Twenty-two began to learn things about the hospital. For instance, the day nurse, while changing his pillow slips, would observe that Nineteen was going to be operated on that day, and close her lips over further information. But when the afternoon relief, while giving him his toothbrush after lunch, said there was a most interesting gall-stone case in nineteen, and the night nurse, in reply to a direct question, told Nineteen's name, but nothing else, Twenty-two had a fair working knowledge of the day's events.
He seemed to learn about everything but Jane Brown. He knew when a new baby came, and was even given a glimpse of one, showing, he considered, about the colour and general contour of a maraschino cherry. And he learned soon that the god of the hospital is the Staff, although worship did not blind the nurses to their weaknesses. Thus the older men, who had been trained before the day of asepsis and modern methods, were revered but carefully watched. They would get out of scrubbing their hands whenever they could, and they hated their beards tied up with gauze. The nurses, keen, competent and kindly, but shrewd, too, looked after these elderly recalcitrants; loved a few, hated some, and presented to the world unbroken ranks for their defence.
Twenty-two learned also the story of the First Assistant, who was in love with one of the Staff, who was married, and did not care for her anyhow. So she wore tight shoes, and was always beautifully waved, and read Browning.
She had a way of coming in and saying brightly, as if to reassure herself:
"Good morning, Twenty-two. Well, God is still in His heaven, and all's well with the world."
Twenty-two got to feeling awfully uncomfortable about her. She used to bring him flowers and sit down a moment to rest her feet, which generally stung. And she would stop in the middle of a sentence and look into space, but always with a determined smile.
He felt awfully uncomfortable. She was so neat and so efficient—and so tragic. He tried to imagine being hopelessly in love, and trying to live on husks of Browning. Not even Mrs. Browning.
The mind is a curious thing. Suddenly, from thinking of Mrs. Browning, he thought of N. Jane Brown. Of course not by that ridiculous name. He had learned that she was stationed on that floor. And in the same flash he saw the Senior Surgical Interne swanking about in white ducks and just the object for a probationer to fall in love with. He lay there, and pulled the beginning of the new moustache, and reflected. The First Assistant was pinning a spray of hyacinth in her cap.
"Look here," he said. "Why can't I be put in a wheeled chair and get about? One that I can manipulate myself," he added craftily.
She demurred. Indeed, everybody demurred when he put it up to them. But he had gone through the world to the age of twenty-four, getting his own way about ninety-seven per cent. of the time. He got it this time, consisting of a new cast, which he named Elizabeth, and a roller-chair, and he spent a full day learning how to steer himself around.
Then, on the afternoon of the third day, rolling back toward the elevator and the terra incognita which lay beyond, he saw a sign. He stared at it blankly, because it interfered considerably with a plan he had in mind. The sign was of tin, and it said:
"No private patients allowed beyond here."
Twenty-two sat in his chair and stared at it. The plaster cast stretched out in front of him, and was covered by a grey blanket. With the exception of the trifling formality of trousers, he was well dressed in a sack coat, a shirt, waistcoat, and a sort of college-boy collar and tie, which one of the orderlies had purchased for him. His other things were in that extremely expensive English car which the city was storing.
The plain truth is that Twenty-two was looking for Jane Brown. Since she had not come to him, he must go to her. He particularly wanted to set her right as to Mabel. And he felt, too, that that trick about respirations had not been entirely fair.
He was, of course, not in the slightest degree in love with her. He had only seen her once, and then he had had a broken leg and a quarter grain of morphia and a burned moustache and no eyebrows left to speak of.
But there was the sign. It was hung to a nail beside the elevator shaft. And far beyond, down the corridor, was somebody in a blue dress and no cap. It might be anybody, but again——
Twenty-two looked around. The elevator had just gone down at its usual rate of a mile every two hours. In the convalescent parlour, where private patients en negligée complained about the hospital food, the nurse in charge was making a new cap. Over all the hospital brooded an after-luncheon peace.
