Part 5

It all seems too ridiculous to be true, but yet the facts are here set down as they actually occurred.

We think there are a good many women about the world of the type of the spinster and her sisters, and we are also convinced that it would be quite impossible to succeed in impressing upon such minds even the most rudimentary notions of nursing; yet it is likely enough they may all have been granted certificates eventually. Professionals are dreadfully bored in dealing with amateurs, and are often glad to take the shortest road to deliverance.

We were once witness, in pre-war days, of the examination of a Red Cross class in the north of England. There was a weary doctor on the platform with a bag of bones; and a retired hospital nurse, very anxious to be on good terms with the delightful family who were the chief organizers of the movement, had charge of the “show.”

The doctor gave a brief address upon dislocation. It ran somewhat in this fashion.

“Dislocation is the misplacement of a joint. It is indicated by the symptoms of swelling, redness, pain, and inability to move the limb. There is no crepitation as in a fracture. As to treatment: my advice to you, ladies, when you meet a case of this kind, is--ahem--to leave it severely alone and to send for a medical man.”

The class took copious notes. The doctor dropped the two bones with which he had been demonstrating into the bag again, leant back in his chair and closed his eyes. His part of the transaction was concluded. It had been most illuminating, the ladies agreed, and the Signorina’s chauffeur, who has a yearning towards general self-improvement, remarked to her on the way home:

“Ow”--like the boy scout, he has a theatrically cockney accent--“I am glad to know what to do for discollation. I’d never studied that, loike, before.”

While the doctor leant back and rested, the hospital nurse examined each student privately on the subject of the previous instructions. The Signorina happened to be quite close to a little old lady with bonnet and strings, and a small, eager, withered, agitated face under bands of frizzled grey hair--the kind of little old lady who is always ready to respond to the call of duty, and who is in the van of knitters for “our dear, brave soldiers” or “our gallant tars.”

“What,” said the hospital nurse tenderly, “would you do for a bed-sore?”

The little old lady began to twitter and flutter:

“I would first wash the place with warm water, and--oh, dear me, dear me, I _did_ know, I knew quite well a minute ago--with, with something to disinfect.”

“It is something to disinfect, quite right,” approved the nurse.

“A salt, I think--I’m sure it was. I could get it at the chemist----”

“Certainly,” said the nurse, as if she were speaking to a child of two years old, “the chemist would be sure to keep it. It’s quite a simple thing. But you would have to know what to ask for, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, dear me, yes. P--p-- or did it begin with an I?”

“Perchloride of mercury,” said the nurse, smothering a yawn.

“Oh yes,” cried the little old lady, delighted, “that’s it.”

“Well, now you know it, don’t you,” said the nurse brightly, wrote “Passed” in her notebook, and turned to the next.

“How much liquid nourishment would you give a typhoid patient at a time?”

This to a village girl, who looked blank, not to say terrified, and wrung her hands in her lap.

“I mean,” helped the questioner, “if the patient were put on milk--a milk diet, very usual in typhoid cases--how much milk would you give at a time?”

The girl’s face lit up.

“Two quarts, miss,” she said with alacrity.

“Not at a time, I think,” corrected the examiner, quite unruffled. “Two quarts, perhaps, in the twenty-four hours, if you could get the patient to take it--that would be splendid. Typhoid is a very weakening malady. It’s a good thing to keep the strength up--if you _can_, you know.”

The Signorina heard this optimist make her report a little later to the charming daughter of the charming family, who had herself studied to good purpose, but was too modest to undertake the instructions.

“They’ve all answered beautifully. Look at my notebook----”

It was “Passed,” “Passed,” to every name.

“That _is_ good,” said the gratified organizer. “We _have_ done well to-day.”

* * * * *

No doubt one occasionally comes across odd specimens even among professionals. Certainly, during a long illness with which the Signora was afflicted a couple of years ago, three of the five nurses who succeeded each other in attendance upon her cannot be said to have lightened the burthen.

