"DISTRICT NURSE"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 January 1939, Page 12

"DISTRICT NURSE"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

BY

FAITH BALDWIN.

CHAPTER X. —Continued. The cop on the beat strolled toward them. Jim turned and went the other way. What if he had a word to say to Dot now and then. He hadn't meant to upset her tonight. She used to be pretty free with her own speech, after all. What harm was there in a little kidding? And Dan hadn’t known about tonight. Not yet. As he reached his own house a tall young figure slouched out of the darkness. ‘Jim,” said someone in a low, heavy voice, with a strong foreign accent, “I been lookin’ for you. I’m quitting, see?” Jim’s eyes were swelling. He said abruptly. “No, you’re not. Come to the office tomorrow, Fontano. No, meet me at Tuccio’s —at noon. “But I tella you, I’m quit—” “Oh, go to hell,” said Jim, and turned on his heel and went into his own door. You couldn’t, Ellen discovered, go on “as you were.” The situation between her, and Bartlett had changed, subtly. He was considerate; sometimes she found herself thinking, with a little scorn of her own inconsistency, too considerate. They met, frequently. When he left town for a weekend, a brief holiday, flowers came in his stead, and notes. Now and then there were moments brimmed as a cup is brimmed with wine, with a dark, beautiful danger. Moments when they were alone. Sometimes, leaving him, she wished almost savagely that he would sweep all her hesitation and doubt aside, close his ears to her “sensible” arguments, take her into his arms . . . But he didn’t.

Add to this Jim’s growing insistence, his impatience, his sullen suspicions, and her mother's increasing dislike of Bartlett, her discomfort, perfectly apparent when he came to the house, and you have Ellen’s history. She was nervous, a little sharp-tongued, she lost weight. Nancy’s vacation came and went. During it, as had been planned, she and her mother went for a few days to Cousin Laura’s little seaside cottage. During these days Ellen made every known excuse not to see Frank Bartlett. He had been complaining (for some time that he never saw her save in comparative public, in restaurants, and theatres, in the midst of traffic. He was not, therefore, to be put off when the small family left town. The least Ellen could do was to give him her free Sunday.

They drove out into the country where the hills were very green and a little lost blue lake was dropped like a jewel into the valley. Frank had brought a picnic basket, complete, and they ate their luncheon by the narrow sandy lake beach, and afterwards he leaned back against a great boulder and smoked a pipe and looked at Ellen, the sun turning her hair to splendid gold, and smiled, and was, for the moment happy. They had agreed, or rather Ellen had decreed and he had been forced to agree, that this one day should pass without any discussion of their personal problems. They talked of a hundred things. Of himself, for instance. Ellen asked something about his little boyhood and later life, and he told her readily enough. “Nothing,” he said ruefully, very exciting, “I’m a very average man, my dear.” But he went on to talk of his work, and some of his more sensational cases, and she listened, enchanted, shifting the sand through her slender fingers. “Sometime,” he told her, “we must come out here in the fall when the trees have turned. I'll bring a steak and a coffee pot and we'll make a fire, and you’ll do the cooking, or don’t you like camping?” She would love it, she said; not that she had had much opportunity. He knew a place in the mountains, he told her, very wild and very secret, with a lake like this one, only less “domestic,” and great sentinel-like trees against a blazing blue sky. In the autumn they were clear torches burning up to heaven. There was a camp there, he said, a shack built of logs, with the bark still on. There was a fireplace, big enough to walk into; and plenty of logs. And the nights in the fall were cold and very clear, and there were a million stars, more or less. It was, he said, a place for lovers. “For you," he said, "and for me . . .” She was silent then, turning to repack the basket. For lovers. CHAPTER XI. They had dinner somewhere along the road and danced. And then drove home. He took her up to her door. “You’ll let me come in for a moment?" he begged. “No “ She smiled at him to soften the sting of the refusal. "No.” she said again; and then, "I’m awfully sleepy. Frank.” She was; her lids were drowsy with the long day in the open. Her hair was a tumbled mass of pale gold, warm silver; and her gray eyes were dreaming. But her heart was wakeful enough, hammering against her side. Now, he caught her to him for a brief breathless, mindless moment. He said the thing that Jim had said, but it made a different pattern in her brain. “You belong to me,’ he said, “when will you realise it, and tell me so . . . Ellen, will you —will you —?” But she reached up her free hand and laid it across his lips and as he kissed the palm, twisted out of his hold and slipped inside the door. She leaned against it, panting a little. What had been the end of that unfinished sentence had she permitted it to come to its conclusion? She knew. “Will you marry me . . will you risk an estrangement with your mother, will you give up your work . . ?” But she had not permitted it, afraid perhaps lest she surrender. But she slept smiling. It would come out all

