Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)

spirits were several degrees below zero, and though her smile was undaunted, there were signs of physical fatigue on her that did not escape her husband's practised eye. He rarely saw her now except in the evenings, for always with the resolution to shut down firmly on his old life and its (for the moment) vain aspirations, he decided against going back, even temporarily, to his bachelor quarters and letting her share them, and had instead taken quiet rooms uptown, near the locality in which he hoped to find a house. Here he sought her whenever he could escape from the practice which he was now nursing with assiduity, but it was nearly always late at night, and at such times she was nearly half dead with fatigue, although she tried to disguise the fact under a gay air. Westenra's heart was sore for her, but he could not quite understand the position. He had realised that, in spite of her nerves, she was anything but a delicate woman, and it puzzled and vaguely disappointed him that she should knock under so soon. He knew nothing of the wandering dryad in her nature with whom she struggled in the house-hunt, trying to school it to the prospect of life in a nursing home; how the clang and clamour of New York's street cars, railways, and fire-bells dazzled and wearied her; how the actual effort to bear with these things and keep her trouble to herself wore her down. In a very few weeks more, however, a reason that sufficed him for her fatigue was made clear. She told him one night as they drove home from the Metropolitan Opera House. They had locked up the house-hunting problem for a few hours and forgotten it in the enchantment of a Beethoven concert. With the glamour of the 17th Sonata still on them, making stormy echoes in their hearts, she leaned her face to his in the darkness, and gave him the dear and wonderful news. "Since when?" he asked, thrilling into tenderness and some other poignant sense he had never known in all his life. "Since the first moment, I think," she whispered laughingly--"an impetuous Irishman anxious to get into the thick of the fight!" "How can you be sure it is n't an Irish girl?" "Oh, I know--I know. God will give me a son, Joe." After that, however important the matter of his private hospital, it was far more important that the arduous house-hunt should come to an end. Besides, they were both sick to death of the whole thing. So, in a kind of despair at last they decided on a house which, though it had a very charming exterior, was inferior in many ways and less suitable to their purpose than some of those rejected earlier in the search. A five-story residence, it stood towards the Broadway end of 68th Street, and had a beautiful flight of marble steps leading up to its front door--which was something to the good; but there was a great deal in the way of alteration to be done before it was suitable for a hospital, and the cost of this had to come from Westenra's private purse. However, Val seemed to be drawn to it for some vague, mystic reason. Fortunately, Westenra could not look into her mind, or he would have discovered that she was congratulating herself on the bird songs they would hear in the early mornings from Central Park close by. That might have irritated Westenra, for, though he loved birds as much as any one, he did not allow them to sway his destiny. Of course, being two thoroughly unpractical and inexperienced people, they were entirely at the mercy of that most astute person in the world, the American Real Estate Agent, and got the worst possible terms. The arrangement about reparations was unsatisfactory, the lease too long, the rent higher than any one else would have paid. Dimly they knew this, and dimly they knew it would always be so, and that it was a pity that one or other of them was not practical and clever in a worldly sense. Brilliant people often feel this helpless sense of foolishness, and it irritates them so much that they long to stab somebody for it (and they usually stab the person they love best, with the cruel little knives lovers keep specially for each other!). Val remembered that Westenra in the early days on the ship had told her that the happiest marriages he had known of in America were between Irish and Germans, the Teuton common sense and equability acting as ballast to Celtic flightiness. And the remembrance vexed her. She saw that as ballast she was of no more use than a red robin. She wondered if Westenra realised it, and one day when the painful affair of furnishing was going forward she could not help saying: "Oh, Joe; if I were only a nice, stolid, lumpy German, I should know by instinct what to buy for the dining-room and kitchen." Joe froze slightly. Prescribing wives for your compatriots is one thing; taking the same prescription is another, and as it happened he was antipathetic to Germans. Nevertheless, since Val had put the idea in his head, he did think that a little _hausfrau_ knowledge of what was fitting furniture for a doctor's dining-room and kitchen would not have been out of place in a doctor's wife, and he said somewhat dryly: "Could n't we try and strike a note somewhere between stolid and fantastic?" He was thinking of the furniture, but Val received the impression that her taste was being indicted. She took the little dagger to her breast with a quivering smile, and it hurt her deeply because she knew that her ideas on furnishing were indeed fantastic, though beautiful. Unfortunately they were all she had, and she was obliged to use them, for Westenra had none at all. He only knew there was something wrong with the furnishing of the living rooms in his private sanatorium. Had he ever lived in the Bohemia of big cities he might have recognised that his drawing, dining, and reception rooms looked like a series of charmingly arranged _ateliers_. But, fortunately, he did not know it. He only saw that the bills were amazing, and that was bad enough, for the fact that nothing but the most modern and expensive appliances and fittings would satisfy him for his operating-room had already accounted for a large outlay of money. The house needed a good deal of renovating before it could be used, and by the time they were settled in their new home there was a hole in his capital large enough to sail a ship through, and several rents and tears in the magic veil of comradeship with which the two had hoped to wrap themselves from the world. Then began a weary search through guilds and registries and bureaus, for a staff of capable servants. This, of course, was Val's exclusive affair. Westenra neither could nor would be beguiled into it, so alone she wrestled with the problem, and made acquaintance with false references and all the guile and tricks of the servant class. For the American domestic, who is not American at all, but of every other nationality under the sun, is truly the worst in the world. When she is honest she is a fool; when she is competent she is a knave. The mistress takes not her choice but her chance of one or the other; and in either case she pays. After a long series of "weekly trials" which usually ended in a day or two with a demand for unearned wages, impudence, and vulgar insults from the "weighed and found wanting," a _menage_ was eventually established, comprising a red-haired cook, who, under a bland and benevolent exterior, was a calculating robber of the most cold-blooded description, and who, while despising her mistress for a "soft fool of a greenhorn," congratulated herself on the circumstance and resolved to take full advantage of it; a couple of housemaids one of whom was raw from minding goats on the Kerry hills, and the other recommended herself by a modest demand to be allowed to go to confession every Friday night. (The last had subsequently to be dismissed in spite of her holiness because, according to her story, she had been "ordered by her dochtor" to take an egg in brandy for her breakfast every morning and several times during the day, and faithfully followed the prescription except that she omitted the egg.) There was also a furnace and general utility man who fought with both cook and maids, and in the end stole Westenra's bicycle from the cellar; and a laundry woman who by arrangement "took two dollars a day," and appeared to spend most of her time seated at the kitchen table taking heavy meals as well. Fortunately event and sequence rarely occur together, so that Val was not flooded out all at once by these disquieting things; they fell upon her from day to day like the gentle drips of water that wear away the stone. But life began to press and gibber in a strangely nightmare fashion round the vagabond journalist, and sometimes there would creep into the smoke-coloured eyes that loved so much to look upon colour and wide spaces, and "watch the silences," an expression slightly reminiscent of a wild thing caught in a trap--a trap full of pots and pans and daily menus, and weekly bills, and fighting cooks and shirking housemaids, and domestic problems,--such a trap as almost every woman finds herself caught in when she engages upon the career of wife to a professional man, and one in which few find success unless specially endowed with an ability for management, economy, and order. Poor Val's endowments were not of this kind. Well she knew it, but would not admit the fact even to herself. She had dreamed of a little space of time between the date of their settling in with their servants about them and the opening of the hospital--a little space like the clearing in the midst of a tangled forest, where she could pitch a tent and rest for awhile with the thought of her wonderful happiness that Westenra's child was to be hers. She meant to recapture into their lives the magic air of that happy week in the Bronx woods. Once more they would adjust and gather about them the fabric of comradeship and love that was to be the veil between themselves and the world, and that somehow in the last few weeks of rushing turmoil had been mishandled and torn. But the dream was vain. No sooner did the domestic mechanism of the house begin to work, creaking and straining like an old ship with an amateur hand at the wheel, when cases for operation were hurried in, the place was filled with nurses, other doctors and students bustled up and down the stairs, and there were endless comings and goings of patients' friends. The strangely disquieting scent of ether came stealing down like a living presence from the upper floor into the atmosphere of home Val was trying to establish in the rooms she and her husband occupied in the big house. It seemed to her, too, that other shadows came in and lingered around; that when operations were in progress pain-troubled spirits wandered through the house, hiding in corners, waiting fearfully. In the fight against these illusions, as well as with the complicated problems of housekeeping and management, life began to resolve itself into something very like Swinburne's "Ballad of Burdens." The burden of fifty-dollar-a-week nurses, rude and arrogant and of a self-reverence amazing, who fought like cannibals with the servants, and made turmoil all round them except in the splendid silence of the sick room. The burden of telephone bells that sounded from morning till night with the injurious sayings of waiting patients. The burden of bitter cold, as the winter came on, and Val suffered as only a tropical bird or flower can suffer in a bleak climate--the grim December dawns when the quiet of three feet of snow lay on the city, unbroken save by the jingle of the bells on the milkman's sleigh, or the shriek of the first car upon the frozen metals! The burden of the elevated railway in