Twenty-two wheeled up under the sign and considered his average of ninety-seven per cent. Followed in sequence these events: (a) Twenty-two wheeled back to the parlour, where old Mr. Simond's cane leaned against a table, and, while engaging that gentleman in conversation, possessed himself of the cane. (b) Wheeled back to the elevator. (c) Drew cane from beneath blanket. (d) Unhooked sign with cane and concealed both under blanket. (e) Worked his way back along the forbidden territory, past I and J until he came to H ward.
Jane Brown was in H ward.
She was alone, and looking very professional. There is nothing quite so professional as a new nurse. She had, indeed, reached a point where, if she took a pulse three times, she got somewhat similar results. There had been a time when they had run something like this: 56—80—120——
Jane Brown was taking pulses. It was a visiting day, and all the beds had fresh white spreads, tucked in neatly at the foot. In the exact middle of the centre table with its red cloth, was a vase of yellow tulips. The sun came in and turned them to golden flame.
Jane Brown was on duty alone and taking pulses with one eye while she watched the visitors with the other. She did the watching better than she did the pulses. For instance, she was distinctly aware that Stanislas Krzykolski's wife, in the bed next the end, had just slid a half-dozen greasy cakes, sprinkled with sugar, under his pillow. She knew, however, that not only grease but love was in those cakes, and she did not intend to confiscate them until after Mrs. Krzykolski had gone.
More visitors came. Shuffling and self-conscious mill-workers, walking on their toes; draggled women; a Chinese boy; a girl with a rouged face and a too confident manner. A hum of conversation hung over the long room. The sunlight came in and turned to glory, not only the tulips and the red tablecloth, but also the brass basins, the fireplace fender, and the Probationer's hair.
Twenty-two sat unnoticed in the doorway. A young girl, very lame, with a mandolin, had just entered the ward. In the little stir of her arrival, Twenty-two had time to see that Jane Brown was worth even all the trouble he had taken, and more. Really, to see Jane Brown properly, she should have always been seen in the sun. She was that sort.
The lame girl sat down in the centre of the ward, and the buzz died away. She was not pretty, and she was very nervous. Twenty-two frowned a trifle.
"Poor devils," he said to himself. But Jane Brown put away her hunting-case watch, and the lame girl swept the ward with soft eyes that had in them a pity that was almost a benediction.
Then she sang. Her voice was like her eyes, very sweet and rather frightened, but tender. And suddenly something a little hard and selfish in Twenty-two began to be horribly ashamed of itself. And, for no earthly reason in the world, he began to feel like a cumberer of the earth. Before she had finished the first song, he was thinking that perhaps when he was getting about again, he might run over to France for a few months in the ambulance service. A fellow really ought to do his bit.
At just about that point Jane Brown turned and saw him. And although he had run all these risks to get to her, and even then had an extremely cold tin sign lying on his knee under the blanket, at first she did not know him. The shock of this was almost too much for him. In all sorts of places people were glad to see him, especially women. He was astonished, but it was good for him.
She recognised him almost immediately, however, and flushed a little, because she knew he had no business there. She was awfully bound up with rules.
"I came back on
purpose to see you," said Twenty-two, when at last the lame girl had limped away. "Because, that day I came in and you looked after me, you know, I—must have talked a lot of nonsense."
"Morphia makes some people talk," she said. It was said in an exact copy of the ward nurse's voice, a frightfully professional and impersonal tone.
"But," said Twenty-two, stirring uneasily, "I said a lot that wasn't true. You may have forgotten, but I haven't. Now that about a girl named Mabel, for instance——"
He stirred again, because, after all, what did it matter what he had said? She was gazing over the ward. She was not interested in him. She had almost forgotten him. And as he stirred Mr. Simond's cane fell out. It was immediately followed by the tin sign, which only gradually subsided, face up, on the bare floor, in a slowly diminishing series of crashes.
