CHAPTER V

SQUIRREL IN A TRAP

"Do not thou make answer to an angry master."

"O speak that which is soft while he is uttering that which

is of wrath."

_Maxims of Art_.

The first thing, then, after leaving their honeymoon woods, was to find

a suitable house for the new venture. In the press of work that greeted

him on his return, Westenra found it impossible to give much time to

house-hunting, so this business practically devolved upon Val. Behold

her, then, utterly inexperienced in the conditions of American life, and

without a glimmering of intuition as to the requirements of an

up-to-date nursing home--whose ideal was a life in the wilds, sharing

the sunshine or the shade of a tree with her beloved, whose domestic

requirements vaguely included a pot and a blanket, who would have been

more at home on the veldt tracking a buck for dinner--rushing from one

end to the other of the most neoteric city in the world, inspecting

houses with "every modern improvement," weighing the advantages of

furnace-heating as compared to steam-heating, examining "open-work

plumbing" and "bathroom extensions," peering into kitchen ranges and

domestic offices, interesting herself in the things from which all her

life instinct had bade her fly, and from which she had fled!

But love was hers and a whole-hearted devotion to Westenra's interests

that even he could not quench, though he did his best. Nowhere could

she discover a house that pleased him. Every time she found something

she thought ideal, he would emerge for a few hours from his office and

completely demolish her hopes. Picking her find to pieces point by

point, he would thereafter retire and leave her to commence the search

anew.

Few things are more wearing to body and soul than a prolonged course of

house-hunting in a large city. There is nothing in the process to feed

the soul and everything to tire the body. At the end of a month Val's

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

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

blows and face the same round next morning, could not but appeal to the

chivalry in Westenra, as well as awaken his own sense of humour.