Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 27

ROM the outside, Stoneywood Sanatorium looked like a charming little country-house. Inside the front door one became conscious instantly of rubber matting and carbolic. Why do they do it?

No one had answered Bellsmith's ring and, opening the front door, he found no one in the long vacant hallway. At the right was a little office, absolutely bare, with white plaster walls. One felt that there should have been a crucifix there and a bad portrait of a good bishop. So felt Bellsmith, at least, in vague recollection of some similar room.

He coughed, shuffled furtively, and then walked to the window. Outside, Keefe, standing beside the car, was watching with the keenest interest an English starling hopping across the lawn, both tiny feet moving together. A gardener went by with a barrowfull of earth for a greenhouse but no one paid any attention to Bellsmith.

He decided to explore. Farther down the hall appeared a sitting-room furnished in chintz and seeming doubly luxurious by contrast with the bare hallways. A nurse in stiff white was writing at a little desk. The chief occupation of nurses was apparently writing. She did not look up, and Bellsmith cleared his throat timidly.

"I beg your pardon. Could I see Miss Tilly Marshall?"

The nurse did not even look up at that.

"Second floor front," she replied; "the room at the end of the hall."

And so that was all there was to a Sanatorium! Bellsmith had expected at least to be searched and disinfected. Embarrassed, he padded up the rubber matting on the stairs and passed by a row of bedrooms, all with doors wide open. In one a woman in a kimono was manicuring her finger nails. In another a man was stirring under white sheets and coughing. Then suddenly he heard a voice hail him jovially: "Hello, Nero!" and there, sitting in bed, laughing at him, was Tilly Marshall.

Bellsmith hesitated at the doorway and looked around furtively.

"Do I come in?" he asked. "Ought there not to be a corps of nurses flanking me on either side?"

The girl laughed. "Goodness, no! Hundreds of people are in and out all day. The gardener spent an hour here this morning. His wife is a handsome, large woman, he says, but spends too much on her clothes."

As Bellsmith advanced into the room she drew a long breath. "Um! You smell of outside!"

Still stiffly, however, Bellsmith advanced slowly to the bedside and stood there awkwardly for a moment, while the girl watched him with eyes growing wider and wider.

"Are n't you going to kiss me?" she demanded in astonishment.

The idea had never occurred to him, but to the girl there had never occurred any other. As he leaned over the pillow both her thin little arms reached quickly up and pulled him down hard, and she kissed him violently—twice.

"There!" she exclaimed, releasing him, "I did most of the kissing, but it's been done anyway."

But Bellsmith was rather bewildered. Again, there is no use in saying that sharp thrills had not run all through him, but in the act itself his principal impression had been a bewildered one of his hand pressing through a crepe negligée on very thin, childish shoulder-blades, and of masses of fluffy hair in his eyes.

Then a softer mood came over the girl and she looked at him in a gentler way. "I should n't have done that, dear thing, but I was keyed up to being impulsive. Remember, I have  n't seen you for nearly two weeks—and we 're both anemic.

"Take off your coat," she commanded in the same breath. "You 'll roast in here. Then sit down and tell me about things. What's going on at the jute-mill?"

As Bellsmith took off his overcoat he drew a small package from the pocket

"I 've brought you a few simple gauds," he explained. I hope you 'll accept them."

As she took the package from his hand the girl looked up at him searchingly; then as she opened it, she exclaimed in delight, "O you sweetheart!"

It was a little platinum bracelet that he had brought her. He had fought mentally over it for hours and then decided that, with her, the simplest thing was always the safest. Impulsively she reached toward him, then drew back sharply.

"No," she said, "I won't kiss you this time, because I don't think you like it very much, and those things have to be done with a certain abandon."

As she slipped the bracelet on her arm and turned it back and forth, Bellsmith gazed curiously around the room. On the dressing-table in a silver frame was a photograph of a frail, pretty woman with bangs, rather English in appearance. He knew that it must be her mother. There were also Miss Marshall's brushes and comb scattered rather in confusion. He wondered why they gave him no particular sense of alarming intimacy.

Taking her eyes from the bracelet, the girl saw that there was some odd query in his mind and demanded instantly:

"What are you thinking about? don't try to fool me."

"I was wondering," confessed Bellsmith, "why it did n't seem stranger to me to be here."

"I wish I knew that," answered the girl. "I can see that it does n't. I suppose that I ought to want you to be all tingly and nervous but I don't know that I do."

"It is n't that so much," said Bellsmith. "What amazes me is that it seems so accepted and natural."

But the answer did not quite satisfy the girl. She looked toward the window rather unhappily.

"I suppose that it might also mean that you don't care for me at all, that you 're just coming to see me as you might any charity patient."

Bellsmith had followed her gaze toward the window. Keefe and the gardener together had moved farther out on the lawn and stood, with hands on their hips, watching a group of birds clustered around some seeds which the gardener had thrown them. Keefe would probably have much to tell William that night about English starlings.

Bellsmith moved nervously and cleared his throat, but the girl turned her head on the pillow and held her hand toward him.

"Now, here," she commanded, "not a word. Just because I love you and don't mind letting you know it, you must n't think that you 've got to feel that way, too."

"But—" began Bellsmith.

"Now, stop!" commanded the girl. "Stop it at once. I know the signs, and you don't really care the way I do."

Obediently Bellsmith took the hand held toward him on the coverlet.