Jane Brown stooped and picked them both up and placed them on his lap. Then, very stern, she marched out of the ward into the corridor, and there subsided into quiet hysterics of mirth. Twenty-two, who hated to be laughed at, followed her in the chair, looking extremely annoyed.
"What else was I to do?" he demanded, after a time. "Of course, if you report it, I'm gone."
"What do you intend to do with it now?" she asked. All her professional manner had gone, and she looked alarmingly young.
"If I put it back, I'll only have to steal it again. Because I am absolutely bored to death in that room of mine. I have played a thousand games of solitaire."
The Probationer looked around. There was no one in sight.
"I should think," she suggested, "that if you slipped it behind that radiator, no one would ever know about it."
Fortunately, the ambulance gong set up a clamour below the window just then, and no one heard one of the hospital's most cherished rules going, as one may say, into the discard.
The Probationer leaned her nose against the window and looked down. A coloured man was being carried in on a stretcher. Although she did not know it—indeed, never did know it—the coloured gentleman in question was one Augustus Baird.
Soon afterward Twenty-two squeaked—his chair needed oiling—squeaked back to his lonely room and took stock. He found that he was rid of Mabel, but was still a reporter, hurt in doing his duty. He had let this go because he saw that duty was a sort of fetish with the Probationer. And since just now she liked him for what she thought he was, why not wait to tell her until she liked him for himself?
He hoped she was going to like him, because she was going to see him a lot. Also, he liked her even better than he had remembered that he did. She had a sort of thoroughbred look that he liked. And he liked the way her hair was soft and straight and shiny. And he liked the way she was all business and no nonsense. And the way she counted pulses, with her lips moving and a little frown between her eyebrows. And he liked her for being herself—which is, after all, the reason why most men like the women they like, and extremely reasonable.
The First Assistant loaned him Browning that afternoon, and he read "Pippa Passes." He thought Pippa must have looked like the Probationer.
The Head was a bit querulous that evening. The Heads of Training Schools get that way now and then, although they generally reveal it only to the First Assistant. They have to do so many irreconcilable things, such as keeping down expenses while keeping up requisitions, and remembering the different sorts of sutures the Staff likes, and receiving the Ladies' Committee, and conducting prayers and lectures, and knowing by a swift survey of a ward that the stands have been carbolised and all the toe-nails cut. Because it is amazing the way toe-nails grow in bed.
The Head would probably never have come out flatly, but she had a wretched cold, and the First Assistant was giving her a mustard footbath, which was very hot. The Head sat up with a blanket over her shoulders, and read lists while her feet took on the blush of ripe apples. And at last she said:
"How is that Probationer with the ridiculous name getting along?"
The First Assistant poured in more hot water.
"N. Jane?" she asked. "Well, she's a nice little thing, and she seems willing. But, of course——"
The Head groaned.
"Nineteen!" she said. "And no character at all. I detest fluttery people. She flutters the moment I go into the ward."
The First Assistant sat back and felt of her cap, which was of starched tulle and was softening a bit from the steam. She felt a thrill of pity for the Probationer. She, too, had once felt fluttery when the Head came in.
"She is very anxious to stay," she observed. "She works hard, too. I——"
"She has no personality, no decision," said the Head, and sneezed twice. She was really very wretched, and so she was unfair. "She is pretty and sweet. But I cannot run my training school on prettiness and sweetness. Has Doctor Harvard come in yet?"
"I—I think not," said the First Assistant. She looked up quickly, but the Head was squeezing a lemon in a cup of hot water beside her.
Now, while the Head was having a footbath, and Twenty-two was having a stock-taking, and Augustus Baird was having his symptoms recorded, Jane Brown was having a shock.
She heard an unmistakable shuffling of feet in the corridor.
Sounds take on much significance in a hospital, and probationers study them, especially footsteps. It gives them a moment sometimes to think what to do next.
