Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
the avenue close by; the hideous rush of it through the night, like some
monstrous winged beast on a ceaseless quest for its prey--the ferocity
of its approach, the sinister melancholy of its receding cry! The
burden of "bathroom extensions" where the water-pipes burst every night,
dislocating the business of the house for hours--of frozen cisterns, and
New York plumbers! Of a cellar furnace that would not heat the house,
or, acting on some aesthetic principle of its own turned the bathrooms
into ovens, while the patients were in cold-storage and in the
operating-room the sponges froze to the tables! The burden of snow on
the sidewalk, and policemen knocking at the front door to say it must be
cleared, or that some one had fallen down and broken something, and
compensation would have to be paid later by the householder!
The burden of a beloved man who, when things went wrong in office or
operating-room, came roaring like a tiger in pain to his mate. For
alas! Garrett Westenra was no Angel in the House! That was one of the
strangest of all burdens to be borne, for Val always wanted to laugh at
it, and yet she knew it was no laughing matter. Westenra at work and
Westenra at play were two very different persons.
Val had been aware from the moment of their return to New York of a
great nervous change in her husband's mentality. It seemed to her that
as soon as they got into their new home he became all nerves and
torment, and difficult and exigeant as a child. It had not taken her
long to find that he possessed all the easily roused devils of the
easy-going Irishman. At first she was amazed by this discovery, then
confused, but in the end she loved him the better for it. Only it
always seemed to her madly funny that a man with such width and height
of mind should be no better than a cross-grained baby about some of the
ordinary vexing trifles of everyday life. It was hard to believe that a
medical scientist of the first water could fall into a state of fury
over a wrongly entered telephone message, a mislaid stethoscope, or
because a careless housemaid had misplaced something in his office; that
a man who had nothing small or mean about him should swear vividly over
the fact that some one had put a used tampon into his waste-paper basket
instead of burning it or thrown a burnt-out match into his fireplace.
There was a dumb-waiter that travelled on a rope up and down between
Val's sitting-room on the first floor and a little surgery at the back
of Westenra's consulting-room, and never a day passed but that rope was
rattled violently for Val to come to her little opening and receive some
furious complaint concerning a negligent maid or a stupid nurse. Many a
time and oft Westenra's special swear--a peculiar combination of his
own--rang up the shaft.
"Hell's blood and blazes! What has that girl from the Kerry hills done
with my stethoscope? How dare she touch it? She must have touched
it--it's not on my desk.--Where are those No. 1 bandages?--Who has moved
my note-book?--Will you find out from Nurse Soames why there are no
tampons made?--Hell's bells!--Is this a doctor's house?--What kind of a
doctor's house?"
The dumb-waiter travelled no farther than Val's room, and she issued
orders that no one was to answer the rattle of the rope but herself.
She realised that it was Westenra's safety-valve in moments of intense
irritation. It gave her a spasm of painful merriment, even in the midst
of her greatest weariness and worries, to hear her signal to come to the
shaft and receive the storm. Later, when the stress of the day was over,
she might laugh at him, and he, first furious, then ashamed, would
finally laugh himself and beg her pardon like a generous and
hot-tempered boy. But at the time she always gravely listened, and
without comment put the trouble right as swiftly as she could. She
realised only too clearly that the hospital was on his nerves as well as
her own, and that his irritation came from a multiplicity of cares
pressing on him, rather than from the one small incident that caused the
explosion. Indeed, life was pressing hard on Westenra. He was working
like a dog, and the dollars were rustling in, but the sound of their
rustling gave him no great joy. His heart was elsewhere, in other work
which must stand still, or perhaps, which was worse, be done by some one
else. The hospital hemmed him in it too. He, quite as much as Val,
felt caged. His work, his private life, all his interests for the
moment seemed narrowly centralised into one street, one house, an affair
of grubbing within four walls. Something in him rebelled at that, and
not less because he himself had so arranged it. It irked him terribly
to be mixed up with the machinery of this hospital, and his reserved
nature chafed under the lack of privacy in the place that should have
been his home. There were nurses everywhere. Val and he were never
together for five minutes without being intruded upon by some one
wanting something. Val had no control over the nurses; they did and
said what they chose, having fear of no one but the doctor. He knew she
had trouble with them every day, but he would not go into the matter.
It was not his province to wrangle with women; he had told her so from
the first when she came to him for advice. She must manage that part of
the scheme by herself, he said; he had his own share of trouble and
could not undertake hers as well. She had recoiled wonderingly before
his unsympathetic attitude, but never again worried him about anything
in the house. But he was aware that she was having a stiff time, and
from his heart he pitied her. But what was to be done? They were in it
now for loss or gain. His fortune was pledged to this thing and they
had got to do or die by it. And he did not mean it to be die! Westenra
was no quitter. It hurt Val to see the way he worked. She had never
realised before what a dog's life is a doctor's. Her husband was at
every one's beck and call but her own, and never could be sure of a
peaceful hour to himself.
