The Joker

Angelina Judd was not the only patient fired with desire to cheer her fellows. There was Susie Spinner, a sparrow-like creature with a giggle, and nostrils that bored into her face like a pair of keyholes. You saw these black holes before you saw Susie. All the rest of her was colourless—neutral drab hair, grey skin peppered with pale freckles, toneless giggles in bunches.

After each bunch of giggles at one of her own jokes, a great sigh burst through the keyholes and Susie’s flat forehead churned into wrinkles. Susie was enthusiastic over her own jokes and sprang one after another like waves splashing on a beach. Each joke had a bridesmaid, or rather four bridesmaids, when everything Susieish happened all over again, giggle, sigh, wrinkle, joke!

Susie Spinner was not T.B. She was a friend of Dr. Bottle’s and came to the San for week-end jaunts because she loved the place. She ran an office in London, also an aged mother. She was not young herself. These little rests at the San kept her going; she loved to float on the dead sea of San life, doing as she was told, stretched inert on a lounge chair on the terrace, speculating as to each patient’s chances, telling Susie Spinner jokes.

“Hokey, I prefer dismal patients to jokers, if patients there must be.”

Hokey said, “Miss Spinner wants to meet you.”

“A want not reciprocated.”

“Don’t be a grump.” She set our chairs side by side on the terrace.

Close-up, the gymnastics of Susie’s features were more irritating than I had suspected.

“I have heard about your birds for Canada. (Giggle!) Splendid idea. (Giggle, giggle!) I adore birds, don’t you? But, of course, or you’d never—”. (Giggle, giggle, giggle.)

Rest bell. I got up. The bell’s clanking vibrations drowned the end of Susie’s giggle. I left her doing all the things that completed the sequence over again.

“Hokey, I hate you.”

“Why now specially?”

“Susie Spinner’ll brood my birdlings day and night. My life will be addled with Susieisms.”

“Miss Spinner is a nice woman, always comes down from London with a headful of jokes to make everyone laugh—everyone but old grumpies like you.” She shook her head, gave my pillow the punch I deserved.

“All right, Hoke, long live the giggles! I do thirst for some mourning-doves, some weeping-willows round here; everything is so forcedly gay.”

Hokey’s Poem

“That’s morbid,” scolded Hokey.

“It is not morbid. Listen! Once, out in Canada, I stayed with some Indians, lived right in their own home. Primitive it was but wise. When they were hungry, they ate—happy, they sang—sleepy, they slept—when they wanted to cry, they cried torrents, vast oceans of tears that washed their miseries completely away, left their faces clear as morning.”

“Very sloppy—very uncontrolled,” said Hokey.