Alice Adams

Alice Adams

Booth Tarkington

By Booth Tarkington

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 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. Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with

digestions of the day before, and these already merged with rumblings

of the morrow. “Owl” cars, bringing in last passengers over distant

trolley-lines, now and then howled on a curve; faraway metallic

stirrings could be heard from factories in the sooty suburbs on the

plain outside the city; east, west, and south, switch-engines chugged

and snorted on sidings; and everywhere in the air there seemed to be

a faint, voluminous hum as of innumerable wires trembling overhead to

vibration of machinery underground.

In his youth Adams might have been less resentful of sounds such as

these when they interfered with his night's sleep: even during

an illness he might have taken some pride in them as proof of his

citizenship in a “live town”; but at fifty-five he merely hated them

because they kept him awake. They “pressed on his nerves,” as he put it;