by Helen Wells
Turning her back recklessly on her sleeping ward, she ran to the door of Room 3 and tried it. It was locked. She had expected that. Then she slipped noiselessly out to the fire stairs. In the dim light she found the door she had guessed must be there. The knob turned easily in her hand, and the door opened.
Cherry found herself in a conventional hospital room. Women’s clothes were strewn around it. Miss Hall’s room, she thought, and pushed hastily through the bathroom. In the room beyond, she stopped, staring.
In the half-light was the strangest hospital room she had ever seen. The bed, table, chairs and bureau were conventional enough. But the windows had been veiled with an extra pair of thick draperies, tightly shut and stirring a little from the open window. On the walls were large maps, with thumbtacks of different colors stuck in them. They were not ordinary maps. There was a telephone, and Cherry saw it had an outside wire. What was going on in here? Cherry started as her eye fell on a curious small machine. She knew from Charlie’s military manual what it was—a short-wave radio which received messages in code. A pair of earphones lay beside it, a crammed brief case, and beside that, a revolver.
Cherry started to back away in fear. This was a secret which was too dangerous to know.
Just then, the big figure in the bed moaned and cried out loudly, “Tell Kendall not to delay the action! Tell Kendall we can’t hold here much longer! Tell Kendall—” He fell back, delirious.
Suddenly it was all clear to Cherry. The man was a soldier. An American—an ally? His voice had a curious intonation but it was so weak Cherry could not be sure of his nationality. An important commander, a man who led whole armies, from the looks of the room. Helpless, ill, and here he was all alone! Cherry sprang to the bed. Next to his side, a dressing was wet with blood. She took his temperature, pulse, and respiration. They were raging. She knew now what she must do. Rules or no rules. Let her get expelled. It was more important to save this military leader.
“I’ll be right back,” she whispered to the delirious man. “I’ll bring help.” She did not know whether he understood her or not. His face—he was about fifty—was strongly boned and the flesh drawn taut with illness. Under heavy sick lids, his eyes were like an eagle’s. The broad, bony shoulders and the great frame seemed to dwarf the hospital bed. It was strange to see such a powerful man helpless. “I’ll get help!” Cherry repeated, and this time he nodded a little.
Back out the way she came, Cherry ran to find the relief nurse. She was knitting peacefully in the nurses’ sitting room.
“You’ve got to take my ward, you’ve got to, please!” Cherry begged.
“I suppose you’re ready now!” the other girl sniffed. “But perhaps I’m not ready to relieve you.”
“I’ll pay you back with any favor you want!” Cherry pleaded. “Please——”
“Oh, all right,” the other girl said grudgingly. She came back to the ward with Cherry. Cherry took a quick glance. Nothing untoward seemed to have happened in the few minutes she was away.
“Will you stay here until I get back?” Cherry asked gravely. “Believe me, it’s a real emergency or I wouldn’t bother you. You won’t leave the ward alone, will you?”
“Well, I must say this is all awfully strange. I won’t promise to stay. I’m not assigned here.” Cherry left the other nurse, hoping she could get back soon, hoping the relief nurse would stay. Cherry could not be sure … And the ward must not be left alone, she thought, as she rang central operator again.
“Will you try Dr. Wylie’s office once more?” Cherry could hear the operator ringing. No one replied. “Has anyone—a Miss Hall—left a message?” There was a moment’s silence and then the operator said no. “Dr. Clayton, then, please.” Cherry took a deep breath.
“Jim! You’ve got to come! It’s a matter of life and death for more than just one man! It’s the most important thing that ever happened to this hospital!”
“Why, Cherry, you sound almost hysterical. What is——”
“I’m not hysterical. It’s the truth, I’m telling you! You’ve got to come!”
There was a moment’s pause and then Dr. Clayton said doubtfully, “All right, I’ll be right up.”
“Hurry!” Cherry jiggled the hook. “Operator. Please ring Dr. Wylie’s home again and tell him or leave word that Miss Ames needs him at once. Urgently. Yes, that’s it. Thanks.”
Well, now she’d done all she could to keep within the rules. If only Miss Hall would come back. But Miss Hall would have a long search, at this hour of the night, to find a hospital laboratory or a commercial laboratory open and one that had exactly the drug or serum she needed. Miss Hall probably was scouring the city. “She’s a brave woman,” Cherry thought.