The first, sent for at eleven o’clock at night, distinguished herself by instantly upsetting a basin of hot water into the patient’s bed. As she repeated the process next night, and greeted the accident with shrieks of laughter, it could scarcely be regarded as the exceptional breach which proves the rule of excellence.

The Signora, who was not supposed to be moved at all, has, fortunately, the sense of humour which helps one along the troublesome way of life, in sickness as in health. She laughed too. The nurse, who was an Irishwoman, immediately thought herself rather a wag. She was a little, vivacious creature, ugly, but bright-eyed. She was extremely talkative, and perhaps the most callous person the Signora has ever come across. It is our experience that all nurses are talkative. If the patient wants to make life endurable at all, the talk must be guided into the least disagreeable channels.

The Signora’s dread is the tale of operations--“of practice in the theatre,” which one of the nurses of her youth told her she considered “an agreeable little change.”--This particular Dorcas’s favourite topic was deathbeds. The patient was quite aware that the supreme experience was a not at all impossible event for herself in the near future, so she had a certain personal interest in the matter. Anyhow, she permitted the discourse.

She heard at full length the narration of Nurse MacDermott’s first deathbed in private nursing. It was a horrible anecdote, which might have formed a chapter in a realistic novel. “A gentleman at Wimbledon it was,” evidently of the well-to-do merchant class, and he seemed, poor man! to have been the unhappy father of a family as cold-blooded and heartless as the wife in Tolstoi’s painful story of death. But here there was no one to care, not even a poor servant lad--not even the nurse whose vocation it was to help him through the final agony. She arrived at ten o’clock, and at eleven the doctor warned the family that the patient would not pass the night. Thereupon everyone--the wife, two daughters, and a son--retired to bed, and left the dying man in charge of the newly arrived attendant, who sat down to watch, reading a novel. About two o’clock the moribund began to make painful efforts to speak.

“Charlie, Charlie,” he kept saying.

“Ah, the poor fellow!” said the little nurse, as she recounted the story, “he had a son who was a scapegrace, it seems, off away somewhere, and he wanted to send him a message. I ran and called the wife out of her bed--what do you think? She’d put her hair in crimpers! Upon my word, she had; they were bristling all round the head of her. Well, I didn’t want to have him die on me while I was out of the room, so I rushed back. And he made signs to me. The power of speech was gone from him. He wanted to write. I had a bit of pencil, but there wasn’t a scrap of paper that I could see, so there was nothing I could give him but the fly-leaf of the book I was reading; and ah! the poor fellow, it was only scrawls he could make after all. And sure, he was dead before his wife came in. And she just gave one look at him, and, ‘I’m going back to bed,’ says she, and back to bed she went. But it was the hair-curlers that did for me. I never can forget them.”

She was sitting at the end of the Signora’s bed, and doubled herself up with laughter as she spoke. We have no doubt but that she went back to her novel, scrawled with the dying father’s last futile effort.

We never knew anyone quite so frankly unmoved by the awful scenes it was her trade to witness. She found vast amusement in the wanderings of delirious patients. Whenever she wanted to cheer the other nurses up, she informed us, in the Home where they dwelt together, she could always make them laugh with little anecdotes from the typhoid ward; and the “wanderings” from the different beds.

She tried to cheer the Signora up on these lines; and the Signora, on wakeful nights, has to force her mind away from the “humorous” memories. She infinitely preferred the story of Nurse McDermott’s love affairs. Like many ugly people, the young woman believed herself irresistible, and paid a great deal of attention to the conservation of her charms. Once, having settled her patient for the night, she reappeared unexpectedly _en robe de chambre_.

“I have just come to tell you how many creams I have put on myself,” she cried to the bewildered lady. “I know it will amuse you! There’s the pomade for my hair, and Valaze for my face, and the lanoline for my neck. I do hate the mark of the collar--for evening dress, you know--it gives one away so! And there’s the salve for my lips, and the cold cream for my hands, and the polish for my nails----”

She went away in a hurry to a bad case at Liphurst, jubilating because we were paying her journey, and she would get it out of the other lady also, and the doctor had offered to send her in his car.

