by Helen Wells
Mai Lee’s little ivory face was demure with mischief as she handed Cherry twin swans-down powder puffs. Marie Swift had brought two red velvet bows for Cherry’s hair. When, last of all, Vivian stepped up to the bed, Cherry felt a real thrill. Vivian—giving for perhaps the first time in her life! Her face had lost its hardness, and pride showed there instead, as she pressed two gay, inexpensive, colored glass roosters into Cherry’s hand. “They’re fighting cocks,” Vivian tried to joke. “You and I, I guess.”
“I guess not!” Cherry said warmly and hugged her.
“I nearly forgot,” Ann said. “This is from Winky.” It was a wobbly but unmistakable water color picture of a black-haired, red-cheeked girl in a blue and white striped dress.
“What a birthday!” Cherry said over and over. And they all sat down on the floor and ate cake before breakfast.
That evening, Christmas Eve, their class assembled in the basement. It was pitch black down there, and the voices of older nurses and internes floated down to them teasingly. Upstairs the patients waited expectantly for the traditional Candle Walk. In the dark they groped their way into one long single file. Each girl was dressed in her freshest uniform and apron, and each girl carried in her hand a single tall white candle. Then the Superintendent of Nurses, a lighted taper in her hand, came down the stairs. Slowly, smiling, she went down the long row of young women, lighting each candle, and faces sprang into view.
Upstairs in the darkened hospital, the procession wove its way, singing. The gleaming candles, the fresh young faces in the long lighted line, the clear sweet voices, went from ward to ward. They sang old Christmas songs, a hymn or two, and all the ringing carols. Cherry sang with the rest, looking into the flame of her candle as if it were the very heart or Christmas. The ceremony was like a dedication, Cherry thought, in which that long line of her classmates, ahead and behind her, brought light into the dark where the sick and suffering lay. The patients’ worn faces smiled back at them out of the flickering shadows.
When the last ward had been visited, when the last carol had been sung, one by one the candles were snuffed out. The girls found their way home arm-in-arm through the cold starry night. Cherry looked at the great white hospital under the stars of this holy night and thought:
“Now I really know the hospital spirit! Why it’s the same thing as Christmas—Christmas all year round!”
CHAPTER X
Four A.M. Mystery
WHERE THE TIME WENT, CHERRY NEVER COULD FIGURE out. The world outside froze blankly white and stayed that way. Cherry stayed on Women’s Orthopedic during January, where day melted into busy day, and squeezed in jaunts to town with Ann and Gwen between studying. Classes had stepped up—there were lectures and visits to the wards in medical and surgical clinics and the hilarious bandage class, where the girls took turns winding each other in yards and yards of gauze. Cherry earned her bandage scissors, and admired them hanging so professionally at her belt. Cherry felt much surer of herself now and had a good firm grip on her work. When she moved from Bone Deformities to Women’s Surgical at the beginning of February, she went onto the new ward without a tremor. And she did very good work there.
Milestones stood out here and there in that whizzing stream of days. There was the dance the internes gave for the nurses on Washington’s Birthday. Jim Clayton pointed to the decorations, and said, “Looks like it’s your personal party, Cherry.” And Cherry, clutching a papiermâché axe, said, “I cannot tell a lie. It isn’t.” But it was a very good party—mostly, Cherry thought, because she danced so many dances with Jim Clayton.
Then there was Charlie’s letter. Cherry had a shock as she read it late one night as she soaked herself luxuriously in a hot tub. Charlie wrote he was leaving the university to study flying. He hoped, eventually, to join the Army Air Force. Women too, he wrote, could join the Army Air Force. His letter was full of strange words like “ferrying” and “bomber command” and “B–17’s” and “P–38’s” and “logistics.” Those words made Charlie seem very grown-up, rather far away, in a strange new world of his own choosing. “Well,” Cherry thought, “I’m following my dream and now he’s going to follow his. It would be funny if some day the Ames twins were to bump into each other professionally as nurse and flier.” But her own work kept her so busy she had no time to wonder. Before she knew it, it was March and she had slid smoothly out of Women’s Surgical and into Out-Patient.