And here was Jim Clayton, striding out of the self-service elevator into the shadowy corridor. Cherry had never been so glad to see anyone in her life. She rushed toward him, motioning him to be quiet.
“What is all this?” he demanded softly. But his face was serious and he followed Cherry obediently as she led him quickly out to the fire stairs. They entered the dim suite and Cherry led Dr. Clayton into the forbidden room.
His eyes widened as Cherry’s had, as he saw the mute evidences of the maps, the code radio, the gun. He turned to her, questions in his face. She whispered quickly all the little information she had, and swore him to secrecy. “That’s a very sick man,” Jim Clayton muttered back, and went forward to the bed.
He examined the mysterious patient quickly and frowned. “The suture has broken. There’s an internal hemorrhage. He needs an operation at once. If he does not bleed to death, the displacement of the adjoining organ may be fatal. I don’t like this!” He looked up at Cherry, deeply troubled.
“What—what is it you don’t like? she whispered back.
“The whole thing—I shouldn’t know this secret—I have no authority to operate—but most of all, I don’t like this man’s condition! And as if that weren’t enough—” For a moment he covered his face with his hand.
“What is it?” Cherry whispered tensely.
“To operate—immediately—we’d need a local anaesthetic. This is one of those rare and special cases where we can’t use novocaine, or anything similar. Have to use something else—though I don’t know what would do the trick, unless it is one of those new Russian anaesthetics. I understand Dr. Ketchum over at City Hospital has got some of them. By George! That’s obviously where his nurse has gone! She’s gone to Ketchum. Without the right thing, we can’t operate. And if we delay operating——”
“Give him ether?” Cherry whispered. “Spinal anaesthetic?”
Jim Clayton shook his head. “No, this is a special kind of case.”
The curtains stirred, like a sigh. The man on the bed moaned deliriously. Cherry turned cold. There was so much at stake in this secret room. Victory itself, perhaps.
“What a responsibility!” Jim Clayton said desperately.
Cherry whirled to him and gripped his arm. Her fingers bit into his flesh like steel in her excitement. “We have a drug! We have it! Why didn’t I think of it before!” She reminded him about Dr. Joe’s drug, lying unused down there in the laboratory. Unused, she thought ironically, when it was needed most!
“But it hasn’t been accepted,” Dr. Clayton whispered back worriedly.
“It’s been tested—it works—” She waited, looking at him.
“It’s this man’s only chance,” the young doctor admitted slowly.
Just then they heard the fire stairs door open. Footsteps groped through the darkened rooms. Then they saw Dr. Wylie standing authoritatively in the doorway. Cherry was so relieved to see the surgeon that she forgot to be afraid.
“How is he?” Dr. Wylie demanded, and strode directly to the bed. “Miss Ames! What’s happened? Where’s Miss Hall?”
Cherry told him what she knew. Dr. Wylie sized up the man’s critical condition in a glance. Cherry knew what he was thinking. She ventured to tell him about Dr. Joe’s drug, downsta
irs for the taking.
Dr. Wylie bit his lip. “That drug has been tested on three volunteers and I know it works. But it has not yet been officially accepted, so technically that drug’s an unknown quantity. If I were to use it, unsanctioned as it is, I would be committing a breach of medical ethics. And there is one chance in a hundred that it would mean taking a chance with his life.”
“It works, I know it works!” Cherry pleaded. “It’s been tested most carefully! The Board surely must approve it when they meet in July! I know the man who discovered and developed it! Oh, Dr. Wylie, don’t you remember the successful demonstration—” Cherry put into her voice all her belief in Dr. Joe.
Dr. Wylie glanced at young Dr. Clayton, and looked back at the patient. He shut his eyes tightly for a moment, then said, “You’re right, Miss Ames. It’s questionable procedure but we’ll have to do it. Miss Ames, go get that drug. We can’t move him. Bring me O.R. equipment. Be sure your hands are clean.” He handed her the keys. “Clayton, you’ll have to assist me. I don’t want anyone else to know and as long as you know already—” His voice faded as Cherry dashed out.