Of quite another type was Nurse Vischet. No one could say that she was unaffected by her patient’s symptoms. They had the power of flinging her into frenzy. Capable enough when things were going fairly well with her charge, the first shadow of a change for the worse produced in her what can only be described as fury. Her face would become convulsed, her eyes would flame, she would knock the furniture about as she moved, and could barely restrain herself from insulting the sufferer.

At first the Signora, who was very ill and weaker than it is possible to describe, could not at all understand these outbursts. “What can have annoyed Nurse?” she would wonder feebly to herself. But presently she understood. It was really a mixed terror of, and repulsion from, the sight of suffering. Why such a woman should have become a nurse, and how she could continue in the service of the sick, feeling as she did, remains a mystery. The key to her extraordinary behaviour was given one day by a little dog, who happened to be seized with a very common or garden fit of choking through the nose; such as affects little dogs with slight colds in their heads. Nurse Vischet started screaming.

“He’s all right,” said the Signora. “He only wants his nose rubbed. Carry him over to me if you won’t do it yourself.”

“Ugh!” shrieked Nurse Vischet. “I think it’s dying. I wouldn’t touch it for the world!”

One of the symptoms of the human patient’s illness were agonizing headaches, during which she could scarcely bear a ray of light in the room. In spite of frequent requests, Nurse Vischet always seized the occasion to turn the ceiling electric light full on the bed, and when at last forbidden to do so, she declined to enter a room in which she could not see her way. The Signora gave her the name of her “ministering devil.” She was a rabid Socialist, and had peculiar theories, one of which we remember was that condemned criminals should be handed over to the laboratories for vivisection.

She had also to an acute degree the hospital nurse’s capacity for upsetting the household. Our butler, a hot-tempered man, happened to drop a stray “damn” in the hearing of the under-housemaid, and Vischet, hanging on the landing over the kitchen regions, as she was fond of doing, overheard the dread word. The whole establishment was turned upside down. Maggie was told that she “owed it to her womanhood” not to allow foul language in her presence. Maggie gave notice, but being, after all, an Irish girl with a sense of humour, was as easily soothed down as she had been worked up. Certainly, however, if we had kept Nurse Vischet, we should have lost, one by one, our excellent staff of servants. Besides playing on their feelings against each other, she had a horrible trick of telling them they were at the last gasp upon the smallest ailment. She did not like her patient to have symptoms; but she encouraged the domestics to fly to her with theirs.

Irish Maggie had an indigestion. Vischet declared her condition to be of extreme gravity. She rushed to the Signora with her tale. Maggie was ordered to bed. Vischet produced an immense tin of antiphlogistine with which to arrest “the mischief.”

The daughter of the house went up to visit the sick girl, and came down laughing to console her mother.

“You needn’t worry about Maggie,” she said, and gave a pleasant little description of the scene and the invalid’s remarks.

“Ah, sure I’m all right, miss. It’s all along of a bit of green apple. Sure, Mrs. MacComfort has just given me a drop of ginger, and it’s done me a lot of good already. Do you see what Nurse is after bringing me? God bless us all, wouldn’t I rather die itself than be spreading that putty on me! I’ll be up for tea, miss.”

“She looks as rosy as possible,” went on the comforter, “and ever so nice with her hair in a great thick plait tied with ribbons, grass green, for Ireland.”

Through one recollection Vischet will always remain endeared to the mind of her victim; and that was for her singular pronunciation. There was a story to which the Signora was fond of leading up relating to por-poises, (pronounced to rhyme with noises), and another connected with a tor-toise, which happened to be the pet of a recent “case.” There was also a little tale of a dog: “I was out walking on the embankment,” said Vischet, “and I saw a man coming along leading two dogs--one was a great bulldog, and the other was one of those queer creatures you call a dashun” (the Signora prides herself on her intelligence for instantly discovering that the narrator meant a dachshund). “And there was running about loose the queerest animal ever I saw,” went on the nurse; “it had the head of a bulldog and the legs of a dashun.”

