Chapter 3

He seems quite happy and amused. I see him carrying a bucket sometimes, sharing its handle with a flushed T.B. They carry on animated conversations as they go downstairs, the T.B. talking the most. It reminds me of a child and a dog.

What strange machinery is there for getting him back? Part of the cargo of a ship ... one day ... "a nigger for Central Africa...."

"Where's his unit?"

"Who knows! One nigger and his bundle ... for Central Africa!"

The ward has put Mr. Wicks to Coventry because he has been abusive and violent-tempered for three days.

He lies flat in his bed and frowns; no more jokes over the lemonade, no wilfulness over the thermometer.

It is in these days that Mr. Wicks faces the truth.

I lingered by his bed last night, after I had put his tea-tray on his table, and looked down at him; he pretended to be inanimate, his open eyes fixed upon the white rail of the bed. His bedclothes were stretched about him as though he had not moved since his bed was made, hours before.

His worldly pleasures were beside him--his reading-lamp, his Christmas box of cigars, his _Star_--but his eyes, disregarding them, were upon that sober vision that hung around the bedrail.

He began a bitter conversation:

"Nurse, I'm only a ranker, but I had a bit saved. I went to a private doctor and paid for myself. And I went to a specialist, and he told me I should never get this. I paid for it myself out of what I had saved."

We might have been alone in the world, he and I. Far down at the other end of the room the men sat crouched about the fire, their trays before them on chairs. The sheet of window behind Mr. Wicks's head was flecked with the morsels of snow which, hunted by the gale, obtained a second's refuge before oblivion.

"I'd sooner be dead than lying here; I would, reely." You hear that often in the world. "I'd sooner be dead than----" But Mr. Wicks meant it; he would sooner be dead than lying there. And death is a horror, an end. Yet he says lying there is worse.

"You see, I paid for a specialist myself, and he told me I should never be like this."

There was nothing to be said.... One must have one's tea. I went down the ward to the bunk, and we cut the pink iced cake left over from Christmas....

I did not mean to forget him, but I forgot him. From birth to death we are alone....

But one of the Sisters remembered him.

"Mr. Wicks is still in the dumps," she remarked.

"What is really the matter with him, Sister?"

"Locomotor ataxy." And she added as she drank her tea, "It's his own fault."

"Oh, hush, hush!" my heart cried soundlessly to her, "You can't judge the bitterness of this, nun, from your convent...!"

Alas, Mr. Wicks!... No wonder you saved your money to spend upon specialists! How many years have you walked in fear of this? He took your money, the gentleman in Harley Street, and told you that you might go in peace. He blessed you and gave you salvation.

And the bitterest thing of all is that you paid for him like an officer and he was wrong.

How the blinds blew and the windows shook to-night...! I walked out of the hospital into a gale, clouds driving to the sea, trees bending back and fore across the moon.

I walked till I was warm, and then I walked for happiness.

The maddening shine of the moon held my eyes, and I walked in the road like a fool, watching her--till at last, bringing my eyes down, the telegraph-posts were small as blades of grass on the hill-side and the shining ribbon tracks in the mud on the road ran up the hill for ever. They go to Dover, and Dover is France--and France leads anywhere.

To what a lost enchantment am I recalled by the sight of a branch across the moon? Something in childhood, something which escapes yet does not wither....

As I passed the public-house on the crest of the hill, all black and white in the cold moonlight, a heavy door swung open and, with a cough and a deep, satisfied snuffle, a man coming out let a stream of gaslight across the road. If I were a man I should certainly go to public-houses. All that polished brass and glass boxed up away from the moon and the shadows would call to me. And to drink must be a happy thing when you have climbed the hill.

The T.B. ward is a melancholy place. There is a man in a bed near the door who lies with his mouth open; his head is like a bird-cage beneath a muslin cloth. I saw him behind his screens when I took them over a little lukewarm chicken left from our dinner.

There was a dark red moon to-night, and frost. Our orderly said, "You can tell it's freezing, nurse, by the breath," as he watched mine curl up in smoke in the icy corridor. I like people who notice things....

Out in the road in front of the hospital I couldn't get the motor-bicycle to work, and sat crouched in the dark fiddling with spanners.