right, somehow. Her mother would recovered from this baseless terror and dislike, as one recovers from a fever, and perhaps, for a little he might let her go on working, if not in this job, then in some voluntary work. The next morning as she was leaving the house, she was surprised to see Gilda Esposito, hurrying toward her, her slim arms burdened with a package. ‘I hoped to catch you before you left,” she said, smiling, pretty. “Mother sent this. It’s home-made wine. She told me to tell you it was good for you, it would make you strong.” Ellen took the package, laughing a little, and Gilda waited while she went back and put it in the house. “That was good of her, Gilda,” Ellen said, “I’ll stop in and tell her so. How is she?” “She’s all right,” said Gilda.

“Like your new job?” “I’m crazy about it. I’m going to get somewhere, some day,” promised Gilda, black eyes glowing. “I’m sure you will. Father all right, too, and Mike?” “They’re fine. Mike’s been going to school all year, nights. He drives a taxi, daytimes, you know. Father wishes he wouldn’t but what is there to do? There isn’t enough money in the business for them both,” explained Gilda. “Not that either father or mother care about money. But Mike does, of course. You can’t blame him. He wants to go ahead.” They parted and Ellen went her way. It was a terribly hot day. Leaving the substation a little while afterwards, she saw the ambulance of the City hospital clang toward her. A heat prostration, possibly. The continued heat, she reflected, wouldn’t help matters any. On the ambulance, a white figure, leaning out, waving. That would be Pete, she thought. She wondered vaguely why Pete McGregor never came to see them any more. Perhaps it hurt too much. Yet, probably by now, he’d forgotten —Coral.

The last advertisement she had had inserted in the theatrical papers had brought no answers. Surely if Coral knew how dearly she would be welcomed, she would come home to them. If she could. If she were not long past her earthly homecoming. She cut short her free time at noon to stop in at the Espositos. They lived over the fruit and vegetable store. A cluttered apartment, but clean. Mrs Esposito was a mountain of flesh, a smiling mountain. She helped in the store part of the day, but when Ellen reached there Esposito, a tall lean man, darkly handsome, his black hair feathered with white, told her, that his wife was upstairs, cooking. He had a helper in the store, a half-grown boy, a nephew. The Espositos had always interested Ellen. “Mike,” his Americanisation apparent in his name, and Gilda. And the father, who was, she had often thought, considerably above his neighbourhood. The fat and smiling wife, hysterical, as Ellen knew, quick-tem-pered, sentimental, speaking very little English. She spent a few moments with Mrs Esposito in the spotless kitchen, with its odour of oil and garlic, thanking her for remembering her. “It maka da good red blood,” Mrs Esposito said, “gooda for healt.’ ” Esposito came up to eat his dinner. “You stay,” begged Mrs Esposito of Ellen. She added something in rapid Italian to her husband, and he laughed and translated. “She says you are too thin, all Americans are too thin,” he told her, white teeth gleaming, “She wants you to take dinner with us. She’s always complaining about Gilda, you know, trying to make her fat.” Ellen stayed. She liked the Espositos. And it was a good opportunity to find out about the little Vitar boy next door. She had been called in there a week or two previously to look at the child. There was a suspicion that the stepmother ill-treated him. If so, something had to be done, and quickly. But all her questioning of the other neighbour had brought forth nothing. They were afraid, she thought of Vitar himself and his dark, thin, dynamic second wife, Sicilians ....

During dinner soup, ravioli, spaghetti and melon —the hospitable Mrs Esposito talked continuously about Gilda and about Mike. Her husband, smiling, translated. They were both intensely proud of the two children. “So American,” said Esposito, with, it seemed to Ellen, a certain wistfulness.

She managed to speak of the Vitar boy. Yes, Esposito told Ellen, frowning, the child was ill-treated, the woman beat him with a leather strap. You could hear him screaming. Ellen nodded, sombrely, and said nothing. Presently she took her departure. Standing a moment at the doorway, Esposito having left and gone down to the shop, she was saying goodbye to his wife, when she saw a tall dark young man coming up the stairs. He carried a small package in his hand. He hesitated, seeing Ellen: Mrs Esposito’s face darkened. She screamed at him in Italian. He said something, thrust the package into her hands. Gilda. Ellen caught that much. Then he left. Mrs Esposito held the package gingerly, opened it. A little box fell out. She picked it up, stooping and grunting. A string of imitation pearls. She tossed them from her. “Madonna!” said Mrs Esposito to Ellen, “that Fontana. Always after mia Gilda! She not like heem.” Ellen left, smiling a. little. So Gilda had a beau, whom she didn’t like, whom, presumably her mother and father didn’t like.

(To be Continued.)