Out-Patient was fun. This was the free clinic where hordes of people streamed in daily for care “on the spot.” It made Cherry think of her lively days on Emergency Ward. She was learning about medicine, but she was also learning about people. Cherry picked up enough pidgin Italian to soothe a worried little dark-eyed mother, she persuaded a crotchety old man to walk without his habitual crutch, she calmed a terrified Jewish woman who was sure she was dying because the doctor had prescribed a dreaded medicine called castor oil. And still they came, more and more faces, till she came to know Mr. O’Sullivan, who came back to the clinic because he liked the friendly nurses, not because he had anything wrong with him. And the strange, lonely woman, who, they later discovered, tore off her fresh bandages at home so that her hand would not heal and she would be entitled to more attention. And the babies who sprouted like beans from week to week.
“It’s like a perpetual vaudeville show,” Cherry told Ann and Gwen, “with an all-star cast!” They were in the pint-size laundry rinsing out their stockings.
Gwen nodded. “I’m getting a taste of it on Emergency Ward, and do I love it! The only thing is—how are they ever going to keep me down on a ward after I’ve seen The Big Show?”
Ann shook out her stockings in exasperation. “Everyone gets a ticket but me. I get the dullest assignments!” She was on Men’s Surgical again, with the icy Miss Craig for head nurse. They had been short a nurse there.
“You’ve had night duty,” Cherry reminded her. “My tongue’s hanging out for that.”
“Well, put your tongue right back in. The only exciting thing that happened to me on night duty was falling asleep and letting the six A.M. toast burn to a crisp. You could have smelled it way over here.”
“Oh, we did,” Gwen assured her. “But maybe Cherry will draw chills and thrills when she gets night duty.”
“It would be just her marvelous luck,” Ann agreed.
Cherry bowed but she saw no night duty in sight. It came, however, not suddenly, but in easy tantalizing stages. The first mild day, when the calendar announced April, and they opened the doors of Out-Patient and a whiff of spring blew in, Cherry received her notice to move on to Men’s Orthopedic.
Cherry had something new on Men’s Orthopedic—relief duty for three evenings, while the rest of the week was devoted to regular day duty. Previously her eight-hour shift had been from seven A.M. to three P.M. Now she came on at three in the afternoon until eleven at night, then the night nurse took over. The night nurse remained, alone, until seven the following morning. Cherry would have night duty after a week or so of relief duty.
“It’s supposed to prepare you for staying up all night, so they say,” Cherry explained to Ann and Gwen, “but all it does to me is whet my appetite for dinner.”
As relief duty nurse, she settled the patients for sleep and stayed with them through the quiet evening, preparing the night order book or folding bandages, until the night nurse came in, full of authority and making Cherry a bit jealous. The night world of the hospital provoked Cherry’s imagination—the patients asleep in the shadowy white beds and deep silence the lone nurse moving with her flashlight like a sentinel, vague figures of house doctors and supervisors floating all the long night throughout the closely guarded hospital.
Something happened one evening that gave Cherry a turn and made her thoughtful. About ten o’clock, when the ward was sleeping peacefully, moans came from a far bed. Cherry located the man—he was an ether case.
“I’m in terrible pain!” he panted. “Please, nurse … help me! Give me somet
hing!” He lay rigid with agony.
Cherry looked down at the man’s chart. The doctor had ordered morphine if needed. But he had had his quotient that afternoon. Cherry called the supervisor, who in turn called the interne. It was young Dr. Freeman, a quiet, steady, plain-faced man.
“We need something else,” Dr. Freeman said. “I don’t want to give him another shot of this. Wish there were something else I could give him. But what?”
He and Cherry stood looking down at the sweating man, unable to help him. That hurt Cherry down to the core. What else was there? And then Cherry happened to think of Dr. Joe’s new drug, stored away in the laboratory downstairs. She told Dr. Freeman about it.
“But we can’t use it, it hasn’t been approved yet. More morphine won’t do this man any good.” The patient moaned dully. Dr. Freeman took a deep breath. “All right, Miss Ames, give him another sixth of morphine,” he said reluctantly.
