One morning some three weeks later Stacey received a night letter from Omaha. It was addressed “Honorable Stacey Carroll” and read: “My husband Jim is awfully sick with flu and I am afraid he is going to die. He keeps asking for you though he is out of his head and does not know what he says. Please, Captain Carroll, come if you can because then he might get well. Gertrude Burnham.”
Stacey wasted no time. He sent a telegram to say that he was starting immediately, telephoned for a lower berth on the evening train, and pulled a suitcase from a closet. But in the midst of his neat methodical packing he suddenly paused and gazed abstractedly away. It had occurred to him that perhaps if Burnham could see him as he had been in France the sick man might be more likely to recognize him and might even—who could tell?—draw a little strength from the old revived relationship of command and protectiveness. Stacey took out the things he had already packed, chose a larger bag, and put in his uniform at the bottom.
He arrived in Omaha early the next morning, drove to a hotel, unpacked his bag, put on his uniform, and took a taxi to Burnham’s address.
The taxi stopped in front of a small dilapidated wooden house in a shabby quarter surprisingly near the centre of town. Stacey descended and paid the chauffeur.
But before he had time to reach the door of the house it opened and a woman hurried out to meet him. She was thin, haggard, dishevelled, though not slovenly, with a worn face and worn eyes about which strayed limp locks of black hair, but there were faded traces of fineness in her. Stacey remembered that Burnham had always spoken of his wife with pride. She had, he often said, had a high-school education.
“Oh, Captain Carroll,” she cried, “it’s awful good of you to come, sir! I knew I oughtn’t to’ve asked you, but I didn’t know what to do!”
“Of course you ought,” Stacey returned briefly, shaking her hand.
“And you wore your uniform, too,” she added, with a pale half-smile. “That was just right. I wouldn’t have thought you’d have thought of that.”
They entered the house, in which the Burnhams occupied one-half of the second floor. Three small children, shabby and not very clean, with frightened faces, were waiting for them just inside, and stared at Stacey.
“I keep them looking better than this, Captain Carroll, when everything’s all right,” Mrs. Burnham explained apologetically, and they all climbed the stairs in silence.
As they went, Stacey reflected swiftly on a number of things,—that what life did to Burnham was very like what it did to Phil, and that a lot of criminal rubbish was being talked about the prosperous workingman. Why, thought Stacey, even his father, who was a kindly man, declared bitterly that workmen were buying silk shirts to-day and denounced them as profiteers! Well, suppose a man did earn six dollars a day for manual labor, suppose he even earned it regularly for six days in every week (which he didn’t), how much was that a year? Let’s see. Eighteen hundred and some dollars, on which, with the price of everything gone wild, he was supposed to raise a family and live in luxury. What rot! Stacey himself, who lived at home, had a car that his father had given him, and cared little for luxuries, felt pinched with two hundred dollars a month. Oh, damn money!
They reached the top of the stairs and paused before a door through which came a strange murmuring voice.
“Jim won’t know you, sir,—not now,” said Mrs. Burnham, “but if you’d be willing just to sit there a while, maybe—”
“Of course,” said Stacey. “You have a good doctor?”
“Yes, sir. At least, I guess he’s good. They don’t any of them seem much help. He’ll be here at ten o’clock.”
They went in, Stacey and Mrs. Burnham; the children were left outside the door. Burnham, flushed with fever, lay tossing and muttering on a narrow bed. Stacey looked down at him and lifted his hot hand, but there was no recognition in the man’s eyes.
“I’ll sit here,” said Stacey after a moment, drawing up a chair beside the bed.
The woman silently took another chair, and they remained so for an hour and a half, neither of them speaking, she rising at regular intervals to press a spoonful of medicine between her husband’s teeth, until the doctor arrived.
He was brusque, had keen eyes, and appeared competent. Stacey drew him aside at the conclusion of the visit.
“Any chance?”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “fifty-fifty. He’s as likely to recover as not. Splendid physique! There’s nothing much I can do except to give stimulants in case of sudden collapse. We don’t know anything about flu really, you know, and this pneumonia that follows on flu. I’ve seen hundreds die of it—I was in France, too,—and hundreds get well,—both without any reason. Served under you?”
“My first sergeant. Good man,—no better! Do your best for him.”
“It’s a strong bond, isn’t it?”
Stacey nodded. “Oughtn’t he to have a nurse?”
“It would be a great deal better. He’d have more of a chance.”
“Then send one around, will you please? At my expense, of course.”
“All right,” said the doctor, shook hands with Stacey, and departed.
The conversation had taken place in the hallway outside the door. When Stacey re?ntered the sick room Mrs. Burnham gazed at him wistfully.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Jim’s got a good chance. The doctor’s going to send a nurse.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she opened her mouth as though to speak, but closed it again, with only a strangled: “Thanks,” and turned her head away. After a time she got up.