The third nurse was very different. The daughter of an officer, who was seeking the most genteel way to make her living, she frankly handed over the chief of the attendance to the Signora’s own devoted maid; which, on the Signora becoming aware of her incapacity, she was on the whole glad that she should do. Nurse Fraser was a tall, handsome girl, who was fond of sitting on the sofa at the foot of the patient’s bed, her hands clasped round her knees, staring into space. She was by no means unamiable, but she was bored; and the Signora, who rather liked her, was not averse to screening her deficiencies. When the doctor inquired after the temperature that had never been taken, she herself would declare it had been normal; and she was amused when Nurse Fraser would next vouch for a “splendid breakfast.” She not having appeared in her patient’s room till noon.

She made no attempt to conceal her complete inefficiency in the treatment of the case.

“Oh, _do_ tell me what I’m to do,” she had cried on arrival to the district nurse who had come in as a stopgap. “I’m sure if I ever knew anything about the illness I’ve quite forgotten.”

One day--she, too, was garrulous--she informed her patient that her mother had shares in Kentish Mines. “If ever they work out, we may get a lot of money, and then,” she cried, quite unconscious of offence, “no more beastly sick people for me!”

She left us in tears. She had enjoyed herself very much.

It would seem as if our experience had been unfortunate, and yet it is not so; for surely to have known two perfect nurses one after another is sufficient to re-establish the balance. Chief of these, first and dearest, was Nurse Dove. She was the district nurse, called in, as we have said, in a moment of emergency. How Miss Nightingale would have loved her! Blessed little creature, it was enough to restore anybody’s heart to see her come into the sick-room, quiet, capable, tender, her eyes shining with compassion for the sufferer and eagerness to relieve. She was as gentle as she was skilful: to anyone who did not know her it would be impossible to convey the extent of the virtue contained in this phrase. The Signora would have placed herself, or, what means a great deal more, her nearest and dearest, with the completest confidence in her hands alone, in any dangerous illness.

Among the poor she was an apostle. It seemed to have been her fate that, during her brief stay in our village, several young mothers found themselves in mortal extremity. She never lost a life. We think now with longing of what she would have been among the wounded. Alas! we were not destined to keep such perfection with us. It was Cupid, not death, that robbed us of this treasure--if Cupid, indeed, it can be called, the dingy, doubtful imp that took her away from her wonderful work among us. Alas! charming, devoted, exquisite being as she was, she had a very human side. We fear there was a touch of “pike,” as the old gardener had it, in the business, but in spite of all our efforts a “coloured gentleman,” an invalid to boot, a shifty elderly fellow with an Oriental glibness of tongue, carried her off away with him back to India. She has since written to us describing her palatial abode on the borders of a lake with a horde of servants and a private steam-launch, but we strongly suspect that if the pen was the pen of Nurse Dove, the words were the words of the coloured gentleman.

The individual was a Baboo, a clerk in the Madras Post Office, and had already been invalided out of the service before he left England. We cannot believe that the pension of an underling in the Indian Civil Service runs to these Rajah-like splendours. Moreover, there was a tragic little postcard, sent to a humble friend, which did not at all correspond with the highflown letter above-mentioned: “The world is a very sad place; we must all be prepared for disappointments.”

There is one thing quite certain--wherever she goes she will be doing good.

Curiously enough, the second perfect nurse resembled her in dark pallor of skin, splendour of raven tresses, and thoughtful brilliance of brown eyes; but she was younger and more timid. She will want a few more years of experience and self-reliance before she can develop into a Nurse Dove.

But nevertheless, resembling her in countenance, she had the same deep womanly heart for her patients. Suffering in their sufferings, she would spare no pains to relieve them. And she had the touch of imaginative genius and the courage to act on her own responsibility which made her presence in a house of sickness a comfort and a strength. In fact, the life was to her a vocation. She nursed to help others, not herself. She had not grown callous through the sight of agonies, only more urgent to be of use.