Cherry administered it. But before she went off duty, she had to report to Dr. Freeman that it had not helped much or for very long. Something else was needed. “Why don’t they make up their minds on Dr. Joe’s drug?” she thought angrily as she ran through the cold, early spring rain to the Nurses’ Residence.
That, and the fact that tonight was her first night duty, troubled her so much the next afternoon that she sought out Dr. Jim Clayton. Actually, Cherry was proud to be entrusted with night duty so early in her training. She found him in the library, and they went out to the deserted reception room and sat down in the window seat to talk. A little timid sunshine deepened the rose of Cherry’s cheeks and picked out laughing golden lights in Jim Clayton’s brown eyes.
“I don’t know why I always come running to you with my troubles,” she confessed, “but—–”
“Maybe it’s because you like me.” He looked at her intently. “I hope so.” Cherry was flustered for a moment because her heart beat so hard. “Well, go ahead, shoot. What’s on the Ames mind today?”
Cherry told him what had happened the previous night. Jim Clayton nodded. Then she went on to tell him about Dr. Joe’s discovery, how it could be used as a local anaesthetic to take the place of a drug. “Think what it would mean for soldiers!” Cherry said. “In a way, Dr. Joe discovered it because of the war.” She explained that when the quinine supply was cut off, because the areas where quinine is grown had fallen into enemy hands, many researchers had set about looking for a quinine substitute—Dr. Joe among them. Like some others, he had found one, but more important, his substitute had a by-product. And it was in this by-product that he had stumbled across a revolutionary drug. “It’s so new it hasn’t even a name yet,” Cherry said, “except for a long-drawn-out formula.” She wrinkled her nose trying to recite it.
Dr. Jim Clayton whistled. “Pretty learned, you are. But no joking, it’s wonderful. You look like a pretty girl and you talk like a professor.”
“Stop teasing! Be serious.”
“I am serious. You are pretty, you know. Told Miss Baker so. Go ask her if I didn’t.”
“What’s got into you today?” Cherry demanded, and her dark eyes opened wide and wondering.
“Dunno. Maybe I’m in love.” He looked at her with a face bubbling with laughter. “Miss Ames, do you think I’m in love?”
She was startled. This was more than she was prepared for. “I—I think I’ll go ask Miss Baker if you are.” She ran off breathless and dimpling.
When Cherry reached the door of Marjory Baker’s ward, she stood for a moment in the doorway watching the young golden-haired head nurse, moving gracefully from bed to bed. “If I were a man,” Cherry thought, “I’d be in love with her.”
But she had her own romantic worries. She caught Miss Baker alone at her desk. They chatted a little of this and that, then Cherry skillfully steered the conversation to the subject of Jim Clayton. She asked, as offhand as possible:
“I wonder if he really likes me? He’s so sweet to me, and bucks me up when I get discouraged—do you think he—–”
“Of course he likes you,” Miss Baker smiled back. “He wouldn’t go to all that trouble if he didn’t. By the way, I heard about Sally Chase.”
“Oh!” But Miss Baker was laughing about Sally Chase and treating her as if she were a child. Cherry thought of Jim Clayton’s intent eyes and dropped another hint. “He told me he’s in love.”
Miss Baker looked strange. Then she looked at Cherry understandingly and squeezed her hand. “I’m not surprised,” she whispered.
Cherry ran out of the ward as if all the bells in the world were ringing just for her. She floated, not walked, down the corridor, quite unaware of where she was going, when a firm hand seized her wrist.
“You look as if you’ve just won the sweepstakes,” laughed Miss McIntyre.
“I’m going on night duty tonight for the first time and that’s nearly as exciting,” Cherry replied. She noticed that Miss McIntyre looked quite excited herself.
“I’ve just seen something absolutely amazing.”
Cherry kept pace with Miss Mac’s free sports-woman’s stride. She had a hard time paying attention to Miss Mac’s conversation, with all those imaginary bells pealing, until one word. Then it dawned on her that Miss Mac was talking about Dr. Joe’s drug, not about the new probies who had just arrived.
“—a staff demonstration just now,” she was saying. “And it works! The chemical laboratory has tested it. They’ve tried it out on white rats, and it worked beautifully on three patients who volunteered.”
