DUSKIN (3 page)

“Oh,” broke in the impatient patient, “I’ve got to go myself!”

“Now look here, Caleb,” broke in a calm, commanding voice, as Mrs. Fawcett suddenly loomed up beside the couch, a comfortably stout little woman with a face that had been pretty once and a mouth grown gentle by long practice of living with a pettish tyrant, “you know that’s nonsense. You know you’re not fit to go anywhere, and what’s the use of pretending any longer that you are? You’ve got to the point at last where you have to lie still and take orders, and you might as well do it pleasantly. Doctor, what hospital is it you want him to go to?”

Like magic, things fell into order. The quiet, stout little woman with the placid mouth took command, and Caleb like a lamb protested no more.

When the doctor had completed his examination and given his verdict, Carol was called once more to the couch to confer with her boss. Before she came, however, she beckoned to the doctor and asked him a question privately.

“Doctor, something has come to my knowledge since Mr. Fawcett left the office this morning which quite materially changes some aspects of the business. Would it be right to tell him this? Or mustn’t he be disturbed?”

“Are they of a disturbing nature?”

“I’m afraid they are.” Carol looked troubled.

“Is there anybody else in the firm in whom you could confide?”

“Only Mr. Edgar Fawcett, his brother, and he is in Europe this summer.”

“Do you think you could cope with the situation yourself? Do you know all there is to know about it?”

“I think so… .” Carol hesitated. “I’ve written all the letters; still, there will be great loss to the business involved if—”

“The business be hanged! Excuse me, Miss Berkley, but my patient has had a great shock. I doubt if the fracture he has sustained is the worst of his troubles. If he has anything more to worry about than he has now I can’t answer for his life. You’ll have to do the best you can and let it go at that. But mind you, you make him
think
everything’s going fine!”

“But those letters—” Fawcett was protesting faintly as Carol came back to the office. “They’ve got to be signed!”

“That’s all right,” said Carol brightly. “I’ll type them all with the company’s signature and put your name under, as president. I’ll fix that up. Nobody will notice it isn’t as usual. I suppose, though, you’ll have to give me power to act in your stead. I’ve written this. I think it’s what you wrote for me once before when you were away in Maine.”

She handed him a paper, neatly typed, which would answer as her credential, and put his fountain pen in his hand.

He seemed somehow to take heart at the sight of the businesslike sentences. After all, he had trained her, and she was an unusually good secretary. But how would she do when she was on her own? He drew a long sigh that seemed to be rent from the depths of his soul. How could a mere slip of a woman take his place?

“The papers are there in the top of my bag.” He motioned toward the corner where she had put his things. “You’ll find my wallet in the safe with money and tickets. I have reservations for the six o’clock train. Can you make it?”

“Yes of course,” she said crisply. “My bag is all packed, you know.” She smiled, and he suddenly remembered, and his face went blank. Perhaps he was not such a heartless old bear after all.

“Your
vacation
!” he said. “You can’t go! You mustn’t go of course! I had forgotten.”

“Nonsense!” said Carol with a quick gulp of renunciation in her throat. “What’s a mere vacation? One can have that any time.”

As if she hadn’t been waiting for hers a whole lifetime! For the rocks and the sand and the excellent hotel and her pretty new clothes—faultless they were, for she had been working on them all winter—and the two friends— But what folly!

“You want me to go straight to the building itself and find out with my own eyes just how far things have progressed?” she said in a businesslike voice. “And this Mr. Duskin—why shouldn’t I carry this letter to him instead and tell him you sent me? Of course, I know you were intending to stop over in Chicago and expected the letter to get there ahead of you, but that won’t be necessary now, will it? I can wire the Chicago people to meet me at the station with the papers and ask those questions you had me write out. That will save a whole day.”

He looked at her wonderingly. She did know what she was doing even if she was only a woman, and a young, pretty one at that.

After all he found he needed to give her very few directions. Armed with money, tickets, reservations, and the other necessary papers, she stood aside as the orderlies from the ambulance came to take her employer downstairs, and her eyes filled with unaccountable tears.

