Chapter 4

Our ward is divided: half of it is neat and white and orderly; the other half has khaki tumbled all over it--"Sam Brownes," boots, caps, mud, the caked mud from the "other side."

But the neat beds are empty; the occupants out talking to the new-comers, asking questions. Only the gallants play their bridge unmoved. They are on their mettle, showing off. Their turn will come some day.

Now it only remains to walk home, hungry, under a heavy moon.

The snow is running down the gutters. What a strange and penetrating smell of spring! February ... can it be yet?

The running snow is uncovering something that has been delayed. In the garden a blackbird made a sudden cry in the hedge. I did smell spring, and I'm starving....

I thought last night that a hospital ward is, above all, a serene place, in spite of pain and blood and dressings. Gravity rules it and order and a quiet procession of duties.

Last night I made beds with the eldest Sister. The eldest Sister is good company to make beds with; she is quiet unless I rouse her, and when I talk she smiles with her eyes. I like to walk slowly round the ward, stooping and rising over the white beds, flicking the sheets mechanically from the mattress, and finally turning the mattress with an ease which gives me pleasure because I am strong.

In life nothing is too small to please....

Once during the evening the eldest Sister said to me:

"I am worried about your throat. Is it no better?"

And from the pang of pleasure and gratitude that went through me I have learnt the value of such remarks.

In every bed there is some one whose throat is at least more sore than mine....

Though I am not one of those fierce V.A.D.'s who scoff at sore throats and look for wounds, yet I didn't know it was so easy to give pleasure.

The strange, disarming ways of men and women!

I stood in the bunk to-night beside the youngest Sister, and she looked up suddenly with her absent stare and said, "You're not so nice as you used to be!"

I was dumbfounded. Had I been "nice"? And now different....

What a maddening sentence, for I felt she was going to refuse me any spoken explanation.

But one should not listen to what people say, only to what they mean, and she was one of those persons whose minds one must read for oneself, since her words so often deformed her thoughts.

The familiarity and equality of her tone seemed to come from some mood removed from the hospital, where her mistrustful mind was hovering about a trouble personal to herself.

She did not mean "You are not so nice...." but "You don't like me so much...."

She was so young, it was all so new to her, she wanted so to be "liked"! But there was this question of her authority....

How was she to live among her fellows?

Can one afford to disdain them? Can one steer happily with indifference? Must one, to be "liked," bend one's spirit to theirs? And, most disturbing question of all, is to be "liked" the final standard?

Whether to wear, or not to wear, a mask towards one's world? For there is so much that is not ripe to show--change and uncertainty....

As she sat there, unfolding to me the fogs of her situation, her fresh pink face clouded, her grand cap and red cape adding burdens of authority to the toil of growth, I could readily have looked into the glass to see if my hair was grey!

"Then there is nothing you condemn?" said the youngest Sister finally, at the close of a conversation.

I have to-day come up against the bedrock of her integrity; it is terrible. She has eternal youth, eternal fair hair, cold and ignorant judgments. On things relating to the world I can't further soften her; a man must do the rest.

"A gentleman ... a gentleman...." I am so tired of this cry for a "gentleman."

Why can't they do very well with what they've got!

Here in the wards the Sisters have the stuff the world is made of laid out, bedded, before their eyes; the ups and downs of man from the four corners of the Empire and the hundred corners of social life, helpless and in pyjamas--and they're not satisfied, but must cry for a "gentleman"!

"I couldn't make a friend of that man!" the youngest Sister loves to add to her criticism of a patient.

It isn't my part as a V.A.D. to cry, "Who wants you to?"

"I couldn't trust that man!" the youngest Sister will say equally often.

This goes deeper....

But whom need one trust? Brother, lover, friend ... no more. Why wish to trust all the world?...

"They are not real men," she says, "not men through and through."

That's where she goes wrong; they are men through and through--patchy, ordinary, human. She means they are not men after her pattern.

Something will happen in the ward. Once I have touched this bedrock in her I shall be for ever touching it till it gets sore!

One should seek for no response. They are not elastic, these nuns....