"Now, please—" he insisted, but the girl would have none of it.

"Don't say it," she commanded, "because I know that you don't mean it. It would n't be fair, and I don't even think I want it. "Don't worry," she added, a moment later. "If you ever do care as I do, I 'll know it fast enough.

"And now!" she demanded drawing her hand away sharply. "Come! Quick! It's time for another anticlimax!"

Bellsmith laughed rather gruffly. "I only know that same one. I've been wondering for days what to call you when I saw you. I'm sorry, but 'Tilly' is something I can never say without loathing."

"I know it," agreed the girl. "I suppose I don't mind it myself because I'm used to it. Would 'Helen' be any better?"

Bellsmith shook his head. "Rather worse, if anything. You don't look like a Helen."

Miss Marshall deliberated. "'Snoodles' or 'Doodles' would never do, I tell you. Why can't you call me 'Simon'?"

"Any particular reason?" asked Bellsmith.

"None at all," said the girl. "That's why I thought it might appeal to you.

"But yet," she added, "searching history, don't we come across a Simon? Simon of Athens!"

"Timon," corrected Bellsmith. "But still, to give you good standing, one could find several Simons. Simon de Montfort. Then there was Simon of Cyrene. Sentimental tradition, used for campaign purposes, tries to believe that he was a colored man. Personally I don't think he was."

Miss Marshall was looking at him, laughing.

"The learning," she said, "stored up in that one little brain!"

She changed her tone. "Never mind. I like facts, too. Let's have more of him. Possibly I'd like to be Simon. Just tell me roughly. What did he do? What made him famous?"

"He carried the cross," replied Bellsmith.

The girl looked down at the coverlet.

"Oh," she said, simply.

Bellsmith stirred quickly. "Now I think it's time for more anticlimax—in the other direction. What's the opposite of 'anticlimax'?  'pro-climax'? Let's see. I 'll give you a name. How about—how about—how about—?"

The girl interrupted him. "Oh, dear!" she said. "You took so long I thought you were at it again and were going to give me your own name. Well, what do you suggest?"

"You 've taken the wind out of my sails completely," answered Bellsmith. "I think that now I'm getting accustomed to 'Tilly.'"

Rather reverently he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

"That's better!" said the girl. "I can almost believe that you meant it, that time."

"So then it's decided," she asked, "that my name is 'Tilly'?"

"In the opinion of the chair, the Tillys have it," acknowledged Bellsmith.

And apparently the girl was quite genuine as she changed the subject.

"Tell me," she repeated, "what's happened to the company?" Bellsmith did not answer at once.

"It's still in Leicester," he said finally.

The girl did not seem surprised. She looked toward the window, rather troubled. On the lawn outside, Keefe and the gardener were now taking leave of each other in hearty, ceremonious fashion.

"I knew that something of that kind had happened," continued Tilly. "Dr. MacVickar tried to tell me that they were out in Detroit or somewhere playing to crowded houses, but from two or three things he let slip I knew that they had n't left town."

She turned quietly toward Bellsmith. "What happened? Busted?"

"No," said Bellsmith, "the show is being entirely—what do you call it?—done over?—renovated? We 're going to hold it in Leicester until you come back. We have decided to make you a prima donna."

The girl asked for no explanations. Her face merely clouded.

"Oh, why in the world did you do that?" she demanded. From her tone he might merely have said, "I 've brought you a box of grapefruit."

"You 're not giving me Maida Maine's part?" she asked a moment later, more thoroughly frightened. "I have n't got the voice. I could never do it under the sun."

Bellsmith told her, however, very much what had taken place. He himself had become, by contagion, an enthusiast over the new form of the show and, as he described it, Tilly Marshall began to see it as it had first taken shape before his own eyes. Some of Charlie Barnes's own vividness still clung to his description.

"That 'Eve' song," she admitted, "was the one song in the show that I wanted to sing. Charlie Barnes must have known that." Her eyes misted a little. "Dear old soul! I wonder how much he was thinking of me when he planned that all out."

Bellsmith laughed. "I don't think that you need to worry a great deal about Charlie Barnes. His own part in the show has not exactly suffered by this deal."

He paused, then added, "I don't know, but Surdam and I have a horrible fear that Charles Barnes has his heart set on singing a barytone solo in the second act—a serious solo. Surdam says that that's every comedian's one incurable obsession."

But apparently Stoneywood Sanatorium did really have an organization after all, for a nurse appeared cautiously at the door and tapped gently with the ends of her fingers.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but Dr. MacVickar gave orders—"

Bellsmith rose immediately and began putting on his coat. Then while the nurse stood decorously outside the door, he leaned over the pillow and again the thin arms drew him down.

Tilly Marshall listened while his feet clicked down the brass guards on the rubber-shod stairs. Then, from her window, she could see Keefe, on the lawn, give a respectful start and come running toward the car.

She heard the engine start with a low velvety hum and watched the car disappearing along the curving drive at the edge of the lawn. As it turned out into the country road and was lost from sight, the girl drew her knees up under the covers and, putting her head down on them, she began to pray silently, prayed to a Deity whom she had never visualized, One whose jurisdiction, in her life, was more often social or economic than purely spiritual. One whom she sometimes did not even call by Name:

"Forgive me for what I am doing, but oh, I do love him so!"

The nurse, lingering outside the door, thought she was crying and waited a moment before she came in.