“Good-bye!” said Fawcett, suddenly rousing and putting out his hand quite humanly. “I know it’s a raw deal for you. It’s pretty nervy of you to offer to go, but I suppose really the game’s up!” He dropped back with a strange hopeless expression as if the worst had come.

“Oh, no!” cried Carol brightly, suddenly anxious to lift that burden from his tired face. “The game’s not up at all. I’m in it to win! You’ll see me coming back with flying colors to help you get well!”

He cast a sudden, unexpected smile up at her, strangely sweet on the harsh old face that was gray with pain now, as if he had cast away all pretenses.

“Good-bye, little girl,” he said gently. “Thank you!”

They carried him out on a stretcher to the elevator. The doctor lingered an instant.

“You’re a good little sport!” he said. “Keep the wires hot with comforting messages home and we’ll pull him through. Let me know if you have any difficulties, and if you need to ask him any questions, wire them
to me
, not to him! I can keep my mouth shut as well as the next one, so you needn’t be afraid.”

They were off, and suddenly Carol felt very old and sorry, as if she were going to cry, and very much weighted down with care and responsibility. Here but an hour before she had been reviling Mr. Fawcett for being cross and bearish and hard, though all the time she knew he was carrying an immense burden, and now here she was with the tables turned, her vacation gone, and in its place Mr. Fawcett’s burden thrust without warning upon her young shoulders. And besides that burden, she carried new knowledge that she had overheard from the two men. Then suddenly she remembered them and looked around for them, but the office boy said they were gone.

As Carol turned to go back to her inner office, she heard the elevator stop on its way up, but she did not turn back to see who was getting off.

Later, when she came out with a sheaf of papers for the treasurer, she had a vague impression of two figures, one tall and one short, moving along in the far end of the big room, but when she passed her hand over her eyes wearily and looked again there was no one in the room but the regular men at their desks, hard at work as usual.

If there were only someone to whom she might turn now for a strong word of guidance and encouragement before she went out alone on this strange, wild errand! Or, perhaps if she knew God, the way her mother did, it might help. She felt strangely alone.

S
omehow all the things got done, and Carol found herself seated in the sleeper car with a whole three minutes to spare before the train left.

She was breathless and throbbing with excitement. She felt as if she had been running a race with time and was wound up so tight that it hurt her heart to stop.

Her mother and her fourteen-year-old sister had come down to see her off, and they lingered, wistful and apprehensive, loath to have her go. There had been so little time to explain to them, and they were still indignant over the idea of her giving up her beautiful vacation for this wild business trip into an unknown West filled with no telling what awful possibilities.

“Is he paying you extra for this?” asked Betty sternly, fixing her sister with a pair of very young, very modern blue eyes. “Because if he isn’t I shouldn’t go a step, even now!”

“Betty, you don’t understand,” said Carol. “It wasn’t a time for talking about pay. I tell you Mr. Fawcett was hurt. He was very ill! The doctor felt it might be quite serious. He will pay me of course.”

“Well, I should
sue
him if he didn’t,” asserted Betty indignantly. “Your lovely vacation!”

“Oh, I may get a vacation later,” said Carol carelessly. Although the thought of her postponed vacation still hurt terribly.

“Yes, a vacation after everybody has left and you’re the only pebble on the beach, the last rose of summer! I declare I think it’s the limit!”

“Don’t make it any harder than it is, Betty dear!” pleaded Carol. “Come, perk up. I may be home before long.”

“Yes, Betty, don’t waste time blaming Carol,” said the mother. “We must go in a minute, and there are so many things I wanted to say. You will be careful, won’t you? Going off into the wilds—”

“Oh, Mother! It can’t be very wild where they are putting up an eleven-story building!”

“Well, I suppose that is so,” said the troubled mother. “But you—a young woman
alone
! And you’re so good looking, Carol. Going among a lot of strange men!”

“They won’t be any different from the men in our office, Mother. They’re just men, you know. And I’ll wear a veil if you like, or dye my cheeks with iodine, if you say so!” Carol tried to summon a mischievous grin, in spite of the sudden misgivings that had come to her as she entered the sleeper and realized that she was really going.

