Ladies-In-Waiting

Mrs. B. “Why? He’s perfectly harmless; he is too ill to move.”

Mrs. C. “I’m sure I wish he could! Anything to relieve this hideous dullness. What’s the matter with him, I wonder!”

Mrs. D. “I’ll ask Miss Oaks when I have my hot fomentations this afternoon; she knows everything and she’s as generous as a prince with her knowledge.”

Mrs. G. (patiently). “Just after my youngest child was—”

A nurse passes through the grove, bearing a sterilized tray with peptonized preparations on it.

Mrs. Y. (calling her). “Nurse! what’s the matter with the new man-patient on our floor?”

Nurse (discreetly). “I don’t know, Mrs. Y.”

Mrs. X. (as the nurse vanishes). “She does, but she’s a stiff thing! Anyway, I heard the attendants whispering about him in the corridor before breakfast. Something—I think it’s an organ—is floating about in him.”

All. “Floating? What kind of an organ? Horrors!”

Mrs. X. “I couldn’t understand exactly. You know people always roar if they have nothing particular to say, but if it is interesting they whisper. I distinctly heard the word ‘floating.’ I don’t know whether it’s one of his regular organs, or something he swallowed accidentally.”

Mrs. C. (plaintively). “Doctors are never satisfied. If anything floats they want to get it stationary, and if it’s stationary they want to cut it loose.”

Mrs. G. “Just after my youngest child—”

Mrs. B. “They say Mrs. H. is going to leave to-morrow; she doesn’t like the food or the service.”

Mrs. E. “Goodness, she has all the service there is on our floor! Nobody else gets a chance! She spends her whole silent hour pushing the electric button.”

Mrs. D. “Yes, Miss Oaks declares she ‘lays’ on it. She says that the head nurse told Mrs. H. she must ring less frequently, or the bell would be removed. Miss Oaks says the patients that pay the smallest rates always ring the bells most. It isn’t fair that a thirty-dollar patient should annoy a whole row of eighty-dollar ones and prevent their bells from being answered.”

Mrs. X. “There’s nothing made out of Mrs. H. at thirty dollars a week. She was as contented as possible last night, but this morning she wanted her bed in the other corner, awnings put on the windows, and the bureau changed for a chiffonier. Come, we must all go in for treatment—it wants five minutes of four.”

Mrs. G., in despair, as she sees the occupants of the hammocks dispersing, almost shrieks: “Just after my youngest—”

But the ladies, for some reason or other, do not care to hear anything about Mrs. G.’s youngest, and she is obliged to seek another audience.

    Saturday

The doctor found me “over-treated” this morning and advised a day of quiet, with a couple of hours on the roof-garden or under the trees.

I have heard at various times sighs of weariness or discontent or pain issuing from the room opposite mine, and this afternoon when Miss Blossom had gone into Number 19 to sit with the haughty Mrs. Chittenden-Ffollette I stole across the corridor and glanced in at the half-open door of Number 18.

The quaintest girl raised herself from a mound of sofa-pillows and exclaimed: “Why, you beautiful thing! Are you Number 17? I didn’t know you looked like that!”

“It’s very kind of you,” I answered, blushing at this outspoken greeting; “but I am not beautiful in the least; it is because you do not expect much from a person who has just crept out of bed. I don’t look any better when I am dressed for a party.”

“You don’t need to,” she said. “Now get on my bed and cuddle under the afghan and we’ll talk till Miss Blossom comes back. Won’t she beat you for being out of your room? Why are you here? You haven’t the least resemblance to a rest cure! What is the matter with you?”

“Backache, sideache, shoulderache, headache, sensation of handcuffs on wrists, balls and chains on ankles, lack of appetite, and insomnia.”

“Is that all? Haven’t you any disease?”

“I believe not,” I answered humbly, “but the effect is the same as if I had. Why are you here?” I asked in return, as I looked admiringly at her shining brown hair, plump, rosy cheeks, and dancing eyes.

“I came here, so to speak, in response to an ideal; not my ideal—I never have any—but Laura Simonds’s. She is my dearest friend and one of the noblest girls you ever knew. She said the separation from the world would do us both good, and so it might if she could have stayed to keep me company. Now she has the world and I have the separation.”

“She isn’t here, then?”