The charwomen came out of the big gate in the dark talking and laughing, all in a bunch. One of them stepped off the pavement near me and stopped to put her toe through the ice in the gutter.

"Nah, come on, Mrs. Toms!"

"I always 'ave to break it, it's ser nice an' stiff," she said as she ran after them.

To be a Sister is to have a nationality.

As there are Icelanders urbane, witty, lazy ... and yet they are all Icelanders ... so there are cold, uproarious, observant, subservient, slangy, sympathetic, indifferent, and Scotch Sisters, and yet....

Sister said of a patient to-day, "He was a funny man."

A funny man is a man who is a dark horse: who is neither friendly nor antagonistic; who is witty; who is preoccupied; who is whimsical or erratic--funny qualities, unsafe qualities.

No Sister could like a funny man.

In our ward there are three sorts of men: "Nothing much," "nice boys," and Mr. Wicks.

The last looms even to the mind of the Sister as a Biblical figure, a pillar of salt, a witness to God's wrath.

The Sister is a past-mistress of such phrases as "Indeed!" "That is a matter of opinion," "We shall see..." "It is possible."

I have discovered a new and (for me) charming game which I play with my Sister. It is the game of telling the truth about the contents of my mind when asked.

Yesterday Sister was trying to get some coal out of the coal-bin with a shovel that turned round and round on its handle; she was unsuccessful.

I said, "Let me, Sister!"

She said, "Why?"

And I: "Because I think I can do it better."

"Why should you think that?"

"Because all human beings do," I said, and, luckily, she smiled.

She was washing her caps out in a bowl in the afternoon when I came on.

"Good afternoon, Sister," I said. "Ironing?"

"I am obviously only washing as yet," she said.

"It's because I think so quickly, Sister," I said; "I knew you would iron next."

I dined with Irene last night after the hospital.

I refused to believe what she told me about the last bus passing at half-past nine, and so at a quarter to ten I stood outside "The Green Lamp" and waited.

Ten minutes passed and no bus.

With me were two women waiting too--one holding a baby; the other, younger, smarter, dangling a purse.

At last I communicated my growing fears: "I believe the last has gone...."

We fixed our six eyes on the far corner of the road, waiting for the yellow lights to round it, but only the gas-lamps stood firm in their perspective.

"Oh my, Elsie!" said the woman with the baby, "you can't never walk up to the cross-roads in the dark alone!"

"I wouldn't make the attempt, not for anything!" replied the younger one firmly.

Without waiting for more I stepped into the middle of the road and started on my walk home; the very next sentence would have suggested that Elsie and I should walk together.

She wouldn't "make the attempt...." Her words trailed through my mind, conjuring up some adventure, some act of bravery and daring.

The road was the high road, the channel of tarmac and pavements that she probably walked along every day; and now it was the selfsame high road, the same flagstones, hedges, railings, but with the cloak of night upon them.

It wasn't man she feared; even in the dark I knew she wasn't that kind. She would be awfully capable--with man. No, it was the darkness, the spooky jungle of darkness: she feared the trees would move....

"I wouldn't make the attempt, not for anything"; and the other woman had quite agreed with her.

I knew where I was by the smells and the sounds on the road--the smell of the lines of picketed horses behind the railings, the sharp and sudden stamp of the sick ones in the wooden stables, and, later on, the glitter of water in the horse-troughs.

I thought: "I am not afraid.... Is it because I am more educated, or have less imagination?"

"Halt! Who goes there?"

"Friend," I said, thrilling tremendously.

He approached me and said something which I couldn't make anything of. Presently I disentangled, "You should never dread the baynit, miss."

"But I'm not dreading," I said, annoyed, "I ... I love it."

He said he was cold, and added: "I bin wounded. If you come to that lamp you can see me stripe."

We went to the lamp. "It's them buses," he complained, "they won't stop when I halt 'em."

"But why do you want to stop them? They can't poison the horse-troughs."

"It's me duty," he said. "There's one comin'."

A bus, coming the opposite way, bore down upon us with an unwieldy rush and roar--the last bus, in a hurry to get to bed.

"You'll see," he said pessimistically.