“Then we can use it right away!” Cherry said eagerly.
“No, not until it has been accepted by the Medical Board. To use it before would be a breach of medical ethics. But it’s a shame there’s so much medical red tape,” Miss McIntyre said forthrightly. “The Board doesn’t meet again until July and this is only April. Seems too bad, doesn’t it? But there it is.”
Yes, there it was. Cherry might fret and other anaesthetics be inferior but there lay Dr. Joe’s drug unused.
Cherry thought about it, and about Dr. Jim, that first long night she was alone as night nurse, in sole responsibility for a heavy ward full of helpless people. The sweet cool April air filled the darkened ward, and the shadows lay thick and still, as Cherry made the rounds of beds. Only the glow of the lamp on the head nurse’s desk—her desk for the night—and the stab of light from her flashlight, focused for a moment on a face, showed her a dim world asleep here. The supervisor looked in so seldom and the corridors beyond were so hushed that Cherry thought eerily, “It feels like being on another planet.” But she was not frightened, and to her surprise, she had no struggle to keep awake. Cherry sat down at her desk and filled out the night report and then folded gauze sponges.
At midnight a relief nurse came in. She told Cherry she would be available to help out on any ward that might be very busy at night. Cherry felt reassured to know this nurse was near by. Cherry politely walked her to the door and chatted with her for a few minutes.
When Cherry turned back into the ward, the moon had tilted and spilled great splashes of blue-white light on the floor. Again she moved softly from bed to bed, sure-footed, deft-handed, a white guardian. The same man for whom Dr. Freeman had prescribed morphine could not sleep tonight, He was in pain, he murmured, and Cherry saw his dim, drawn face on the pillow. Dr. Freeman had forbidden any more morphine. There was nothing she could give him, and she thought angrily of Dr. Joe’s unused drug.
“I’ll get you a glass of milk,” she said helplessly. She went out to the tiny kitchen, and found it strange in night magic. After the man had drunk the milk, Cherry softly talked to him, telling any stories that came into her head, until he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. She stood over his bed, shaking her head and wondering why the Medical Board could not meet sooner.
The night wore on. Cherry thought of all the desperate things that were supposed to happen to a lone nurse on night duty—patients getting delirious or trying to escape, sudden heart attacks, hemorrhages. “Don�
��t believe in bogies,” Jim Clayton had said to her once. She smiled, almost seeing his face smiling down at her. Well, she very nearly wished something exciting would happen. The supervisor looked in. That was the only break in the routine for several hours. Cherry began to feel drowsy, so she walked around the ward to keep awake. At four the ward began to get chilly and Cherry slipped into her woolly white sweater. Outside on the black lawn, a bird called, then went back to sleep. “He saw his mistake, I guess,” Cherry thought. Three more hours to go. Three more hours of sleeping silence. It was a long night.
Cherry was indulging herself in thoughts of Jim Clayton when she heard the elevator—the self-service elevator, curiously—and muffled voices in the hall. Who could be there at this hour? If they were sending her an emergency case, why had not Emergency Ward phoned up to tell her to get a bed ready? She sprang up from her desk and hurried to the door. This was very strange.
Someone was being brought in on a stretcher. Alongside the two orderlies marched two men in business suits and, recognizable even in these dense shadows, Dr. Wylie! Perhaps they were going to the private pavilion, which was around the corner. No, they were coming here. No, they weren’t either. Cherry was mystified to see the motley procession stop in the corridor and wait for somebody or something. The elevator came up again and a man in an unidentifiable uniform whispered to Dr. Wylie. She saw Dr. Wylie glance at her sharply. The men discussed something in low voices, looking at her.
Cherry could not understand what was going on. Perhaps they did not want her to see them and she started to move away discreetly. But Dr. Wylie called, “Nurse! Miss Ames, isn’t it? Wait there.”
The next thing that happened puzzled her even more. Dr. Wylie went to the door marked “Broom Closet,” took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door. Instead of the cleaning closet Cherry had always assumed was there, the door swung open to reveal in the moonlight a fully equipped hospital room with a bed, and a bathroom beyond. She stood rooted to the spot in amazement.
