The Sick-a-Bed Lady: And Also Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day, Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover, Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only BusinessAbbott, Eleanor Hallowell
General
The Sick-a-Bed Lady: And Also Hickory Dock, The Very Tired Girl, The Happy-Day, Something That Happened in October, The Amateur Lover, Heart of The City, The Pink Sash, Woman's Only Business
Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell
Fiction; Short stories
Out of this trouble the Sick-A-Bed Lady woke one day to find herself
quite alone and quite alive. She had often felt alone before, but it was
a long time since she had felt alive. The world seemed very pleasant.
The flowers on the wall-paper were still unwilted, and the green paper
birds hung airily without fatigue. The room was full of the most
enticing odor of cinnamon pinks, and by raising herself up in bed the
merest trifle she could get a smell of good salt, a smell which somehow
you couldn't get unless you actually _saw_ the Ocean, but just as she
was laboriously tugging herself up an atom higher, trying to find the
teeniest, weeniest sniff of France, everything went suddenly black and
silver before her eyes, and she fell down, down, down, as much as forty
miles into Nothing At All.
When she woke up again all limp and wappsy there was a Young Man's Face
on the Footboard of the bed; just an isolated, unconnected sort of face
that might have blossomed from the footboard, or might have been merely
a mirage on the horizon. Whatever it was, though, it kept staring at
her fixedly, balancing itself all the while most perfectly on its chin.
It was a funny sight, and while the Sick-A-Bed Lady was puckering her
forehead trying to think out what it all meant the Young Man's Face
smiled at her and said "_Boo!_" and the Sick-A-Bed Lady tiptilted her
chin weakly and said--"Boo _yourself_!" Then the Sick-A-Bed Lady fell
into her fearful stupor again, and the Young Man's Face ran home as fast
as it could to tell its Best Friend that the Sick-A-Bed Lady had spoken
her first sane word for five weeks. He thought it was a splendid
victory, but when he tried to explain it to his friend, he found that
"Boo _yourself_!" seemed a fatuous proof of so startling a truth, and
was obliged to compromise with considerable dignity on the statement:
"Well, of course, it wasn't so much what she said as the _way_ she said
it."
For days and days that followed, the Sick-A-Bed Lady was conscious of
nothing except the Young Man's Face on the footboard of the bed. It
never seemed to wabble, it never seemed to waver, but just stayed there
perfectly balanced on the point of its chin, watching her gravely with
its blue, blue eyes. There was a cleft in its chin, too, that you could
have stroked with your finger if--you could have. Of course, there were
some times when she went to sleep, and some times when she just seemed
to go _out_ like a candle, but whenever she came back from _anything_
there was always the Young Man's Face for comfort.
The Sick-A-Bed Lady was so sick that she thought all over her body
instead of in her head, so that it was very hard to concentrate any
particular thought in her mouth, but at last one afternoon with a mighty
struggle she opened her half-closed eyes, looked right in the Young
Man's Face and said: "Got any arms?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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