"'Alt! 'Alt, there!" The bus, with three soldiers hanging on the step, rushed past us, and seemed to slow a little. The sentry ran a few paces towards it, crying "'Alt!" But it gathered speed and boomed on again, buzzing away between the gas-lamps. He returned to me sadly.

"I don't believe they can hear," I said, and gave him some chocolates and went on.

As I passed the hospital gates it seemed there was a faint, a very faint, sweet smell of chloroform....

I was down at the hospital to-night when the factory blew up over the river.

The lights went out, and as they sank I reached the kitchen hatchway with my tray. At the bottom of the stairs I could see through the garden door the sky grown sulphur and the bushes glowing, while all the panes of glass turned incandescent.

Then the explosion came; it sounded as though it was just behind the hospital. Two hundred panes of glass fell out, and they made a noise too.

Standing in the dark with a tray in my hand I heard a man's voice saying gleefully, "I haven't been out of bed this two months!"

Some one lit a candle, and by its light I saw all the charwomen from the kitchen bending about like broken weeds, and every officer was saying, "There, there now!"

We watched the fires till midnight from the hill.

I went over this morning early. We were thirty-two in a carriage--Lascars, Chinese, children, Jews, niggers from the docks.

Lascars and children and Jews and I, we fought to get off the station platform; sometimes there wasn't room on the ground for both my feet at once.

The fires were still burning and smouldering there at midday, but a shower of rime fell on it, so that it looked like an old ruin, something done long ago.

At Pompeii, some one told me, one looked into the rooms and they were as they had been left--tables laid.... Here, too, I saw a table laid for the evening meal with a bedstead fallen from the upper floor astraddle across it. The insides of the houses were coughed into their windows, basket-chairs hanging to the sills, and fire-irons.

Outside, the soil of the earth turned up; a workman's tin mug stuck and roasted and hardened into what looks like solid rock--a fossil, as though it had been there for ever.

London is only skin-deep. Beneath lies the body of the world.

The hump under the blankets rolls over and a man's solemn face appears upon the pillow.

"Can you get me a book, nurse?"

"Yes. What kind do you like?"

"Nothing fanciful; something that might be true."

"All right!"

"Oh--and nurse...?"

"Yes?"

"Not sentimental and not funny, I like a practical story."

I got him "Lord Jim."...

Another voice: "Nurse, is there any modern French poetry in that bookcase?"

"Good heavens, no! Who would have brought it here?"

(Who are they all ... these men with their differing tastes?)

Perhaps the angels feel like this as they trail about in heaven with their wings flapping on their thin white legs....

"Who were you, angel?"

"I was a beggar outside San Marco."

"Were you? How odd! I was an Englishman."

The concerts that we give in the ward touch me with some curious emotion. I think it is because I am for once at rest in the ward and have time to think and wonder.

There is Captain Thomson finishing his song. He doesn't know what to do with his hands; they swing. He is tall and dark, with soft eyes--and staff badges.

Could one guess what he is? Never in a dozen years.... But I _know_!

He said to me last night, "Nurse, I'm going out to-morrow."

I leant across the table to listen to him.

"Nurse, if you ever want any _crêpe de Chine_ ... for nightgowns ... mind, at wholesale prices...."

"I have bought some at a sale."

"May I ask at what price?"

"Four-and-eleven a yard."

"Pity! You could have had it from me at three!"

He gave me his business card. "That's it, nurse," he said, as he wrote on the back of it. "Drop me a line to that address and you'll get any material for underwear at trade prices."

He booked one or two orders the night he went away--not laughingly, not as a joke, but with deep seriousness, and gravely pleased that he was able to do what he could for us. He was a traveller in ladies' underwear. I have seldom met any one so little a snob....

Watch Mr. Gray singing....

One hand on the piano, one on his hip:

"I love every mouse in that old-fashioned house."

"That fellow can sing!" whispers the man beside me.

"Is he a professional?" I asked as, finishing, the singer made the faintest of bows and walked back to his chair.

"I think he must be."

"He is, he is!" whispered Mr. Matthews, "I've heard him before."

They know so little about each other, and they don't ask. It is only I who wonder--I, a woman, and therefore of the old, burnt-out world. These men watch without curiosity, speak no personalities, form no sets, express no likings, analyse nothing. They are new-born; they have as yet no standards and do not look for any.