In all honesty the hospital is a convent, and the men in it my brothers.

This for months on end....

For all that, now and then some one raises his eyes and looks at me; one day follows another and the glance deepens.

"Charme de l'amour qui pourrait vous peindre!"

Women are left behind when one goes into hospital. Such women as are in a hospital should be cool, gentle; anything else becomes a torment to the "prisoner."

For me, too, it is bad; it brings the world back into my eyes; duties are neglected, discomforts unobserved.

But there are things one doesn't fight.

"Charme de l'amour...." The ward is changed! The eldest Sister and the youngest Sister are my enemies; the patients are my enemies--even Mr. Wicks, who lies on his back with his large head turned fixedly my way to see how often I stop at the bed whose number is 11.

Last night he dared to say, "It's not like you, nurse, staying so much with that rowdy crew...." The gallants ... I know! But one among them has grown quieter, and his bed is No. 11.

Even Mr. Wicks is my enemy.

He watches and guards. Who knows what he might say to the eldest Sister? He has nothing to do all day but watch and guard.

In the bunk at tea I sit among thoughts of my own. The Sisters are my enemies....

I am alive, delirious, but not happy.

I am at any one's mercy; I have lost thirty friends in a day. The thirty-first is in bed No. 11.

This is bad: hospital cannot shelter this life we lead, No. 11 and I. He is a prisoner, and I have my honour, my responsibility towards him; he has come into this room to be cured, not tormented.

Even my hand must not meet his--no, not even in a careless touch, not even in its "duty"; or, if it does, what risk!

I am conspired against: it is not I who make his bed, hand him what he wishes; some accident defeats me every time.

Now that I come to think of it, it seems strange that the Sisters should be my enemies. Don't we deserve sympathy and pity, No. 11 and I? From women, too....

Isn't there a charm hanging about us? Aren't we leading magic days? Do they feel it and dislike it? Why?

I feel that the little love we have created is a hare whose natural fate is to be run by every hound. But I don't see the reason.

We can't speak, No. 11 and I, only a whispered word or two that seems to shout itself into every ear. We don't know each other.

Last night it was stronger than I. I let him stand near me and talk. I saw the youngest Sister at the far end of the ward by the door, but I didn't move; she was watching. The moment I took my eyes from her I forgot her.... That is how one feels when one is desperate; that is how trouble comes.

Later, I stood down by the hatch waiting for the tray of fish, and as I stood there, the youngest Sister beside me, he came down, for he was up and dressed yesterday, and offered to carry the tray. For he is reckless, too....

She told him to go back, and said to me, looking from her young, condemning eyes, "I suppose he thinks he can make up for being the cause of all the lateness to-night."

"Sister...." and then I stopped short. I hated her. Were we late? I looked at the other trays. We were not late; it was untrue. She had said that because she had had to wrap her barb in something and hadn't the courage to reprove me officially. I resented that and her air of equality. Since I am under her authority and agree to it, why dare she not use it?

As for me, I dared not speak to her all the evening. She would have no weapons against me. If I am to remember she is my Sister I must hold my hand over my mouth.

She would not speak to me, either. That was wrong of her: she is in authority, not I.

It is difficult for her because she is so young; but I have no room for sympathy.

At moments I forget her position and, burning with resentment, I reflect, " ... this schoolgirl...."

To-day I walked down to the hospital thinking: "I must be stronger. It is I who, in the inverted position of things, should be the stronger. He is being tortured, and he has no release. He cannot even be alone a moment."

But at the hospital gates I thought of nothing but that I should see him.

In the bunk sat the eldest Sister, writing in a book. It passed through my head that the two Sisters had probably "sat" on my affairs together. I wondered without interest what the other had told her. Putting on my cap, I walked into the ward.

Surely his bed had had a pink eiderdown!

I walked up the ward and looked at it; but I knew without need of a second glance what had happened.

His bed was made in the fashion in which we make an empty bed, a bed that waits for a new patient. His locker was empty and stood open, already scrubbed. I smiled as I noticed they hadn't even left me that to do.

No one volunteered a word of explanation, no one took the trouble to say he had gone.