“Now, Carol, do be serious!” pleaded her mother. “This is a dreadful world—”

“Oh, no, Mother! It’s a pretty good world! Wait till I get back and tell you all the wonders of the wild and woolly West beginning with Chicago. Just think of it! I have to meet the Chicago representative and talk turkey to him! I telegraphed him in Mr. Fawcett’s name, ‘Accident prevents my coming. Meet my representative, C. W. Berkley, tomorrow on train No. 10 and give her all details of situation.’ Why, Mother, I expect to be carried around on a throne!”

“Mercy!” said her mother apprehensively. “To think you’re grown up and have to do things like that! I don’t know what your father would have said to me if he had known I would let you go off alone like this. You’ve always been sheltered.”

“Exactly, little mother!” said Carol with a firm set of her lips. “I have! But the time has come when I’ve got to take care of myself for a while. It does come, you know, no matter how long you try to hold it off. I’m not a baby, and you know you really don’t believe that I can’t take care of myself after all these years you’ve spent on bringing me up. Isn’t it almost time I had a chance to try myself out? Come now, wipe away those tears, little mother, and forget it. I’m going to have the time of my life out there! It’s going to be different from anything I ever did, and I’m going to make a story out of it to write to you. There may not be any sand, but I’ll warrant there’s a decent hotel, and very likely I’ll meet up with plenty of rocks of one sort or another before I get done. It’s really going to be fabulous when I get going, so don’t have any more worries about it.”

She forced a smile and her mother brushed an anxious tear furtively from her cheek and tried to summon a gleam of a smile to answer her with. But the young sister continued to look displeased.

“I don’t see how you thought it was right to disappoint Jean and Edith,” she put in. “Did you tell them? Weren’t they terribly upset about it?”

“I just had time to call up Jean and tell her in one sentence before I left the office. Yes, Jean was rather put out. I’m afraid I didn’t make her see how necessary it was that I should go. I wish you’d call her up, Betts, when you get home, and try to make her understand. Perhaps you’ll call Edith, too. I hated to go with only a word to them, but I didn’t have another second to spare.”

“Of course we will,” said her mother lovingly. “Oh, Carol, I put your Bible in your bag. You’ll promise to read a few verses every day, won’t you, dear?” The mother’s pleading eyes were full of tears. Of course Carol promised, though somewhat impatiently.

“All aboard,” shouted the brakeman, and Mrs. Berkley caught her daughter in one last quick embrace and then they were gone.

The train moved out from the station and Carol realized that she was actually on her way.

For a moment she had an impulse to jump up and run out to the platform and try to get off. How
could
she go off like this into unknown responsibilities and leave behind all the pleasant vacation that had been planned so long?

Then, as the train moved more swiftly, she realized how childish she was, after all her brave words to her mother. She deliberately forced herself to go over everything to make sure she had not left anything undone. It was as if she must keep on with the breathless race she had been running for the last three hours or she would lose herself entirely.

The parting with her family was naturally still uppermost in her mind. How disappointed they had been for her in the loss of her long-expected vacation. It was almost as if they had lost something themselves. But how foolish her mother had been about her going off alone! And then insisting on that silly promise to read her Bible every day! She would have to keep it of course, because she had been brought up with a conscience, but how annoying it was going to be—always having to remember that! She would not have time to read the Bible! Why was mother like that?

Suddenly she realized that she was weak with hunger, and putting aside her annoyance, she made her way to the dining car.

Most of the tables in the diner were already filled, but Carol found a vacancy at the far end of the car beside a lady with two small children.

Dining cars were not a common experience to Carol Berkley, and she scanned the menu interestedly, trying to appear quite used to traveling. After she had given her order, she sat watching the children. She tried to adjust herself to her new surroundings and to enjoy the experience while it was hers, but in spite of herself she felt disinterested, disappointed, almost ready to cry at the thought of what she was missing. In a little while now Edith and Jean would be taking the train together, laughing and talking, perhaps being cross meeting together at her absence. To think what she was missing!