be sensible, Jimmy. There’s the phone; it must be Mrs Lenz. Let me go.” He did so, reluctantly, trying, knowing himself more disturbed than usual, to laugh it off. A moment later her mother regarded Ellen’s heightened colour with an appraising eye. She was answering the telephone, speaking quickly, with hastened breath. Mrs Adams, didn’t, she thought, approve of hallway courtships. It didn’t occur to her that her own girls must accustom themselves to courtship, in its more intimate sense, in hallways, motion picture theatres, buses, park benches. For when “company” came Mrs Adams was alway serenly seated in the living room save on those not very rare occasions when she was confined to her bed, in which case no company came.

It wasn’t Mrs Lenz, it was. Dr Travers. He was explaining in his slow, deep voice, always, a little tired, that he’d been delayed . . a number of late calls, he said. “By the way,” he went in, “I’ve a case for you. I’ll call the office direct tomorrow. In your district, an Irish family, measles, three of them, and very sick, that is, the baby is very sick. Looks like pneumonia.

They'd attend to it, Ellen assured him, he'd ’phone the details, of course. And they’d get a night nurse, if necessary.

Heinie, you wanted to tell mo about Heinie,” Ellen’s hurried voice went on. “Of course. Told Alma Lenz I’d tell you. He’s all right. Gastric, and why not. But you're a sensible girl, Ellen. God bless you.” “How’s Mel?”

“Fine. Working into a nice little practice as Henderson's assistant. Buzzes all over the suburbs in a new car. holding the hands of the victims of the depression epidemic. The depression has upset more stomachs and caused more gastric ulcers,” he said dramatically, “than speakeasies. However, that’s neither here nor there. Mel's all right, I think he has a girl. I'm sorry that won’t hurt your feelings, Ellen,” said Doctor Travers. Presently she hung up and turned to repeat the doctor’s conversation to her mother. Mrs Adams was fretful. “You didn’t tell him how I was,” she said. “Yes, I did. I said you were just grand. He asked, of course. Travers was their family doctor. He had ushered Coral and Ellen and Nancy into the world. He had watched their father leave it. He had been taking care of Mr Adams since her illness. “Well. I’m not ‘just grand,' " denied Mrs Adams, offended. She rose and moved toward her bedroom. “I'll go to bed now, Ellen,” she said. This would be Ellen’s last job. To put her mother to bed, to give her the sleeping tablet that was a blank, but Mrs Adams didn’t know that and relied, religiously, on her sugar pellet; to rub her back and to tuck her in and open the windows. During the process Mrs Adams returned to the subject of Frank Bartlett. “I can’t understand,” she said, “pickup men in the way. You!" “Oh, I didn’t." Ellen was tired to the point of impatience. "Or, yes, I suppose I did. In my work I pick up a lot of people, I don’t wait for introductions, you know.”

“It was hardly your work,” her mother reminder her, "a dog.”

Ellen laughed, “Well, never mind. I'll probably never see him again." “You probably shall, if he came back to see you, the second time,” her mother surmised shrewdly. “How did he

know who you were?” “Billy, I suppose. Billy knows everything.” ‘l’d just as soon,” said Mrs Adams, “that neither you nor Nancy struck up friendships out of —out of —” “Mother, if you say ‘out of your class’ I'll scream,” Ellen told her. “You know that’s ridiculous. You, poring over a genealogy book dull afternoons and telling us time and time again about the Adams, who they are, and why, to say nothing of the Westons, your branch, the whole history.” “I don’t mean class,” denied Mrs Adams, with dignity “and you know it. I hope I have proper pride in my stock and that of your father. I only mean as far as—as circumstances .are concerned."

“I don’t .think Billy’s new friend is a Vanderbilt,” Ellen assured her, deftly massaging the slender back with its surprisingly youthful skin . . . “turn over a litle, will you, angel? And after all, a visiting nurse may look at a lawyer, may she not? You had no objection to Elmer Jones . . he was a lawyer, wasn’t he? Or to Mel Travers. He’s a doctor. And you haven't any to Jim, certainly, and he’s a realtor, or whatever they call it, and he told me the other day that he was going to turn in his Ford for a Lincoln!” “You know I didn’t mean that," murmured Mrs Adams sleepily, her lids heavy without benefit of sugar pill. “We have always known these young men. Strangers—are different.” “They needn’t,” suggested Ellen sensibly, “stay strangers.” Mrs Adams was silent, half in dreams, Ellen roused her a little to settle her comfortably in the big bed, which she refused to discard and \vhich broke Ellen’s back anew every night. She pinched the white nainsook frill at her mother’s thin sagging throat, raised her a little to give her her water and the “sleeping” medicine, tucked in sheets and blankets and raised the window.