These women.... I smiled again. Only the comic phrase rang in my head "They've properly done me in! Properly done me in...."

I went downstairs and fetched the trays, and all the time the smile was on my lips. These women.... Somehow I had the better of the Sister. It is better to be in the wrong than in the right.

His friends looked at me a little, but apparently he had left no message for me.

Later I learnt that he had been taken to another hospital at two, while I came on at three.

Once during the evening the eldest Sister mentioned vaguely, "So-and-so has gone."

And I said aloud, after a little reflection, "Yes ... in the nick of time, Sister."

During the evening I realized that I should never see him again. It was here in this ward the thing had grown. The hare we had started wouldn't bear the strain of any other life. He might write, but I shouldn't go and see him.

"He must be wild," I thought with pity.

The feeling between us would die anyhow; better throw in my strength with the Sister's and help her hurl it now towards its death. I looked at her bent head with a secret triumph.

Then, slowly: "How ... permanently am I in disgrace?"

And she: "Not at all ... now."

Behind the stone pillar of the gateway is one dirty little patch of snow; I saw it even in the moonless darkness.

The crown of the hill here holds the last snows, but for all that the spring smell is steaming among the trees and up and down the bracken slopes in the garden next door.

There is no moon, there are no stars, no promise to the eye, but in the dense, vapouring darkness the bulbs are moving. I can smell what is not earth or rain or bark.

The curtain has been drawn over No. 11; the Sister holds the corners tightly against the window-frame. He is outside, somewhere in the world, and I am here moving among my thirty friends; and since it isn't spring yet, the lights are lit to hide the twilight. The Sister's eyes talk to me again as we make beds--yes, even bed No. 11 with a little jaundice boy in it. They let me make it now!

Last night we had another concert in the ward.

A concert demoralizes me. By reason of sitting on the beds and talking to whom one wills, I regain my old manners, and forget that a patient may be washed, fed, dressed but not talked to. My old manners were more gracious, but less docile.

Afterwards we wheeled the beds back into their positions. I bumped Mr. Lambert's as I wheeled it, and apologized.

"I'm not grumbling," he smiled from his pillow.

"You never do," I answered.

"You don't know me, nurse!"

And I thought as I looked down at him "I shall never know him better or so well again...."

Indeed a Sister is a curious creature. She is like a fortress, unassailable, and whose sleeping guns may fire at any minute.

I was struck with a bit of knowledge last night that will serve me through life, i.e. that to justify oneself is the inexcusable fault. It is better to be in the wrong than in the right.

A Sister has an "intimate life."

It occurs when she goes off duty; that is to say, it lies between 8.45, when she finishes her supper, and 10 o'clock, when she finishes undressing.

That is why one Sister said to me, "If I hadn't taken up nursing I should have gone in for culture."

I don't laugh at that.... To have an intimate life one must have a little time.

Who am I that I can step in from outside to criticize? The hospital is not my life. I am expectant....

But for them here and now is the business of life.

As the weeks go by I recognize the difficulty of keeping the life of the Sisters and the V.A.D.'s out of the circle of my thoughts. Their vigorous and symmetrical vision of the ward attacks me; their attitude towards the patients, which began by offending me, ends by overtaking me.

On the whole the Sisters loathe relations. They look into the ward and see the mothers and sisters and wives camped round the beds, and go back into the bunk feeling that the ward doesn't belong to them.

The eldest Sister said to me yesterday: "Shut the door, nurse; there's Captain Fellows's father. I don't want him fussing round."

On that we discussed relations, and it seemed to me that it was inevitable that a Sister should be the only buffer between them and their pressing anxieties.

"No, a relation is the last straw.... You don't understand!" she said.

I don't understand, but I am not specialized.

Long ago in the Mess I said to _my_ Sister, laughing: "I would go through the four years' training just to wear that cap and cape!"

And she: "You couldn't go through it and come out as you are...."

Mr. Wicks has set his heart on crutches.

"If you won't try me on them I'll buy me own and walk out of here!"

Then I realize the vanity of his threat and the completeness of his imprisonment, and hurry to suggest a new idea before he sees it too....

