greeted them, and a rush of hot, stale air, smelling of warming
flannels.
At three o’clock in the morning Dr. Archie was in the parlor putting on
his cuffs and coat—there was no spare bedroom in that house. Peter
Kronborg’s seventh child, a boy, was being soothed and cosseted by his
aunt, Mrs. Kronborg was asleep, and the doctor was going home. But he
wanted first to speak to Kronborg, who, coatless and fluttery, was
pouring coal into the kitchen stove. As the doctor crossed the
dining-room he paused and listened. From one of the wing rooms, off to
the left, he heard rapid, distressed breathing. He went to the kitchen
door.
“One of the children sick in there?” he asked, nodding toward the
partition.
Kronborg hung up the stove-lifter and dusted his fingers. “It must be
Thea. I meant to ask you to look at her. She has a croupy cold. But in
my excitement—Mrs. Kronborg is doing finely, eh, doctor? Not many of
your patients with such a constitution, I expect.”
“Oh, yes. She’s a fine mother.” The doctor took up the lamp from the
kitchen table and unceremoniously went into the wing room. Two chubby
little boys were asleep in a double bed, with the coverlids over their
noses and their feet drawn up. In a single bed, next to theirs, lay a
little girl of eleven, wide awake, two yellow braids sticking up on the
pillow behind her. Her face was scarlet and her eyes were blazing.
The doctor shut the door behind him. “Feel pretty sick, Thea?” he asked
as he took out his thermometer. “Why didn’t you call somebody?”
She looked at him with greedy affection. “I thought you were here,” she
spoke between quick breaths. “There is a new baby, isn’t there? Which?”
“Which?” repeated the doctor.
“Brother or sister?”
He smiled and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Brother,” he said,
taking her hand. “Open.”
“Good. Brothers are better,” she murmured as he put the glass tube under
her tongue.
“Now, be still, I want to count.” Dr. Archie reached for her hand and
took out his watch. When he put her hand back under the quilt he went
over to one of the windows—they were both tight shut—and lifted it a
little way. He reached up and ran his hand along the cold, unpapered
wall. “Keep under the covers; I’ll come back to you in a moment,” he
said, bending over the glass lamp with his thermometer. He winked at her
from the door before he shut it.
Peter Kronborg was sitting in his wife’s room, holding the bundle which
contained his son. His air of cheerful importance, his beard and
glasses, even his shirt-sleeves, annoyed the doctor. He beckoned
Kronborg into the living-room and said sternly:—
“You’ve got a very sick child in there. Why didn’t you call me before?
It’s pneumonia, and she must have been sick for several days. Put the
baby down somewhere, please, and help me make up the bed-lounge here in
the parlor. She’s got to be in a warm room, and she’s got to be quiet.
You must keep the other children out. Here, this thing opens up, I see,”
swinging back the top of the carpet lounge. “We can lift her mattress
and carry her in just as she is. I don’t want to disturb her more than
is necessary.”
Kronborg was all concern immediately. The two men took up the mattress
and carried the sick child into the parlor. “I’ll have to go down to my
office to get some medicine, Kronborg. The drug store won’t be open.
Keep the covers on her. I won’t be gone long. Shake down the stove and
put on a little coal, but not too much; so it’ll catch quickly, I mean.
Find an old sheet for me, and put it there to warm.”
The doctor caught his coat and hurried out into the dark street. Nobody
was stirring yet, and the cold was bitter. He was tired and hungry and
in no mild humor. “The idea!” he muttered; “to be such an ass at his
age, about the seventh! And to feel no responsibility about the little
girl. Silly old goat! The baby would have got into the world somehow;
they always do. But a nice little girl like that—she’s worth the whole
litter. Where she ever got it from—” He turned into the Duke Block and
ran up the stairs to his office.
Thea Kronborg, meanwhile, was wondering why she happened to be in the
parlor, where nobody but company—usually visiting preachers—ever
slept. She had moments of stupor when she did not see anything, and
moments of excitement when she felt that something unusual and pleasant
was about to happen, when she saw everything clearly in the red light
from the isinglass sides of the hard-coal burner—the nickel trimmings
on the stove itself, the pictures on the wall, which she thought very
beautiful, the flowers on the Brussels carpet, Czerny’s “Daily Studies”
which stood open on the upright piano. She forgot, for the time being,
all about the new baby.
When she heard the front door open, it occurred to her that the pleasant
thing which was going to happen was Dr. Archie himself. He came in and
warmed his hands at the stove. As he turned to her, she threw herself
wearily toward him, half out of her bed. She would have tumbled to the
floor had he not caught her. He gave her some medicine and went to the
kitchen for something he needed. She drowsed and lost the sense of his
being there. When she opened her eyes again, he was kneeling before the
stove, spreading something dark and sticky on a white cloth, with a big
spoon; batter, perhaps. Presently she felt him taking off her nightgown.
He wrapped the hot plaster about her chest. There seemed to be straps
which he pinned over her shoulders. Then he took out a thread and needle
and began to sew her up in it. That, she felt, was too strange; she must
be dreaming anyhow, so she succumbed to her drowsiness.
Thea had been moaning with every breath since the doctor came back, but
she did not know it. She did not realize that she was suffering pain.
When she was conscious at all, she seemed to be separated from her body;
to be perched on top of the piano, or on the hanging lamp, watching the
doctor sew her up. It was perplexing and unsatisfactory, like dreaming.
She wished she could waken up and see what was going on.
The doctor thanked God that he had persuaded Peter Kronborg to keep out
of the way. He could do better by the child if he had her to himself. He
had no children of his own. His marriage was a very unhappy one. As he
lifted and undressed Thea, he thought to himself what a beautiful thing
a little girl’s body was,—like a flower. It was so neatly and
delicately fashioned, so soft, and so milky white. Thea must have got
her hair and her silky skin from her mother. She was a little Swede,
through and through. Dr. Archie could not help thinking how he would
cherish a little creature like this if she were his. Her hands, so
little and hot, so clever, too,—he glanced at the open exercise book on
the piano. When he had stitched up the flaxseed jacket, he wiped it
neatly about the edges, where the paste had worked out on the skin. He
put on her the clean nightgown he had warmed before the fire, and tucked
the blankets about her. As he pushed back the hair that had fuzzed down
over her eyebrows, he felt her head thoughtfully with the tips of his
fingers. No, he couldn’t say that it was different from any other
child’s head, though he believed that there was something very different
about her. He looked intently at her wide, flushed face, freckled nose,
fierce little mouth, and her delicate, tender chin—the one soft touch