Then she tiptoed out of the bedroom and went to her; own. She undressed slowly, deep-in thought. Her mother had a fixed idea. It really was a fixed idea, it wasn’t just a notion. Strangers . . with money. Coral had met such a “stranger.” She’d never brought him to the house. Met him in her first job. It was he who persuaded her .to give up the stenography and try the stage. She had tried, and all her mother’s tears and her father’s anger had been unable to move her. She had found her work. And then, she had moved “up town” with some other girls. After which she had gone on the road. And finally the man’s wife had sued him for divorce, naming her, Coral, Cora Carmen she had called herself.

After that, silence. Young Pete McGregor, who had been insane about her since their school days, coming to the house, white with worry, wild with threats. That had been the beginning of Pete’s careless degradation, from which, through rescuing a lad of his own kidney, if of a different environment, he in his turn had been rescued. While their father lived Ellen and Nancy had not dared to try to find Coral. Since his death, two years after she had gone, they had tried through every means open to them. Some day, she would come back. On that hope their mother lived. Prettier than either of them, Coral, thought Ellen, in just appraisal, with her dark hair and the red lights, and her small, slenderness, her very especial dimple, hear the corner of a too full mouth, with her tremendous blue eyes, bigger and darker than Nancy’s. CHAPTER V. Later, lying in bed, Ellen found herself too tired to sleep. She always slept with one ear alert anyway, listening for the knock on the wall which so often came and which never failed to frighten her, to make her start up, sweat on the palms of her hands, her own heart beating painfully. Too tired tonight, thoughts coming and going, arresting her attention, seme of them.

There was, she supposed, no earthly reason why she shouldn’t know Frank Bartlett, provided he made any effort to see her again. She had liked him. He attracted her. He was, he had to be, a very decent sort to take an interest in Bill, to really care what became of Bill. If he did care. Or was it an excuse? At the thought that it might have been an excuse she felt herself flushing in the darkness. That might cast doubt on his sincerity toward Bill, but, toward herself? He’d said . . . “I’m not trying to use him as an excuse to see you again . .” But he’d gone on saying . . in a quite matter of fact way, not at all frivolously . . . what had he gone on saying? She didn't remember. She remembered. She didn’t, of course, believe in love at first sight. She wondered how much she believed in love anyway, romantic love. She was slowly learning to look on life with eyes adjusted just a little differently from those of other girls, Nancy’s eyes, for instance. In love itself one had to believe; in mother love, smothering, hurting, sacrificial, wounding, savage. In father love, too. In love of kindred for kindred. In love of man and wife, a building, dogged patient sort of love. But romantic love 9 Perhaps what they all started out with as just that. But down here, where the sidewalks came so close to a person's house, where intimacy was inevitable, but privacy impossible, it faded pretty quickly. Jobs and money, clothes and food, babies crying, illness, stupidity, ignorance— Where was your romantic love, then? Uptown, perhaps, it lasted longer. Did it? She had had some months of private duty before she came into the VNA, just for the actual practical experience. She’d seen things—up town. Marriage, thought Ellen.

Why was she thinking of marriage? Jim, of course, asking her, sometimes not in words; generally in words, trivial, half laughing—“ Look here, Ellen, haven’t you been my girl long enough? Jim O'Conner’s girl? "Sure you are. Why not Jim O'Conner’s wife? I’m doing well, I can look after you and Aunt Elizabeth too.” But she didn’t want him. He was doing well. He was, the neighbourhood said, a good business man. He had to be to squeeze any profit from the wretched tenements and shacks and shabby stores he rented or for which he acted as agent; he had to be else his little insurance business couldn’t, she thought, survive down here under the conditions she knew all too well. Suddenly she sat bolt upright. Something had occurred to her; why hadn’t she wondered about it before? Perhaps Bartlett was married. Well, what of it? she demanded of herself, and lay down again. Most attractive men were. Still, he hadn’t looked married. She laughed a little, aloud. No, he hadn’t looked mayried . . hadn’t looked at her as if he were. Not that married men hadn't looked at her . . . But it hadn’t been that kind of a look, exactly. (To be Continued.)