We set him on crutches....

He is brave. He said with anger, "I can't stand on these, they're too long. You go and ask for some shorter ones...."

And thus together we slurred over the fact of that pendulous, nerveless body which had hung from the crutches like an old stocking.

But all the evening he was buried in his own silence, and I suppose he was looking at the vision on the bedrail.

A boy of seventeen was brought in yesterday with pneumonia.

He was so ill that he couldn't speak, and we put screens round his bed. All the other patients in the ward immediately became convalescents.

I helped Sister to wash him, holding him on his side while he groaned with pain; and Sister, no longer cynical, said, "There you are Sonnie, it's almost finished...."

When I rolled back the blanket it gave me a shock to see how young his feet were--clean and thin, with the big toe curling up and the little toes curling back.

"Will you brush my hair?" he managed to say to me, and when I had finished: "This is a pretty ward...."

It isn't, but I am glad it seems so to him.

The boy is at his worst. Whenever we come near him he lifts his eyes and asks, "What are you going to do now?"

But to whatever we do he submits with a terrible docility.

Lying there propped on his pillow, with his small yellow face staring down the ward, he is all the centre of my thoughts; I am preoccupied with the mystery that is in his lungs.

Five days ago he was walking on his legs: five days, and he is on the edge of the world--to-night looking over the edge.

There is no shell, no mark, no tear.... The attack comes from within.

The others in the ward are like phantoms.

When I say to-morrow, "How is the boy?" what will they say?

The sun on the cobwebs lights them as it lights the telephone-wires above. The cocks scream from every garden.

To-day the sky is like a pale egg-shell, and aeroplanes from the two aerodromes are droning round the hill.

I think from time to time, "Is he alive?"

Can one grow used to death? It is unsafe to think of this....

For if death becomes cheap it is the watcher, not the dying, who is poisoned.

His mother buys a cake every day and brings it at tea-time, saying, "For the Sisters' tea...."

It is a bribe, dumbly offered, more to be on the safe side of every bit of chance than because she really believes it can make the slightest difference.

Now that I have time to think of it, her little action hurts me, but yesterday I helped to eat it with pleasure because one is hungry and the margarine not the best.

Aches and pains.... Pains and aches....

I don't know how to get home up the long hill....

Measles....

(Unposted.)

"DEAR SISTER,--Four more days before they will let me out of bed.... Whatever I promise to a patient in future I shall do, if I have to wear a notebook hanging on my belt.

"By which you will see that I am making discoveries!

"The quality of _expectation_ in a person lying horizontally is wrought up to a high pitch. One is always expecting something. Generally it is food; three times a day it is the post; oftener it is the performance of some promise. The things that one asks from one's bed are so small: 'Can you get me a book?' 'Can you move that vase of flowers?' 'When you come up next time could you bring me an envelope?'

"But if one cannot get them life might as well stop.

"The wonder to me is how they stood me!

"I was always cheerful--I thought it a merit; I find instead it is an exasperation.

"I make a hundred reflections since my eyes are too bad to read. I stare at the ceiling, and if a moth comes on it--and just now that happened, or I would not have thought of mentioning it--I watch the pair of them, the moth and its leaping shadow, as they whirl from square to square of the smoke-ripened ceiling. This keeps my thoughts quiet.

"Then in the daytime there is the garden, the dog that crosses the lawn, the gardener talking to himself, the girl who goes to feed the hens....

"I don't say that in any of these things I find a substitute for reading, but since I can't and mayn't read....

"I am thinking, you know, of the beds down the right-hand side of the ward.

"There's Mr. Wicks, now: he has his back to the road with the trams on it.

"Do you see anything in that?

"I do. But then I have the advantage of you; my position is horizontal.

"Mr. Wicks's position is also ... strictly ... horizontal. It seems to me that if he could see those trams, mark Saturdays and Sundays by the increase of passengers, make little games to himself involving the number of persons to get on and off (for the stopping-place is within view: I know, for I looked) it might be possible to draw him back from that apathy which I too, as well as you, was ceasing to notice.

