Alice Adams

he patient, an old-fashioned man, thought the nurse made a mistake in
keeping both of the windows open, and her sprightly disregard of his
protests added something to his hatred of her. Every evening he told her
that anybody with ordinary gumption ought to realize that night air was
bad for the human frame. “The human frame won't stand everything,
Miss Perry,” he warned her, resentfully. “Even a child, if it had just
ordinary gumption, ought to know enough not to let the night air blow on
sick people yes, nor well people, either! 'Keep out of the night air, no
matter how well you feel.' That's what my mother used to tell me when I
was a boy. 'Keep out of the night air, Virgil,' she'd say. 'Keep out of
the night air.'”

“I expect probably her mother told her the same thing,” the nurse
suggested.

“Of course she did. My grandmother----”

“Oh, I guess your GRANDmother thought so, Mr. Adams! That was when all
this flat central country was swampish and hadn't been drained off yet.
I guess the truth must been the swamp mosquitoes bit people and gave 'em
malaria, especially before they began to put screens in their windows.
Well, we got screens in these windows, and no mosquitoes are goin' to
bite us; so just you be a good boy and rest your mind and go to sleep
like you need to.”

“Sleep?” he said. “Likely!”

He thought the night air worst of all in April; he hadn't a doubt it
would kill him, he declared. “It's miraculous what the human frame WILL
survive,” he admitted on the last evening of that month. “But you and
the doctor ought to both be taught it won't stand too dang much! You
poison a man and poison and poison him with this April night air----”

“Can't poison you with much more of it,” Miss Perry interrupted him,
indulgently. “To-morrow it'll be May night air, and I expect that'll be
a lot better for you, don't you? Now let's just sober down and be a good
boy and get some nice sound sleep.”

She gave him his medicine, and, having set the glass upon the center
table, returned to her cot, where, after a still interval, she snored
faintly. Upon this, his expression became that of a man goaded out of
overpowering weariness into irony.

“Sleep? Oh, CERTAINLY, thank you!”

However, he did sleep intermittently, drowsed between times, and even
dreamed; but, forgetting his dreams before he opened his eyes, and
having some part of him all the while aware of his discomfort, he
believed, as usual, that he lay awake the whole night long. He was
conscious of the city as of some single great creature resting fitfully
in the dark outside his windows. It lay all round about, in the damp
cover of its night cloud of smoke, and tried to keep quiet for a few
hours after midnight, but was too powerful a growing thing ever to
lie altogether still. Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with
digestions of the day before, and these already merged with rumblings
of the morrow. “Owl” cars, bringing in last passengers over distant
trolley-lines, now and then howled on a curve; faraway metallic
stirrings could be heard from factories in the sooty suburbs on the
plain outside the city; east, west, and south, switch-engines chugged
and snorted on sidings; and everywhere in the air there seemed to be
a faint, voluminous hum as of innumerable wires trembling overhead to
vibration of machinery underground.

In his youth Adams might have been less resentful of sounds such as
these when they interfered with his night's sleep: even during
an illness he might have taken some pride in them as proof of his
citizenship in a “live town”; but at fifty-five he merely hated them
because they kept him awake. They “pressed on his nerves,” as he put it;
and so did almost everything else, for that matter.

He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his windows
and stop at each house. The milkman carried his jars round to the “back
porch,” while the horse moved slowly ahead to the gate of the next
customer and waited there. “He's gone into Pollocks',” Adams thought,
following this progress. “I hope it'll sour on 'em before breakfast.
Delivered the Andersons'. Now he's getting out ours. Listen to the darn
brute! What's HE care who wants to sleep!” His complaint was of the
horse, who casually shifted weight with a clink of steel shoes on the
worn brick pavement of the street, and then heartily shook himself in
his harness, perhaps to dislodge a fly far ahead of its season. Light
had just filmed the windows; and with that the first sparrow woke,
chirped instantly, and roused neighbours in the trees of the small yard,
including a loud-voiced robin. Vociferations began irregularly, but were
soon unanimous.

“Sleep? Dang likely now, ain't it!”

Night sounds were becoming day sounds; the far-away hooting of
freight-engines seemed brisker than an hour ago in the dark. A cheerful
whistler passed the house, even more careless of sleepers than the
milkman's horse had been; then a group of coloured workmen came by, and
although it was impossible to be sure whether they were homeward bound
from night-work or on their way to day-work, at least it was certain
that they were jocose. Loose, aboriginal laughter preceded them afar,
and beat on the air long after they had gone by.

The sick-room night-light, shielded from his eyes by a newspaper propped
against a water-pitcher, still showed a thin glimmering that had grown
offensive to Adams. In his wandering and enfeebled thoughts, which
were much more often imaginings than reasonings, the attempt of the
night-light to resist the dawn reminded him of something unpleasant,
though he could not discover just what the unpleasant thing was. Here
was a puzzle that irritated him the more because he could not solve it,
yet always seemed just on the point of a solution. However, he may have
lost nothing cheerful by remaining in the dark upon the matter; for
if he had been a little sharper in this introspection he might have
concluded that the squalor of the night-light, in its seeming effort
to show against the forerunning of the sun itself, had stimulated some
half-buried perception within him to sketch the painful little synopsis
of an autobiography.

