“This is serious,” Mrs. Ewing said indignantly. “I am a Registered Nurse—locked in a medicine closet.”
“Any my kind of medicine in that closet?”
At this point Emmet missed a few sentences but presently Mrs. Ewing looked back into the closet.
“He seemed to understand,” she said. “But he was awfully drunk. He’s going to try the kitchen door.”
Once more a character passes out of this history. Neither of them laid eyes upon this stray personage again. But later, perhaps twenty minutes later, Emmet spoke up.
“Come in and shut the window,” he said. “It’s getting colder.”
“I prefer to sit out here.”
“Shut the window then.”
A pause.
“I’d come in, Mr. Monsen, but you understand I hardly know you.”
“I understand. I hardly know you either.”
She hesitated a moment longer—then she came to a decision and climbed back in, half shutting the window after her.
“We’ll just have to wait,” he said drowsily. “I took some aspirin.”
There was another gap in time for which Emmet could not accurately account though he felt sure that Mrs. Ewing, crouching delicately across from him, did not close her eyes. Then he was awakened by the sound of her fists beating on the doors, her voice calling “Margerilla! Margerilla!”
“What!” he demanded.
“It’s Margerilla,” she cried. “I heard her car!”
“Solution,” muttered Emmet, but the tone of Mrs. Ewing’s cries had not served to reassure Margerilla below—it was some time before the key turned in the lock.
Margerilla atoned for her dilatory attitude by a burst of coy laughter.
“Why, you two!” she exclaimed. “Whatever you doin’ in there?”
Emmet stood up, drawing his burnouse around him. He called in vain on the chivalry of his youthful reading, but nothing occurred to him.
“We got locked in the medicine closet,” said Mrs. Ewing majestically.
“Yes,” said Emmet haughtily, “we did.”
Like Caesar in his toga covered with many wounds, he could only follow the nurse past the giggling Margerilla, and collapse into bed behind the door of the sick room.
He woke up into a world that even as he opened his eyes seemed vaguely threatening. It was still May; the gardens of the Davis estate had erupted almost overnight into a wild rash of roses, which threw a tangle of sweet contagion up over his porch and across the window screen; but he felt a sharp reaction from the humorous desperation that had carried him through the day before. Had he been told the absolute truth about his condition? And would Elsa Halliday come today—and be the same girl whom he had parted with two years before? Would he himself seem different with fever burning in him, its secret in his heart?
When he was indiscreet enough to open his eyes it was to see Miss Hapgood, back “on duty” and rushing toward him, with a thermometer held stilletto-like in a wavering hand.
Something would have to be done about her he knew—as she arrested her rush and shook down the thermometer—shook it in fact all the way to the floor where it rolled in sections beneath the dresser drawer.
Wearily he rang twice—a signal arranged for the secretary the day before. As she appeared he hunched up on his pillow—then he followed her infectious glance toward the window.
“Lot of them, aren’t there?”
“I’d just let them grow right into this room,” the Trainor girl suggested. “And Miss Halliday sent flowers this morning.”
“Did she?” He grew eager. “What kind?”
“Roses.” After a moment she added, “American Beauties.”
“Get them, will you, Miss Hapgood?” Then to Miss Trainor: “What are these on the porch?”
“Talismans—with a few Cecile Brunners.” As the door closed behind Miss Hapgood, she volunteered: “I’ll drive down to the drug store and get another thermometer. I see there’s been an accident.”
“Thanks. The most important thing is to see that I’m awake when, and if Miss Halliday comes. Apparently I’m getting sick man’s psychology in a rush—I feel as if there’s a conspiracy between the doctor and nurses to keep me sort of frozen—like that woman in the magazine.”
She opened the screen window, pinched off a rose and tossed it to the pillow beside him.
“There’s something you can trust,” she said; then briskly: “You have mail downstairs. Some men like to start a day with the mail—but Mr. Rachoff always liked to get through his planned work even before he read the newspaper.”
Emmet conceiving a faint hostility toward Mr. Rachoff, weighed the possibilities.
“Well, any phone call from Miss Halliday comes first, and I wish you could find out when she’s coming without appearing too anxious. About the work—I felt like it yesterday—now I don’t feel like anything till I know what this doctor’s planned. Give me that nurse’s pad, will you?”
“I’ll ring for Miss Hapgood.”
“Oh no.”