She shook all the time her flashlight picked out the precious vial in the darkened laboratory. She shook as she raced into the operating room, spread a sterile sheet on a wheeled table, with a sterile forceps picked up and flung on it everything she thought Dr. Wylie would need, covered the O.R. equipment with another sterile sheet and raced upstairs with it. She had never even seen an operation and here she was about to assist at one! Well, Dr. Wylie would tell her what she must do. She prayed that in her ignorance, she would not make some fatal mistake.
What happened next was like a nightmare. Everything went so fast, everything was so difficult and strange to Cherry. She felt as if she were running at top speed through a trance of scrubbing the bathroom, scrubbing herself for an endless twenty minutes, setting up an emergency table. “Sterile! Sterile!” she kept muttering to herself dully. She saw—or did she dream it?—the surgeon preparing the patient, giving him a blood transfusion. The next thing she knew someone had turned on a cloaked but powerful lamp. Within that narrow blaze of light, Cherry briefly moved, remaking the bed with sterile sheets, helping the two men into sterile gowns, gloves, masks.
Suddenly, just as he was about to start, Dr. Wylie lifted his eyes to their faces. “Do you know who this man is?” he said sternly. “He is General—” And he spoke a name which Cherry and Jim heard with the profoundest respect, one of the greatest names of their time. He had been wounded and had been flown to the United States.
Half-hypnotized by Dr. Wylie’s tense whispered orders, Cherry acted as anaesthetist. Jim Clayton was hovering somewhere beside him. Out of hurry and urgency and the blinding circle of light, one thing stood out firm and solid for Cherry. She saw Dr. Wylie administer Dr. Joe’s drug! At last it was being used, and by a great surgeon! Would it hold? Would it work? Tookie the cat, drugged, floated before her eyes. The patient stirred and spoke. Dr. Wylie’s voice came and went out of the shadow behind the brilliant lamp. Time melted.
“Eighty-four, pulse weak,” she heard her own voice say.
“All right, Clayton. Incision.”
Jim’s gloved hands came within Cherry’s range of vision, moved, withdrew.
“Scalpel, Miss Ames.”
The patient murmured something. The surgeon’s hands, light and quick as butterflies, lifted tiny delicate living parts.
“Clamp.”
Jim Clayton moved forward, receded again into the dense gloom. They worked in breathless silence. For how long, Cherry did not know. The surgeon’s terse commands, a pause, a reassuring word to the patient, a rustle—that was all. Cherry did not understand all she saw, knew she would not understand until as a senior she would work in the O.R.’s
Finally Dr. Wylie stepped back with a heavy sigh. His eyes above the gauze mask drooped with exhaustion.
“All right, Clayton. Finish up.” The young doctor carefully closed the incision and bandaged it.
It was all over. The patient was all right. The drug had held.
They went into the next room, leaving the patient to rest. They were just stripping off their gloves and masks when a strange woman burst in, and behind her, the three mysterious men Cherry had seen that first night.
“You’re here, sir!” the woman said in relief. She was a tall middle-aged woman, stern-faced, and under her coat Cherry saw a nurse’s white dress. Miss Hall. She fumbled in her bag, distressed, and held out a vial to Dr. Wylie. “I knew you’d need this—it may not be right but it’s the best thing there is. I tried all over the city to find Dr. Ketchum and couldn’t. Then my taxi stalled on the express highway and I was frantic.” She looked anxiously at the surgeon. “Forgive me for leaving the patient, sir. I shouldn’t have—but I couldn’t reach you—I couldn’t reach anyone—I couldn’t tell anyone! I couldn’t stand by and let him die! There was nothing else I could do!” The three men behind her were anxious beyond speech.
Dr. Wylie nodded. “You did the right thing, Miss Hall. I got your message—also Miss Ames’s. We won’t need this now,” he indicated the vial. “I’ve operated. He’s all right.”
A sigh went up from all the newcomers.
Then the man in the unknown uniform said sharply, “Who are these two? What right have they in here?”
Through the open door came the General’s voice, very weak. “The little girl—she saved my life.”