“I’ll go down and cook some dinner,” she said. “You’ll excuse me, sir, if it isn’t much, won’t you? I haven’t had time to—”
“No,” he broke in, “you’re too tired to cook. Please go out and get some lunch for yourself and the children if you know of some delicatessen place,—and for me, too.” And he drew out his purse.
But at this her face colored. “No sir,” she said, with just a hint of resentment, “I couldn’t.”
He thrust a five-dollar bill upon her. “Do as I tell you,” he said imperiously. “This is no time for silly pride. Go on, and mind you get good things and plenty of them.”
She cowered beneath his sternness and went meekly. And Stacey reflected grimly that pride was a decorative handsome emotion that flourished ornamentally, a highly esteemed orchid, in luxury. It couldn’t grow well in poverty, came up sickly and scrawny,—the soil was too weak.
Half an hour later he heard her climb the stairs again and move quietly about the next room. Presently she returned to the bedroom.
“Will you go in there now, sir?” she said. “Everything’s ready for you. Here’s your change—two dollars and sixty-four cents.”
“No, no, please!” he replied. “Keep it for to-morrow.”
He wanted to insist on her eating first, but thought best not to try, so he went, without comment, through the door she indicated into another bedroom—the only other, he supposed,—that obviously also served as dining-room and parlor. Dishes were disposed neatly on a table, with sandwiches, Bologna sausage, eggs, coffee, and doughnuts.
He sat down, then looked up, listening, with a smile, and suddenly rose, crossed the room, and flung open another door. The kitchenette. And there, as he had thought, were the three children, sitting, very terrified at his discovery of them, close together on a small bench.
“Hello,” he said, “you’re out here, are you? Well, come on! Let’s eat together. Only I think we’d better do it in this room or your mother will hear us.”
“She said we was to wait and not make a noise,” observed the oldest girl in a small voice.
“Well, we won’t wait,” Stacey remarked. “There are doughnuts, you know. You come on in with me,” he said to the girl who had spoken, “on your tip-toes, and help fix the plates.”
She obeyed timidly.
“First we’ll fix one for your mother,” he whispered, and she nodded, her lips pressed together.
He and the three children ate gravely in the kitchenette. Then Stacey rose. “I’ll go back to your father now,” he said, “and send your mother out.”
“Your plate is ready for you, Mrs. Burnham. And the children have eaten,” he announced in a triumphant whisper.
She gasped, then suddenly her mouth curved prettily into a smile—the first he had seen her give. Stacey sat down again by the bedside.
Burnham seemed a little calmer now, and his incoherent muttering had ceased, but he looked very exhausted, and Stacey was relieved when about one o’clock the nurse arrived.
The three of them sat there silently all the hot afternoon, with only short intervals of release when Stacey stretched his legs in the hall or Mrs. Burnham went out to keep an eye on the children. There was no change in the sick man. The nurse said that the crisis would probably be reached next day.
At six o’clock Stacey left the house, asking the nurse to telephone him in case of a serious change. He walked back to his hotel.
He was abstracted, an isolated personality, growing more isolated with every month that passed in his life; so that now he saw little of his surroundings and glanced but carelessly both at the depressing quarter from which he had set out and at the prosperous business section he presently entered. He merely thought, idly, that the city seemed a characterless place, like all other middle-western cities. And the imposing court-house, of white marble, that he passed shortly before reaching his hotel, did not impress him. It did, indeed, occur to him once that there was a certain tensity in the air, like that which characterizes a city in boom times, but the observation, purely involuntary, did not particularly interest him. It interested him not at all when later, glancing through the front page of a local paper, he learned the cause of the tensity—trouble with the negroes, “Another Dastardly Assault!”
Early the next morning he was back at Burnham’s house. The man seemed worse, Stacey thought with a touch of real sadness,—more feverish, more restless. There was no capacity for smiling, even faintly, left in Mrs. Burnham. The nurse, cool, professional, would express no opinion; and the doctor, too, when he came, was noncommittal.
“Before to-night there ought to be a decision one way or the other,” he said to Stacey. “I’ll come again at four. Call me up earlier if necessary.”
There was nothing to do but wait, and Stacey again settled himself in a chair near the foot of the bed.
The crisis came early in the afternoon. Burnham tossed and kicked furiously, and his incoherent muttering grew louder. Suddenly he raised himself on the palms of his hands into a half-sitting posture and stared directly at Stacey—or not really at him, through him.
“By God, Captain!” he cried wildly, in a high unnatural voice, “you’ve got nerve! Might’ve been shot . . . shot . . . shot! What hell you............