The After House | Page 3

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The After House
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
CHAPTER I
I PLAN A VOYAGE
By the bequest of an elder brother, I was left enough money to see me
through a small college in Ohio, and to secure me four years in a
medical school in the East. Why I chose medicine I hardly know.
Possibly the career of a surgeon attracted the adventurous element in
me. Perhaps, coming of a family of doctors, I merely followed the line
of least resistance. It may be, indirectly but inevitably, that I might be
on the yacht Ella on that terrible night of August 12, more than a year
ago.
I got through somehow. I played quarterback on the football team, and
made some money coaching. In summer I did whatever came to hand,
from chartering a sail-boat at a summer resort and taking passengers, at
so much a head, to checking up cucumbers is Indiana for a Western
pickle house.
I was practically alone. Commencement left me with a diploma, a new
dress-suit, an out-of-date medical library, a box of surgical instruments
of the same date as the books, and an incipient case of typhoid fever.
I was twenty-four, six feet tall, and forty inches around the chest. Also,
I had lived clean, and worked and played hard. I got over the fever
finally, pretty much all bone and appetite; but - alive. Thanks to the

college, my hospital care had cost nothing. It was a good thing: I had
just seven dollars in the world.
The yacht Ella lay in the river not far from my hospital windows. She
was not a yacht when I first saw her, nor at any time, technically, unless
I use the word in the broad sense of a pleasure-boat. She was a
two-master, and, when I saw her first, as dirty and disreputable as are
most coasting-vessels. Her rejuvenation was the history of my
convalescence. On the day she stood forth in her first coat of white
paint, I exchanged my dressing-gown for clothing that, however
loosely it hung, was still clothing. Her new sails marked my promotion
to beefsteak, her brass rails and awnings my first independent excursion
up and down the corridor outside my door, and, incidentally, my return
to a collar and tie.
The river shipping appealed to me, to my imagination, clean washed by
my illness and ready as a child's for new impressions: liners gliding
down to the bay and the open sea; shrewish, scolding tugs; dirty but
picturesque tramps. My enthusiasm amused the nurses, whose ideas of
adventure consisted of little jaunts of exploration into the abdominal
cavity, and whose aseptic minds revolted at the sight of dirty sails.
One day I pointed out to one of them an old schooner, red and brown,
with patched canvas spread, moving swiftly