He was half out of bed when Miss Trainor yielded suddenly. In possession of the chart Emmet settled down and read steadily for several minutes; then he was out of bed in earnest, reaching for his dressing gown with one hand and ringing three times for the nurse. There were words too—words that he merely hoped Miss Trainor didn’t understand, impeded as they were by the increasing bronchitis contracted in the medicine closet.
“Get me Dr. Cardiff on the phone! And then read it—read it yourself! Lie on my right side three hours—then I ask the nurse to turn me gently to the left! This isn’t a routine! These are instructions for an undertaker, only he forgot the embalming fluid!”
Some of the blame that later fell on the Trainor girl must fairly be partitioned to her, for it was from the moment that she handed Emmet the chart that the complexion of the case changed. Later she confessed that she could have seized it and darted from the room but in Emmet’s state of mind this suggested a chase, perhaps the greater of the two evils.
Emmet descended to the living room, sat in his armchair and brooded.
He asked the Trainor girl to sit in the room because something about her made him rather ashamed to speak crossly or harshly. Her eyes with their other-world astigmatism, their suggestion of looking slantwise upon a richer and more amusing universe must never be corrected back into the dull vision of the truth at which he stared at present. Emmet did not want her to see the things he did. When Dr. Cardiff arrived he felt comparatively calm.
“Let me have the first go,” he suggested, “because what you say will be the final authoritative word and all that.”
Dr. Cardiff nodded, with obvious patience.
“I looked at that chart,” said Emmet, “and Doctor—I can’t live like that for four months.”
“I’ve heard that before,” said Dr. Cardiff scathingly. “I’ve heard dozens of these so called ‘high pressure’ men say: ‘If you think I’m going to stay in this —— bed you must be crazy!’ And a few days later when they get scared they’re meek as—”
“But that business of staring at the ceiling all day—and the bedpan and the mush diet—you’d have a nut on your hands!”
“Mr. Monsen, since you insisted on reading the chart you should have read it all. There is provision for the nurse reading to you—and there’s half an hour in the morning when you can have your mail read, sign checks and all that. Personally I think you’re lucky to be sick out here in this beautiful country—”
“So do I,” Emmet interrupted, “I’m not refusing to lead a completely vegetable life—I’m saying you’ll have to modify it. I can’t do it—I ran away from home when I was twelve and beat my way to Texas—”
The doctor arose.
“You’re not twelve now. You’re a grown man. Now, sir—”
He slipped off Emmet’s dressing gown and said, as he adjusted a blood-pressure apparatus:
“You should be in bed this minute!”
The machine sighed down—Dr. Cardiff looked at the gauge and unwound the flap; then Miss Hapgood was at her patient’s side and Emmet felt a gouge in his arm.
Dr. Cardiff turned to Miss Hapgood. “We’ll get Mr. Monsen upstairs.”
“I’m quite able to get upstairs…”
Miss Trainor, who happened to be in the hall saw him go—assisted on either side. She was a grave, slow-thinking girl, despite the very special delights that showed in her face, and she seldom yielded to intuition. But she could not dismiss a persistent doubt as to whether Dr. Cardiff had his fingers on the pulse of this business.
She felt it even more strongly the next day at one o’clock as she sat at her typewriter looking out a window and across a rose bed into the kitchen. Mr. Monsen was at the stove in person, accompanied by the increasingly faint Miss Hapgood.
It seemed that Margerilla had not yet appeared though it was long past one o’clock. She had telephoned from some vague locality about eleven and Miss Trainor had received the vague impression of a grandmother with a broken leg. Margerilla had promised to arrive later but the patient was in an increasingly impatient and nervous mood.
Miss Trainor listened:
“Mr. Monsen, you can’t cook with a temperature of 103°.”
“Why not? Think of the Huns. They used raw steak for their saddles all day—that broke down the fibre of the meat—just like a modern kitchen range.”
“Mr. Monsen!”
Miss Trainor heard him chopping savagely at some meat and bent resolutely to her transcription. He had seemed such a pleasant, attractive man.
“You’re too weak,” said Miss Hapgood forlornly.
“You think so? Well, there’s a bottle of fine brandy in the pantry there.
Do you think it makes me any stronger to take those sedatives, that keep you in a daze for twenty-four hours?”
The patent percolator cracked and the chopping sound ceased.
“I won’t want anything to eat anyhow,” Emmet declared. “And please don’t apologize. We’ll send Miss Trainor for sandwiches. All I really