Internes, for instance, frequently wear rubber soles on their white shoes and have a way of slipping up on one. And the engineer goes on a half run, generally accompanied by the clanking of a tool or two. And the elevator man runs, too, because generally the bell is ringing. And ward patients shuffle about in carpet slippers, and the pharmacy clerk has a brisk young step, inclined to be jaunty.
But it is the Staff which is always unmistakable. It comes along the corridor deliberately, inexorably. It plants its feet firmly and with authority. It moves with the inevitability of fate, with the pride of royalty, with the ease of the best made-to-order boots. The ring of a Staff member's heel on a hospital corridor is the most authoritative sound on earth. He may be the gentlest soul in the world, but he will tread like royalty.
But this was not Staff. Jane Brown knew this sound, and it filled her with terror. It was the scuffling of four pairs of feet, carefully instructed not to keep step. It meant, in other words, a stretcher. But perhaps it was not coming to her. Ah, but it was!
Panic seized Jane Brown. She knew there were certain things to do, but they went out of her mind like a cat out of a cellar window. However, the ward was watching. It had itself, generally speaking, come in feet first. It knew the procedure. So, instructed by low voices from the beds around, Jane Brown feverishly tore the spread off the emergency bed and drew it somewhat apart from its fellows. Then she stood back and waited.
Came in four officers from the police patrol. Came in the Senior Surgical Interne. Came two convalescents from the next ward to stare in at the door. Came the stretcher, containing a quiet figure under a grey blanket.
Twenty-two, at that exact moment, was putting a queen on a ten spot and pretending there is nothing wrong about cheating oneself.
In a very short time the quiet figure was on the bed, and the Senior Surgical Interne was writing in the order book: "Prepare for operation."
Jane Brown read it over his shoulder, which is not etiquette.
"But—I can't," she quavered. "I don't know how. I won't touch him. He's—he's bloody!"
Then she took another look at the bed and she saw—Johnny Fraser.
Now Johnny had, in his small way, played a part in the Probationer's life, such as occasionally scrubbing porches or borrowing a half dollar or being suspected of stealing the eggs from the henhouse. But that Johnny Fraser had been a wicked, smiling imp, much given to sitting in the sun.
Here lay another Johnny Fraser, a quiet one, who might never again feel the warm earth through his worthless clothes on his worthless young body. A Johnny of closed eyes and slow, noisy breathing.
"Why, Johnny!" said the
Probationer, in a strangled voice.
The Senior Surgical Interne was interested.
"Know him?" he said.
"He is a boy from home." She was still staring at this quiet, un-impudent figure.
The Senior Surgical Interne eyed her with an eye that was only partially professional. Then he went to the medicine closet and poured a bit of aromatic ammonia into a glass.
"Sit down and drink this," he said, in a very masculine voice. He liked to feel that he could do something for her. Indeed, there was something almost proprietary in the way he took her pulse.
Some time after the early hospital supper that evening Twenty-two, having oiled his chair with some olive oil from his tray, made a clandestine trip through the twilight of the corridor back of the elevator shaft. To avoid scandal he pretended interest in other wards, but he gravitated, as a needle to the pole, to H. And there he found the Probationer, looking rather strained, and mothering a quiet figure on a bed.
He was a trifle puzzled at her distress, for she made no secret of Johnny's status in the community. What he did not grasp was that Johnny Fraser was a link between this new and rather terrible world of the hospital and home. It was not Johnny alone, it was Johnny scrubbing a home porch and doing it badly, it was Johnny in her father's old clothes, it was Johnny fishing for catfish in the creek, or lending his pole to one of the little brothers whose pictures were on her table in the dormitory.
Twenty-two felt a certain depression. He reflected rather grimly that he had been ten days missing and that no one had apparently given a hang whether he turned up or not.
"Is he going to live?" he inquired. He could see that the ward nurse had an eye on him, and was preparing for retreat.
"O yes," said Jane Brown. "I think so now. The interne says they have had a message from Doctor Willie. He is coming." There was a beautiful confidence in her tone.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 418