Everyone looked at Cherry and she had an idiotic impulse to say, “Who, me?” Yes, he really did mean her. Cherry Ames. She was frightened, a little, under all those examining eyes, and stepped closer to Jim Clayton. He took her hand comfortingly. They smiled at each other. They had been through a good deal together this night.
“This student nurse had no right to come in here,” Dr. Wylie said. Cherry, tired as she was, felt a wave of fury. She turned on Dr. Wylie and for the first time in the long history of her feud with the surgeon, she fought back.
“If I hadn’t broken your orders, the General would be dead by now!” she cried at him. “And you can’t blame Dr. Clayton, either!”
Dr. Wylie shut his mouth tightly and looked down at the floor. Two of the men whispered. Then to Cherry’s surprise, Dr. Wylie said in a chastened voice, “You’re quite right, Miss Ames. You did save his life.” He added stiffly, “I beg your pardon.” He turned his back. “You two may go now.”
But barring the door was the man in uniform. He looked at them gravely. “Under no circumstances are you to tell anyone the General is here!” Then he looked deep into their eyes and said with the greatest emphasis, “Should his army know he is temporarily not in command, it would do their courage no good. Should the enemy know this, it would be the signal for an attack.” He paused. “Now do you understand?”
Shaken, Cherry and Jim Clayton said, “Yes.” Then they were permitted to leave. The door closed, the lock clicked, and they knew they would never enter that forbidden room again.
They stood for a moment in the fire hall, utterly exhausted. “It’s half past three,” Jim Clayton said irrelevantly.
Only then did Cherry remember. “My ward!” Had the reluctant relief nurse stayed? What had been happening on the ward? She pushed open the heavy door frantically, and ran out.
There in the hall was the floor supervisor, very angry. She was waiting for her and pounced on Cherry as she came through the door.
“The relief nurse reported you,” the floor supervisor whispered sharply. Reported her! What a rotten thing to do! “Why did you go off and leave your ward? What sort of nurse are you?”
“But I left a nurse in charge—I—” Cherry leaned tiredly against the wall. She wondered herself what sort of nurse she was. Jim Clayton stood near by, uncertain, unable to help her.
Cherry looked at the supervisor. “A great deal went wrong,” she said earnestly. She was heartsick that she could not explain. “I can’t tell you about it but Dr. Wylie can.”
“Dr. Wylie,” th
e floor supervisor exclaimed unbelievingly. She looked Cherry up and down.
“Return to your ward, Miss Ames. Dr. Wylie indeed! I only hope he backs you up!”
Aching with fatigue and nervous let-down, too tired even to worry any more, Cherry went back into the sleeping ward. It seemed a year since she had been in here. She dragged herself from bed to bed with her flashlight. Everyone was sleeping quietly. She wondered numbly how she could stay awake until seven in the morning.
A rustle at the door caught her attention. She was shocked at what she saw. Apparently this night’s excitement was not over yet! And yet in a way, she had to smile, they looked so right together. Jim Clayton and Marjory Baker were clasped in each other’s arms.
They came toward Cherry, half-guilty and smiling. “Well, now you know our secret,” Marjory Baker whispered, “and I’m glad you’re the first to know, because you’re——”
“Some hour for romance, huh?” Jim said. “Would you have thought——”
“I was on duty tonight and phoned Jim and he was off his ward for two hours—well, I was worried, so I came up here,” Marjory Baker explained.
“Cherry, do you give us your blessing?” Jim laughed. And Cherry most emphatically did.
They both talked at once. They looked so happy, they were so obviously and deeply in love, that Cherry wondered how she could have missed seeing the truth. It was a happy truth, too. “They’re perfect together,” Cherry thought as she watched them disappear into the shadows of the corridor. There went her romance. But it was all right, Cherry thought happily. Her two favorite people in the hospital—it was perfect. Reeling as she was with fatigue, Cherry realized she was not really in love with Jim—or with anybody. She was in love with nursing.
“And maybe it’s going to be an unrequited love,” she thought wearily as she wrote in the order book and wondered what Dr. Wylie would say for her tomorrow. Right now, she was just too tired to worry. She had done her best—and if it had been wrong, then she just was not meant to be a nurse. The gnawing self-doubts crept back but she pushed them away. That would be decided for her, tomorrow. She was too tired to think any more.
