Dawn
Copyright© 2024 by Eleanor H. Porter
Chapter 16: The Worry of It
There was a letter from the doctor when the bandages were removed. Daniel Burton began to read the letter, but his eyes blurred and his hand shook, so that Susan had to take it up where he had dropped it.
Yet the letter was very short.
The operation had been as successful, perhaps, as they could expect, under the circumstances. Keith could discern light now—faintly, to be sure, but unmistakably. He was well and happy. Meanwhile he was under treatment for the second operation to come later. But that could not be performed for some time yet, so they must not lose their patience. That was all.
“Well, I s’pose we ought to be glad he can see light even a little,” sighed Susan; “but I’m free to confess I was hopin’ he could do a little more than that.”
“Yes, so was I,” said Daniel Burton. And Susan, looking at his face, turned away without another word. There were times when Susan knew enough not to talk.
Then came the days when there were only Keith’s letters and an occasional short note from the doctor to break the long months of waiting.
In the Burton homestead at Hinsdale, living was reduced to the simplest formula possible. On the whole, there was perhaps a little more money. Dunning tradesmen were not so numerous. But all luxuries, and some things that were almost necessities, were rigorously left out. And the money was saved always—for Keith. A lodger, a young law student, in Keith’s old room helped toward defraying the family expenses.
Susan had given up trying to sell her “poems.” She had become convinced at last that a cruel and unappreciative editorial wall was forever to bar her from what she still believed was an eagerly awaiting public. She still occasionally wrote jingles and talked in rhyme; but undeniably she had lost her courage and her enthusiasm. As she expressed it to Mrs. McGuire, she did not feel “a mite like a gushing siphon inside her now.”
As the summer came and passed, Susan and Mrs. McGuire talked over the back-yard fence even more frequently. Perhaps because Susan was lonely without Keith. Perhaps because there was so much to talk about.
First there was Keith.
Keith was still under treatment preparatory to the second operation. He had not responded quite as they had hoped, the doctor said, which meant that the operation must be postponed for perhaps several months longer.
All this Susan talked over with Mrs. McGuire; and there was always, too, the hushed discussion as to what would happen if, after all, it failed, and Keith came home hopelessly blind.
“But even that ain’t the worst thing that could happen,” maintained Susan stoutly. “I can tell you Keith Burton ain’t goin’ to let a little thing like that floor him!”
Mrs. McGuire, however, did not echo Susan’s optimistic prophecies. But Mrs. McGuire’s own sky just now was overcast, which perhaps had something to do with it. Mrs. McGuire had troubles of her own.
It was the summer of 1914, and the never-to-be-forgotten August had come and passed, firing the match that was destined to set the whole world ablaze. Mrs. McGuire’s eldest son John—of whom she boasted in season and out and whom she loved with an all-absorbing passion—had caught the war-fever, gone to Canada, and enlisted. Mrs. McGuire herself was a Canadian by birth, and all her family still lived there. She was boasting now more than ever about John; but, proud as she was of her soldier boy, his going had plunged her into an abyss of doubt and gloom.
“He’ll never come back, he’ll never come back,” she moaned to Susan.
“I can just feel it in my bones that he won’t.”
“Shucks, a great, strong, healthy boy like John McGuire! Of course, he’ll come back,” retorted Susan. “Besides, likely the war’ll be all over with ‘fore he gets there, anyhow. An’ as for feelin’ it in your bones, Mis’ McGuire, that’s a very facetious doctrine, an’ ain’t no more to be depended upon than my flour sieve for an umbrella. They’re gay receivers every time—bones are. Why, lan’ sakes, Mis’ McGuire, if all things happened that my bones told me was goin’ to happen, there wouldn’t none of us be livin’ by now, nor the sun shinin’, nor the moon moonin’. I found out, after awhile, how they DIDN’T happen half the time, an’ I wrote a poem on it, like this:
Trust ‘em not, them fickle bones,
Always talkin’ moans an’ groans.
Jest as if inside of you,
Lived a thing could tell you true,
Whether it was goin’ to rain,
Whether you would have a pain,
Whether him or you would beat,
Whether you’d have ‘nuf to eat!
Bones was give to hold us straight,
Not to tell us ‘bout our Fate.”
“Yes, yes, I s’pose so,” sighed Mrs. McGuire. “But when I think of
John, my John, lyin’ there so cold an’ still—”
“Well, he ain’t lyin’ there yet,” cut in Susan impatiently. “Time enough to hunt bears when you see their tracks. Mis’ McGuire, CAN’T you see that worryin’ don’t do no good? You’ll have it ALL for nothin’, if he don’t get hurt; an’ if he does, you’ll have all this extra for nothin’, anyway, —that you didn’t need till the time came. Ever hear my poem on worryin’?”
Without waiting for a reply—Susan never asked such questions with a view to having them answered—she chanted this:
“Worry never climbed a hill,
Worry never paid a bill,
Worry never led a horse to water.
Worry never cooked a meal,
Worry never darned a heel,
Worry never did a thing you’d think it oughter!”
“Yes, yes, I know, I know,” sighed Mrs. McGuire again. “But John is so—well, you don’t know my John. Nobody knows John as I do. He’d have made a big man if he’d lived—John would.”
“‘If he’d lived’!” repeated Susan severely. “Well, I never, Mis’ McGuire, if you ain’t talkin’ already as if he was dead! You don’t have to begin to write his obliquity notice yet, do you?”
“But he is dead,” moaned Mrs. McGuire, catching at the one word in Susan’s remark and paying no attention to the rest. “He’s dead to everything he was goin’ to do. He was ambitious, —my John was. He was always studyin’ and readin’ books nights an’ Sundays an’ holidays, when he didn’t have to be in the store. He was takin’ a course, you know.”
“Yes, I know—one of them respondin’ schools,” nodded Susan. “John’s a clever lad, he is, I’m free to confess.”
Under the sunshine of Susan’s appreciation Mrs. McGuire drew a step nearer.
“He was studyin’ so he could ‘mount to somethin’—John was,” declared Mrs. McGuire. “He was goin’ to be”—she paused and threw a hurried look over her shoulder—”he was keepin’ it secret, but he won’t mind my tellin’ NOW. He was goin’ to be a—writer some day, he hoped.”
Susan’s instantly alert attention was most flattering.
“Sho! You don’t say! Poems?”
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