LITMIR.BIZ

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was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had accepted and promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named Nelly Byers, that Martin began to brood:

      “Wonder if he did have a headache last night?

      “Wonder if somebody gave him the tickets?

      “Why didn’t he ask Dad Silva’s daughter to go with us? Does he think Leora is some tart I’ve picked up?

      “Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody—wants to keep us all friendly, so we’ll send him surgical patients some day when we’re hick G. P.’s and he’s a Great and Only.

      “Why did I crawl down so meekly?

      “I don’t care! If Leora enjoys it—Me personally, I don’t care two hoots for all this trotting around—Though of course it isn’t so bad to see pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed as good as anybody—Oh, I don’t know!”

      VI

      In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a play “with the original New York cast” was an event. (What Play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theatre was splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers admired the bloods—graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi of golf, familiars of New York—who with their shrill and glistening women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often mentioned in Town Topics.

      Leora and Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero when he refused the governorship; Martin worried because the heroine was prettier than Leora; and Angus Duer (who gave an appearance of knowing all about plays without having seen more than half a dozen in his life) admitted that the set depicting “Jack Vanduzen’s Camp in the Adirondacks: Sunset, the Next Day” was really very nice.

      Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality. He was going to give them supper and that was all there was to it. Miss Byers explained that they had to be in the hospital by a quarter after eleven, but Leora said lazily, “Oh, I don’t care. I’ll slip in through a window. If you’re there in the morning, the Old Cat can’t prove you got in late.” Shaking her head at this lying wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car, while Leora, Angus, and Martin strolled to Epstein’s Alt Nuremberg Café for beer and Swiss cheese sandwiches flavored by the sight of German drinking mottos and papier-mâché armor.

      Angus was studying Leora, looking from her to Martin, watching their glances of affection. That a keen young man should make a comrade of a girl who could not bring him social advancement, that such a thing as the boy and girl passion between Martin and Leora could exist, was probably inconceivable to him. He decided that she was conveniently frail. He gave Martin a refined version of a leer, and set himself to acquiring her for his own uses.

      “I hope you enjoyed the play,” he condescended to her.

      “Oh, yes—”

      “Jove, I envy you two. Of course I understand why girls fall for Martin here, with his romantic eyes, but a grind like me, I have to go on working without a single person to give me sympathy. Oh, well, I deserve it for being shy of women.”

      With unexpected defiance from Leora: “When anybody says that, it means they’re not shy, and they despise women.”

      “Despise them? Why, child, honestly, I long to be a Don Juan. But I don’t know how. Won’t you give me a lesson?” Angus’s aridly correct voice had become lulling; he concentrated on Leora as he would have concentrated on dissecting a guinea pig. She smiled at Martin now and then to say, “Don’t be jealous, idiot. I’m magnificently uninterested in this conceited hypnotist.” But she was flustered by Angus’s sleek assurance, by his homage to her eyes and wit and reticence.

      Martin twitched with jealousy. He blurted that they must be going—Leora really had to be back—The trolleys ran infrequently after midnight and they walked to the hospital through hollow and sounding streets. Angus and Leora kept up a high-strung chatter, while Martin stalked beside them, silent, sulky, proud of being sulky. Skittering through a garage alley they came out on the mass of Zenith General Hospital, a block long, five stories of bleak windows with infrequent dim blotches of light. No one was about. The first floor was but five feet from the ground, and they lifted Leora up to the limestone ledge of a half-open corridor window. She slid in, whispering, “G’ night! Thanks!”

      Martin felt empty, dissatisfied. The night was full of a chill mournfulness. A light was suddenly flickering in a window above them, and there was a woman’s scream breaking down into moans. He felt the tragedy of parting—that in the briefness of life he should lose one moment of her living presence.

      “I’m going in after her; see she gets there safe,” he said.

      The frigid edge of the stone sill bit his hands, but he vaulted, thrust up his knee, crawled hastily through the window. Ahead of him, in the cork-floored hallway lit only by a tiny electric globe, Leora was tiptoeing toward a flight of stairs. He ran after her, on his toes. She squeaked as he caught her arm.

      “We got to say good night better than that!” he grumbled. “With that damn’ Duer—”

      “Ssssssh! They’d simply murder me if they caught you here. Do you want to get me fired?”

      “Would you care, if it was because of me?”

      “Yes—no—well—but they’d probably fire you from medic school, my lad. If—” His caressing hands could feel her shiver with anxiety. She peered along the corridor, and his quickened imagination created sneaking forms, eyes peering from doorways. She sighed, then, resolutely: “We can’t talk here. We’ll slip up to my room—roommate’s away for the week. Stand there, in the shadow. If nobody’s in sight upstairs, I’ll come back.”

      He followed her to the floor above, to a white door, then breathlessly inside. As he closed the door he was touched by this cramped refuge, with its camp-beds and photographs from home and softly wrinkled linen. He clasped her, but with hand against his chest she forbade him, as she mourned:

      “You were jealous again! How can you distrust me so? With that fool! Women not like him? They wouldn’t have a chance! Likes himself too well. And then you jealous!”

      “I wasn’t—Yes, I was, but I don’t dare! To have to sit there and grin like a hyena, with him between us, when I wanted to talk to you, to kiss you! All right! Probably I’ll always be jealous. It’s you that have got to trust me. I’m not easy-going; never will be. Oh, trust me—”

      Their profound and unresisted kiss was the more blind in memory of that barren hour with Angus. They forgot that the superintendent of nurses might dreadfully come bursting in; they forgot that Angus was waiting. “Oh, curse Angus—let him go home!” was Martin’s only reflection, as his eyes closed and his long loneliness vanished.

      “Good night, dear love—my love forever,” he exulted.

      In the still ghostliness of the hall, he laughed as he thought of how irritably Angus must have marched away. But from the window he discovered Angus huddled on the stone steps, asleep. As he touched the ground, he whistled, but stopped short. He saw bursting from the shadow a bulky man, vaguely in a porter’s uniform, who was shouting:

      “I’ve caught yuh! Back you come into the hospital, and we’ll find out what you’ve been up to!”

      They closed. Martin was wiry, but in the watchman’s clasp he was smothered. There was a reek of dirty overalls, of unbathed flesh. Martin kicked his shins, struck at his boulder of red cheek, tried to twist his arm. He broke loose, started to flee, and halted. The struggle, in its contrast to the aching sweetness of Leora, had infuriated him. He faced the watchman, raging.

      From the awakened Angus, suddenly appearing beside him, there was a thin sound of disgust. “Oh, come on! Let’s get out of this. Why do you dirty your hands on scum like him?”

      The watchman bellowed, “Oh, I’m scum, am I? I’ll

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