In spite of noises without, he drowsed again, not knowing that he did;
and when he opened his eyes the nurse was just rising from her cot. He
took no pleasure in the sight, it may be said. She exhibited to him a
face mismodelled by sleep, and set like a clay face left on its cheek in
a hot and dry studio. She was still only in part awake, however, and by
the time she had extinguished the night-light and given her patient his
tonic, she had recovered enough plasticity. “Well, isn't that grand!
We've had another good night,” she said as she departed to dress in the
bathroom.

“Yes, you had another!” he retorted, though not until after she had
closed the door.

Presently he heard his daughter moving about in her room across the
narrow hall, and so knew that she had risen. He hoped she would come
in to see him soon, for she was the one thing that didn't press on his
nerves, he felt; though the thought of her hurt him, as, indeed, every
thought hurt him. But it was his wife who came first.

She wore a lank cotton wrapper, and a crescent of gray hair escaped to
one temple from beneath the handkerchief she had worn upon her head for
the night and still retained; but she did everything possible to make
her expression cheering.

“Oh, you're better again! I can see that, as soon as I look at you,” she
said. “Miss Perry tells me you've had another splendid night.”

He made a sound of irony, which seemed to dispose unfavourably of Miss
Perry, and then, in order to be more certainly intelligible, he added,
“She slept well, as usual!”

But his wife's smile persisted. “It's a good sign to be cross; it means
you're practically convalescent right now.”

“Oh, I am, am I?”

“No doubt in the world!” she exclaimed. “Why, you're practically a well
man, Virgil--all except getting your strength back, of course, and that
isn't going to take long. You'll be right on your feet in a couple of
weeks from now.”

“Oh, I will?”

“Of course you will!” She laughed briskly, and, going to the table in
the center of the room, moved his glass of medicine an inch or two,
turned a book over so that it lay upon its other side, and for a few
moments occupied herself with similar futilities, having taken on the
air of a person who makes things neat, though she produced no such
actual effect upon them. “Of course you will,” she repeated, absently.
“You'll be as strong as you ever were; maybe stronger.” She paused for a
moment, not looking at him, then added, cheerfully, “So that you can fly
around and find something really good to get into.”

Something important between them came near the surface here, for though
she spoke with what seemed but a casual cheerfulness, there was a
little betraying break in her voice, a trembling just perceptible in the
utterance of the final word. And she still kept up the affectation of
being helpfully preoccupied with the table, and did not look at her
husband--perhaps because they had been married so many years that
without looking she knew just what his expression would be, and
preferred to avoid the actual sight of it as long as possible.
Meanwhile, he stared hard at her, his lips beginning to move with little
distortions not lacking in the pathos of a sick man's agitation.

“So that's it,” he said. “That's what you're hinting at.”

“'Hinting?'” Mrs. Adams looked surprised and indulgent. “Why, I'm not
doing any hinting, Virgil.”

“What did you say about my finding 'something good to get into?'” he
asked, sharply. “Don't you call that hinting?”

Mrs. Adams turned toward him now; she came to the bedside and would have
taken his hand, but he quickly moved it away from her.

“You mustn't let yourself get nervous,” she said. “But of course when
you get well there's only one thing to do. You mustn't go back to that
old hole again.”

“'Old hole?' That's what you call it, is it?” In spite of his weakness,
anger made his voice strident, and upon this stimulation she spoke more
urgently.

“You just mustn't go back to it, Virgil. It's not fair to any of us, and
you know it isn't.”

“Don't tell me what I know, please!”

She clasped her hands, suddenly carrying her urgency to plaintive
entreaty. “Virgil, you WON'T go back to that hole?”

“That's a nice word to use to me!” he said. “Call a man's business a
hole!”

“Virgil, if you don't owe it to me to look for something different,
don't you owe it to your children? Don't tell me you won't do what we
all want you to, and what you know in your heart you ought to! And if
you HAVE got into one of your stubborn fits and are bound to go back
there for no other reason except to have your own way, don't tell me so,
for I can't bear it!”

He looked up at her fiercely. “You've got a fine way to cure a sick
man!” he said; but she had concluded her appeal--for that time--and
instead of making any more words in the matter, let him see that there
were tears in her eyes, shook her head, and left the room.

Alone, he lay breathing rapidly, his emaciated chest proving itself
equal to the demands his emotion put upon it. “Fine!” he repeated, with
husky indignation. “Fine way to cure a sick man! Fine!” Then, after a
silence, he gave forth whispering sounds as of laughter, his expression
the while remaining sore and far from humour.

“And give us our daily bread!” he added, meaning that his wife's little
performance was no novelty.