The 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 have 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.