“No, worse luck! She is always working and planning for the good of others, but she is constantly meeting with ingratitude and misunderstanding. She had just brought me here when she was telegraphed for to turn about and go home. You see she had sent two ailing slum children to be taken care of at her house, and it proved to be scarlet fever, and, of course, her stepmother took it the first thing—she’s a hateful person and takes everything she can get—and then the cook followed suit. Now they blame Laura and she has to find trained nurses and settle everything before she comes back to me.”

“Then you’re not an invalid? I thought you were in pain and couldn’t reach the bell. That’s the reason I looked in.”

“Oh, dear, no, I was only yawning! I came for what Laura calls the healing influence of solitude, but Laura thought as the place was so expensive, and treatment was included, we’d better take Turkish baths, massage, and electricity, they’re so good for the complexion. I have a little table to myself in the convalescents’ dining-room and haven’t made any acquaintances. I can’t stand their sweetbread complexions and their double chins. The patients are all so fat they might sing Isaac Watts’ hymn in unison: ‘Much of my time has run to waist.’”

“It is not an inspiring assemblage,” I agreed, “though I haven’t seen them all together, as you have.”

“And they think of nothing but themselves, which is exactly what I want to think about—myself, I mean. There’s one charming girl on this floor. Something’s the matter with her solar plexus and they won’t allow her to talk, so we have had some nice conversations in the silent hour. They’ve told me now I mustn’t call again; it seems that I was too exciting. Tell me something about yourself, Vashti—I am sure that’s your name, or Semiramis or Zenobia or Judith, and if it isn’t one or another of those I don’t want to hear what it is, for you wouldn’t look like it.”

Just here a page brought in a letter which she glanced through with an “Excuse me, please.”

“Oh, dear! Now Laura can’t come to-morrow! She is certainly the most unfortunate being in the universe. She became very much interested in a deaf man that she met in her settlement work, and so as to give the poor thing employment she appointed him Superintendent of the Working Boys’ Club. Now the working boys refuse to play with him and the directors have had a meeting asking Laura to remove him at once. I do think they might have endured him one season when I gave him a twenty-dollar ear-trumpet, but some people are utterly unreasonable; and here I am, in need of advice every moment, and Laura kept in the city!”

“Haven’t you any family?”

“Not a soul; have you?”

“No one but a cousin.”

“I believe nobody nice and interesting has a family nowadays. Laura has no one but an uncongenial stepmother, and that is the reason we are so intimate. I am so giddy and frivolous, and Laura is so noble and self-sacrificing that I try to form myself on her now and then, when I’m not too busy.”

“You live with her, do you?”

“Oh, no! I don’t live anywhere in particular. Of course I have a house and a lady housekeeper, but she doesn’t count. I’ve been staying mostly with a Mrs. Beckett, an old friend of my mother’s. She is the dearest and loveliest woman in the world and I can’t bear to be away from her.”

“Why can’t she join forces with you if you are so alone in the world?”

“Because there’s a son.”

“Is he too young, or too old, to join forces?”

“No, he’s just right, and he’d be only too glad to join forces, or anything else that had me in it, but he mustn’t, and that’s the reason Laura made me come here!” And with this she punched the sofa-pillows rebelliously, looking more like an enraged Angora kitten than anything else.

“It’s your hour for cold spray,” said Jimmy, the page-boy, peeping in at the crack of the door.

“I’ll come!” she responded unwillingly. “Now do steal in again,” she whispered, turning to me, “for I must talk to somebody, and if Laura could see you I know she would think you safer than anybody here.”

That afternoon, as I swung in my hammock in the grove below the sanitarium, I looked up at its three stories of height and its rows upon rows of windows, and wondered how many cases of neurasthenia under its roof were traceable to a conflict between love and conscience. “I begin to have an interest in that chatterbox neighbor of mine,” I thought drowsily, “and that, after vowing not to make an acquaintance in this place. Love will be a side dish, not the roast, in her bill of fare, if I am any judge of character, and why does her Laura attempt to stem the natural tide of events? It is almost wicked of the Fates to give such a featherhead any problems to solve; she ought to have her what’s-his-name, Beckett, if she wants him, particularly if he wants her. As for the noble Laura, I long to make her acquaintance. I can almost hear the uncongenial stepmother, the feverish cook, and the infuriated directors, clamoring for a providence to remove her from their field of vision, and substitute some thoroughly practical and ignoble person in her stead.”

    Sunday