Ah, to have had that experience too!... I am of the old world.

Again and again I realize, "A nation in arms...."

Watchmakers, jewellers, station-masters, dress-designers, actors, travellers in underwear, bank clerks ... they come here in uniforms and we put them into pyjamas and nurse them; and they lie in bed or hobble about the ward, watching us as we move, accepting each other with the unquestioning faith of children.

The outside world has faded since I have been in the hospital. Their world is often near me--their mud and trenches, things they say when they come in wounded.

The worst of it is it almost bores me to go to London, and London was always my Mecca. It is this garden at home, I think. It is so easy not to leave it.

When you wake up the window is full of branches, and last thing at night the moon is on the snow on the lawn and you can see the pheasants' footmarks.

Then one goes to the hospital....

When Madeleine telephones to me, "I'm living in a whirl...." it disturbs me. Suddenly I want to too, but it dies down again.

Not that it is their world, those trenches. When they come in wounded or sick they say at once, "What shows are on?"

Mr. Wicks has ceased to read those magazines his sister sends him; he now stares all day at his white bedrail.

I only pass him on my way to the towel-cupboard, twice an evening, and then as I glance at him I am set wondering all down the ward of what he thinks, or if he thinks....

I may be quite wrong about him; it is possible he doesn't think at all, but stares himself into some happier dream.

One day when he is dead, when he is as totally dead as he tells me he hopes to be, that bed with its haunted bedrail will bend under another man's weight. Surely it must be haunted? The weight of thought, dream or nightmare, that hangs about it now is almost visible to me.

Mr. Wicks is an uneducated and ordinary man. In what manner does his dream run? Since he has ceased to read he has begun to drop away a little from my living understanding.

He reflects deeply at times.

To-night, as I went quickly past him with my load of bath-towels, his blind flapped a little, and I saw the moon, shaped like a horn, behind it.

Dropping my towels, I pulled his blind back:

"Mr. Wicks, look at the moon."

Obedient as one who receives an order, he reached up to his supporting handle and pulled his shoulders half round in bed to look with me through the pane.

The young moon, freed from the trees, was rising over the hill.

I dropped the blind again and took up my towels and left him.

After that he seemed to fall into one of his trances, and lay immovable an hour or more. When I took his dinner to him he lifted his large, sandy head and said:

"Seems a queer thing that if you hadn't said 'Look at the moon' I might have bin dead without seeing her."

"But don't you ever look out of the window?"

The obstinate man shook his head.

There was a long silence in the ward to-night. It was so cold that no one spoke. It is a gloomy ward, I think; the pink silk on the electric lights is so much too thick, and the fire smokes dreadfully. The patients sat round the fire with their "British warms" over their dressing-gowns and the collars turned up.

Through the two glass doors and over the landing you can see the T.B.'s moving like little cinema figures backwards and forwards across the lighted entrance.

Suddenly--a hesitating touch--an ancient polka struck up, a tune remembered at children's parties. Then a waltz, a very old one too. The T.B.'s were playing dance music.

I crept to their door and looked. One man alone was taking any notice, and he was the player; the others sat round coughing or staring at nothing in particular, and those in bed had their heads turned away from the music.

The man whose face is like a bird-cage has now more than ever a look of ... an empty cage. He allows his mouth to hang open: that way the bird will fly.

What is there so rapturous about the moon?

The radiance of a floating moon is unbelievable. It is a figment of dream. The metal-silver ball that hung at the top of the Christmas tree, or, earlier still, the shining thing, necklace or spoon, the thing the baby leans to catch ... the magpie in us....

Mr. Beecher is to be allowed to sleep till eight. He sleeps so badly, he says. He woke up crying this morning, for he has neurasthenia.

That is what Sister says.

He should have been in bed all yesterday, but instead he got up and through the door watched the dead T.B. ride away on his stretcher (for the bird flew in the night).

"How morbid of him!" Sister says.

He has seen many dead in France and snapped his fingers at them, but I agree with him that to die of tuberculosis in the backwaters of the war isn't the same thing.