In her own way she worked even harder than he, and it was a
heart-breaking thought that with it all she was not making a success of
the place. Though money was coming in fast, it flowed out still faster
through her incompetent fingers. The problem of how to make things pay
was a black beast which she fought by day and wrestled with in nightly
dreams, and the more she fought and wrestled the more it grinned and dug
its malignant claws into her heart. Even courage and ardour cannot
overcome inexperience and triumph over disability. Despair came often
to sit with her and whispered that this was not her place, and _here_
would never be laurels for her. But she did not want laurels for
herself--only for Westenra; and the more despair filled her the more she
loved her big difficult Irishman, whose nerves and torment and prevision
for the rottenness of life's rewards nearly drove her crazy.
Bills were another burden heavy in the bearing. Like all good men,
Westenra was "tight with money." He never said a word when Val with
heaving heart produced her weekly pile, large as a roll of drugget, but
what he left unsaid during the short interval between sighting the sum
total and producing his cheque-book would have filled a library.
They were always double what they should have been, those bills, and
triple what they would have been with an experienced woman at the head
of things: he knew it and she knew it; and they thought of the stolid,
lumpy German, and sometimes they spoke of her and of red robins that
were no good as ballast! And she felt as if she were drawing his
heart's blood, and so did he. Not that he was mean--far from it; only
he realised that his was not the money-making head, and he suffered from
the fear all brain-workers know--that their money-making capacity may
give out at any time.
"Simple people like you and me can never make fortunes, Val," he would
say sadly, "the only thing for us is to hang on tight to what we have
come by so hardly." But when he adjured her earnestly to "try and
economise," her face became as haggard as if he had thrust a dagger into
her, so that he made haste to add:
"I know you do, darling. It is only that I 've got into the habit of
saying it--forgive me!"
She forgave him gladly, and lay awake more than ever thinking out
impractical plans for economising. She hated to take the dollars that
he had sweated for as only doctors and treadmill prisoners can sweat, to
bestow them on insolent cooks who stole, housemaids who drank and
shirked their duties, tradesmen who took advantage of her "English
accent" to charge her twice as much as they would charge other people.
When she found that almost every good American housekeeper defeats the
dishonesty of servants by doing her own marketing, she shouldered the
business too, and made acquaintance with Baumgarten's Market, a huge
place where everything save groceries could be obtained for household
consumption. Some of the darkest hours of her life were spent at
Baumgarten's. It was there, sitting upon a high chair before the meat
and poultry counter awaiting her turn to be served, that she most keenly
realised her defeat. All around her, good American wives were examining
the grain of beef and the breasts of chickens. Poor Val could never
understand how they extracted information from the process. She herself
always got the toughest meat and the oldest birds for the highest
prices. She knew nothing of the breasts of chickens and never would
know anything. She, who could write a mile long passage from the
classics and never forget a poet's inspired word, found it impossible to
remember from day to day the price of sugar, and how much she ought to
pay for butter. Information like that simply passed through her head
like an express train through a tunnel. She never got the bargains
other women got. She was the victim of every sharper, and was "done" on
every side. On a desert island she would have been a treasure. In a
civilised city, battling with extraordinary conditions on a professional
man's income, she was a failure, and the knowledge deepened day by day
and was bitter as gall. She fought on with the courage of the desperate
and the doomed, but despair was in her heart and her eyes, and sometimes
Westenra saw it there, and thought she hated this life to which he had
brought her. He saw that she was a round peg in a square hole, and the
last woman in the world for the practical life she pursued with the
ardour of a doomed squirrel. The knowledge never interfered with his
affection for her, but it sometimes interfered with his nerves. It was
a bad dream from which they only woke up at night, for then together for
a few hours a natural reaction from the strain of the day took place,
and they would laugh like two children over the cares and problems of
the day. The night nurses, passing up- and down-stairs, often wondered
what it was the doctor and his wife found so amusing when they were shut
up in their rooms together. The fact was that in the practical affairs
of life they were no more than children, either of them, for all their
brains and experience. It is often so with gifted people. Of course,
Westenra knew his business as a doctor--none better, but the business of
being a practical and responsible husband and head of a household was a
sealed book to him, just as the problem of how to become the successful
manageress of a private nursing home was one that Val would never solve.
But if she could not defeat the cares that the day brought, she could at
least be extremely humorous over her mistakes and failures, and the
valiant spirit of her that was ready to get up from one day's knock-out