IN WHICH MARGARET MACLEAN REVIEWS A MEMORY
As Margaret MacLean climbed the stairs to Ward C—she
rarely took the lift, it was too remindful of the
time when she could not climb stairs—her
mind thought back a step for each step she mounted.
When she had reached the top of the first flight
she was a child again, back in one of the little white
iron cribs in her own ward; and it was the day when
the first stringent consciousness came to her that
she hated Trustee Day.
The Old Senior Surgeon—the present one,
of whom Saint Margaret’s felt inordinately proud,
was house surgeon then—had come into Ward
C for a peep at her, and had called out, according
to a firmly established custom, “Hello, Thumbkin!
What’s the news?”
She had been “Thumbkin” to him ever since
the night he had carried her into the hospital, a
tiny mite of a baby; and he had woven out of her coming
a marvelous story—fancy-fashioned.
This he had told her at least twice a week, from
the time she was old enough to ask for it, because
it had popped into his head quite suddenly that this
morsel of humanity would some day insist on being
accounted for.
The bare facts concerning her were rather shabby ones.
She had been unceremoniously dumped into his arms
by a delegate from the Foundling Asylum, who had found
him the most convenient receptacle nearest the door;
and he had been offered the meager information that
she belonged to no one, was wrong somehow, and a hospital
was the place for her.
One hardly likes to pass on shabby garments, much
less shabby facts, to cover another’s past.
So the Old Senior Surgeon had forestalled her inquisitiveness
with a tale adorned with all the pretty imaginings
that he, “a clumsy-minded old gruffian,”
could conjure up.
Margaret MacLean remembered the story—word
for word—as we remember “The House
That Jack Built.” It began with the Old
Senior Surgeon himself, who heard a pair of birds
disputing in one of the two trees which sentineled
the hospital. They had built a nest therein;
it was bedtime, and they wished to retire, only something
prevented. Upon investigation he discovered
the cause—“and there you were, my
dear, no bigger than my thumb!”
This was the nucleus of the story; but the Old Senior
Surgeon had rolled it about, hither and yon, adding
adventure after adventure, until it had assumed gigantic
proportions. As she grew older she took a hand
in the adventure-making herself, he supplying the bare
plot, she weaving the threads therefrom into a detailed
narrative which she retold to him later, with a few
imaginings of her own added. This is what had
established the custom for the Old Senior Surgeon to
take a peep into Ward C at day’s end and call
across to her: “Hello, Thumbkin! What’s
the news?” or, “What’s happened next?”
And until this day the answer had always been a joyous
one.