It's dreary; he thought how dreary it was as he lay awake in the night.

But then he has neurasthenia....

Pity is exhaustible. What a terrible discovery! If one ceases for one instant to pity Mr. Wicks he becomes an awful bore. Some days, when the sun is shining, I hear his grieving tenor voice all over the ward, his legendary tale of a wrong done him in his promotion. The men are kind to him and say "Old man," but Mr. Gray, who lies in the next bed to him, is drained of everything except resignation. I heard him say yesterday, "You told me that before...."

We had a convoy last night.

There was a rumour at tea-time, and suddenly I came round a corner on an orderly full of such definite information as:

"There's thirty officers, nurse; an 'undred an' eighty men."

I flew back to the bunk with the news, and we sat down to our tea wondering and discussing how many each ward would get.

Presently the haughty Sister from downstairs came to the door: she held her thin, white face high, and her rimless glasses gleamed, as she remarked, overcasually, after asking for a hot-water bottle that had been loaned to us:

"Have you many beds?"

"Have they many beds?" The one question that starts up among the competing wards.

And, "I don't want any; I've enough to do as it is!" is the false, cloaking answer that each Sister gives to the other.

But my Sisters are frank women; they laughed at my excitement--themselves not unstirred. It's so long since we've had a convoy.

The gallants of the ward showed annoyance. New men, new interests.... They drew together and played bridge.

A little flying boy with bright eyes said in his high, piping voice to me across the ward:

"So there are soldiers coming into the ward to-night!"

I paused, struck by his accusing eyes.

"What do you mean? Soldiers...?"

"I mean men who have been to the front, nurse."

The gallants raised their eyebrows and grew uproarious.

The gallants have been saying unprofessional things to me, and I haven't minded. The convoy will arm me against them. "Soldiers are coming into the ward."

Eight o'clock, nine o'clock.... If only one could eat something! I took a sponge-finger out of a tin, resolving to pay it back out of my tea next day, and stole round to the dark corner near the German ward to eat it. The Germans were in bed; I could see two of them. At last, freed from their uniform, the dark blue with the scarlet soup-plates, they looked--how strange!--like other men.

One was asleep. The other, I met his eyes so close; but I was in the dark, and he under the light of a lamp.

I knew what was happening down at the station two miles away; I had been on station duty so often. The rickety country station lit by one large lamp; the thirteen waiting V.A.D.'s; the long wooden table loaded with mugs of every size; kettles boiling; the white clock ticking on; that frowsy booking clerk....

Then the sharp bell, the tramp of the stretcher-bearers through the station, and at last the two engines drawing gravely across the lighted doorway, and carriage windows filled with eager faces, other carriage windows with beds slung across them, a vast Red Cross, a chemist's shop, a theatre, more windows, more faces....

The stretcher-men are lined up; the M.O. meets the M.O. with the train; the train Sisters drift in to the coffee-table.

"Here they come! Walkers first...."

The station entrance is full of men crowding in and taking the steaming mugs of tea and coffee; men on pickaback with bandaged feet; men with only a nose and one eye showing, with stumbling legs, bound arms. The station, for five minutes, is full of jokes and witticisms; then they pass out and into the waiting chars-à-bancs.

A long pause.

"Stretchers!"

The first stretchers are laid on the floor.

There I have stood so often, pouring the tea behind the table, watching that littered floor, the single gas-lamp ever revolving on its chain, turning the shadows about the room like a wheel--my mind filled with pictures, emptied of thoughts, hypnotized.

But last night, for the first time, I was in the ward. For the first time I should follow them beyond the glass door, see what became of them, how they changed from soldiers into patients....

The gallants in the ward don't like a convoy; it unsexes us.

Nine o'clock ... ten o'clock.... Another biscuit. Both Germans are asleep now.

At last a noise in the corridor, a tramp on the stairs.... Only walkers? No, there's a stretcher--and another...!

Now reflection ends, my feet begin to move, my hands to undo bootlaces, flick down thermometers, wash and fetch and carry.

The gallants play bridge without looking up. I am tremendously fortified against them: for one moment I fiercely condemn and then forget them. For I am without convictions, antipathies, prejudices, reflections. I only work and watch, watch....