God send many such to our men in their need to-day!

IV

“CONSIDER THE LILIES”

“For the first time the Lamb shall be dyed red....”

_Brother Johannes’ Prophecy._

“Consider the lilies, how they grow....”

The sad thing is that with us they decline to grow. When we bought the small, high-perched house and grounds on the Surrey hills there is no doubt that the thought of lilies in those terraced gardens was no unimportant part of the programme. Oddly, the little house had from the first an Italian look, which we have not been slow to cultivate.

Now we were haunted by a picture of an Italian garden: a pergola--vine-covered, it was--with two serried ranks of Madonna lilies growing inside the arches; flagged as to pathway, with probably fragrant tufts of mint and thyme between the stones. In the land of its conception this vision of shadowy green and exquisite white, cool yet shining, as if snow-fashioned, must have given upon some stretch of quivering, heat-baked country.

Without being able to provide such an antithesis, the garden-plotter--she means the dreadful quip--otherwise the mistress of the English Villino, with a vivid and charming picture in her mind’s eye, fondly imaged a very effective outlook upon the great shouldering moors that rise startlingly across the narrow valley at the bottom of her garden. But the lilies refused to grow.

She tried them in border after border. She set clumps of Auratums under the dining-room between the heliotrope and the Nicotianas, which swing such gushes of fragrance into the little house all the hot summer days. She got monster bulbs of Madonnas from the first specialist in the kingdom, and put them singly between the red and white roses against the upper terrace wall. She ran amok upon luscious spotted darlings; Pardelinum and Monadelphum, Polyphyllum and Parryi, and had them placed in a cool, shady walk against a background of delphiniums. She thrust Harrisi under the drawing-room bow; and the glorious scarlet-trumpeted Thunbergianum where they would flame in the middle distance. They showed many varied forms of disapproval, but were unanimous in declining to remain with us. Some were a little more polite than the others. The great trumpets blew fiercely for one season, almost as with a sound of glorious brass, in their dim nook; and a single exquisite, perfect stem of Krameri rose intact amid a dying sisterhood, and swayed, delicately proud, faintly flushed, a very princess among flowers, one long, golden September fortnight. But such meteors only make our persistent gloom, where lilies are concerned, the more signal.

The pergola had to go the way of so many cherished dreams. Yet there is an exception. With just an occasional threat of disease, there is one border favoured by the tiger-lily. She is not a very choice creature, of course; she has neither the fragrance nor the mystic grace of her cousins; but such as she is, she is welcome in our midst. On our third terrace there is a stretch of turf, curved outwards like a half-moon, against a new yew hedge: we call it the Hemicycle. In spring it is a jocund pleasaunce for crocus and scylla and flowering trees--almond, _Pyrus floribunda_, and peach; in summer the weeping standards hold the field, set between the pots of climbing geraniums. That is on the outward curve. A rough wall, overhung with Dorothy Perkins, clothed from the base with Rêve d’Or, runs straightly on the inner side. It is in the border underneath this wall that the tiger-ladies condescend to us.

Last year, by a somewhat accidental development of seeds, we had a marvellous post-impressionist effect along the line, for all the stocks there planted, between the Tigrinum, turned out to be purple and mauve. They grew tall, with immense heads of bloom: drawn up by the wall, we think. Over the orange and violet row the Dorothy Perkins showered masses of vivid pink. A narrow ribbon of bright pale yellow violas ran between the border and the turf. To connect this mass of startling colour, an intermediate regiment of lavender-bushes and the cream hues of the Rêve d’Or roses against their grey-green foliage acted very successfully. It is not a scheme that one would perhaps have tried deliberately, but we could not regret it. It does one good sometimes to steep the senses in such a fine tangle of elementary colour. The shock is bracing, as of a sea wave; like the march of a military band, we could enjoy it, in the open air and sunshine, just where it was placed; away from the house, with its distant background of fir-trees and moors.