"Mr. Wicks, Sister, not only has his back to the road with trams on it, but for eleven months he has had his eyes on the yellow stone of the wall of the German ward; that is, when they are not on his own bedrail....

"But if his bed were turned round to range alongside the window...? For he is a man with two eyes; not one who can write upon a stone wall with his thoughts.

"And yet ... it would be impossible! There's not a ward in the hospital whose symmetry is so spoilt.

"And that, you know, is a difficulty for you to weigh. How far are you a dictator?

"I have been thinking of my rôle and yours.

"In the long run, however 'capable' I become, my soul should be given to the smoothing of pillows.

"You are barred from so many kinds of sympathy: you must not sympathize over the deficiencies of the hospital, over the food, over the M.O.'s lack of imagination, over the intolerable habits of the man in the next bed; you must not sigh 'I know ...' to any of these plaints.

"Yours is the running of the ward. Yours the isolation of a crowned head.

"One day you said a penetrating thing to me:

"'He's not very ill, but he's feeling wretched. Run along and do the sympathetic V.A.D. touch!'

"For a moment I, just able to do a poultice or a fomentation, resented it.

"But you were right.... One has one's _métier_."

III

"THE BOYS ..."

So now one steps down from chintz covers and lemonade to the Main Army and lemon-water.

And to show how little one has one's eye upon the larger issues, the thing that upset me most on coming into a "Tommies'" ward was the fact that instead of twenty-six lemons twice a day for the making of lemonade I now squeeze two into an old jug and hope for the best about the sugar.

Smiff said to-day, "Give us a drop of lemon, nurse...." And the Sister: "Go on with you! I won't have the new nurse making a pet of you...."

I suppose I'm new to it, and one can't carry on the work that way, but, God knows, the water one can add to a lemon is cheap enough!

Smiff had a flash of temper to-night. He said: "Keepin' me here starin' at green walls this way! Nothing but green, nine blessed months!"

His foot is off, and to-night for the first time the doctor had promised that he should be wheeled into the corridor. But it was forgotten, and I am too new to jog the memory of the gods.

It's a queer place, a "Tommies'" ward. It makes me nervous. I'm not simple enough; they make me shy. I can't think of them like the others do, as "the boys"; they seem to me full-grown men.

I suffer awfully from my language in this ward. I seem to be the only V.A.D. of whom they continually ask, "What's say, nurse?" It isn't that I use long words, but my sentences seem to be inverted.

An opportunity for learning to speak simple Saxon....

"An antitetanic injection for Corrigan," said Sister. And I went to the dispensary to fetch the syringe and the needles.

"But has he any symptoms?" I asked. (In a Tommies' ward one dare ask anything; there isn't that mystery which used to surround the officers' illnesses.)

"Oh no," she said, "it's just that he hasn't had his full amount in France."

So I hunted up the spirit-lamp and we prepared it, talking of it.

But we forgot to talk of it to Corrigan. The needle was into his shoulder before he knew why his shirt was held up.

His wrath came like an avalanche; the discipline of two years was forgotten, his Irish tongue was loosened. Sister shrugged her shoulders and laughed; I listened to him as I cleaned the syringe.

I gathered that it was the indignity that had shocked his sense of individual pride. "Treating me like a cow...." I heard him say to Smiff--who laughed, since it wasn't his shoulder that carried the serum. Smiff laughed: he has been in hospital nine months, and his theory is that a Sister may do anything at any moment; his theory is that nothing does any good--that if you don't fuss you don't get worse.

Corrigan was angry all day; the idea that "a bloomin' woman should come an' shove something into me systim" was too much for him. But he forgets himself: there are no individualists now; his "system" belongs to us.

Sister said, laughing, to Smiff the other day, "Your leg is mine."

"Wrong again; it's the Governmint's!" said Smiff. But Corrigan is Irish and doesn't like that joke.

There are times when my heart fails me; when my eyes, my ears, my tongue, and my understanding fail me; when pain means nothing to me....

In the bus yesterday I came down from London sitting beside a Sister from another ward, who held her hand to her ear and shifted in her seat.

She told me she had earache, and I felt sorry for her.