Vigil in the Night

by A. J. Cronin

  Before delivering sentence, Miss East gave Anne a vitriolic lecture on the imbecility of trusting the integrity of any man, made a few pungent observations on the fallacy that nurses steal the husbands of other women, and finally tempered the worst of the blow by informing Anne that if she pledged herself to secrecy, she would be permitted to resign instead of having to take her leave under the stigma of dismissal.

  There was no possible argument. Anne saw that she must submit. Next morning the astounding news shook the Hepperton that Nurse Lee was resigning on one month’s notice.

  A babble of inquiry at once beset Anne. But she kept silent. Not even to Nora and Glennie could she open her heart. A blight fell upon the happy trio. It became understood that Anne was leaving for family reasons. But that did not satisfy the other two.

  Anne went about, dazed and wretched at this second misfortune which had, through no fault of her own, interrupted her career. She clung for a time to the belief that Bowley might come forward with the truth. But the despicable Matt, for once severely frightened, was determined to lie low. And soon Anne’s last hope died.

  She did not see Dr. Prescott for a full week after the event. Once he passed her in the corridor as though she did not exist.

  But on the following Wednesday she had to take duty in his theatre. After the operation the encounter, which she dreaded, inevitably took place. As she helped him out of his gown in the small anteroom where he washed up, he remarked without looking at her, in that icy voice of which he was particularly a master:

  “I am led to understand that you are removing yourself to other spheres.”

  Her whole being recoiled at his tone. She fought to be equally impersonal. “Yes, sir.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To London, I think. You see—my sister—for family reasons—” She broke off uncertainly, her eyes downcast.

  There was a wealth of satire in his silence. He took the towel she held out to him and began to dry his hands, examining each finger with meticulous attention. Then, like the surgeon he was, he cut straight to the heart of her distress.

  He said frigidly: “I am not particularly concerned with Mrs. Bowley’s fairy-tale. But I have, I understand, to thank you for meddling in my affairs.”

  She bit her lip, hurt beyond endurance at this reference to her unhappy, her pitiful effort to secure Bowley’s support for his clinic.

  Remorselessly he went on. “Your concern is no doubt flattering. But I wish you to understand that I allow no one to interfere in my business. Least of all a nurse.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “No doubt,” he returned with that cool and cutting irony. “But you are no more sorry than I. Your predilection for the dramatic has effectively ruined any chance I ever had of achieving my clinic in Manchester. I have to thank you for a very pretty piece of bungling.”

  She could not speak. Fighting back her tears, she could merely hang her head. There was a pause.

  He still did not look at her. Then he concluded: “I don’t know what your plans are. Indeed, I have no wish to know. But I imagine that, leaving the Hepperton like this, you may have some difficulty in finding an adequate position. I have no wish, in fairness, that your actual nursing service here should pass unrecognized. If you take this letter to the matron of the London Trafalgar Hospital, she will look after you suitably. Good-bye, Nurse Lee.”

  Brokenly she accepted the unsealed envelope he held out to her. He did not offer to shake hands. There was nothing that she could say. And so she turned and, with an agonizing sense of defeat, walked slowly from the room.

  CHAPTER 34

  As she made her way toward Ward C, the theatre sister stopped her.

  “What’s the matter, Lee?” Sister Carr’s question held a natural yet not ill-natured curiosity. “Has Prescott been scolding you?”

  Anne shook her head.

  “Well,” said the Sister, “you look as if he had! He certainly was cross this afternoon. It’s not to be wondered at, either. Say what he likes, he must be pretty cut up about leaving.”

  “Leaving!” exclaimed Anne in a startled voice.

  “Didn’t you know? I had it a couple of hours ago. Heard Prescott and old Sinclair talking before they started operating. Bowley has definitely refused to cough up the money. ‘I’m sick of this obstruction,’ says Prescott to Sinclair. ‘If I live to be a hundred, I shall never get my chance here. I shall carry the fight on to another front.’ ”

  Anne stared at Sister Carr dumbly. She could not yet fully comprehend the motive behind Prescott’s decision to abandon his work in Manchester. Yet vaguely, instinctively, she felt her misguided interference to be at least in part responsible. Without a word she turned and moved blindly away.

  Back in Ward C she sought the privacy of the ward kitchen, and here she found herself gazing at the letter he had given her. Unconsciously she read it. It was a splendid testimonial recommending her for a sister’s post now vacant at the Trafalgar Hospital in London.

  Anne could contain her tortured sensibilities no longer. Feeling that her life was raveled into an inextricable skein, she broke down and sobbed as if her heart would break.

  CHAPTER 35

  A sharp winter day in London. Gray skies overhanging the teeming city, the traffic roaring and surging, buses charging, taxis racing, millions of human beings hurrying. For Anne, setting out from the Trafalgar Hospital to meet Lucy, the huge metropolis had not yet lost its wonder, its potency, its compelling sense of being a battlefield where she, a nursing sister, must play her appointed part.

  Her transference to the Trafalgar was now an accomplished fact. Matron Melville, a tall, aristocratic woman, had been a close friend of Dr. Prescott’s mother. Anne’s acceptance, from the moment when Alice Melville focused her horn-rimmed glasses upon Prescott’s letter, had been a foregone conclusion.

  It was a modern hospital, the Trafalgar, an enormous scientific machine for dealing with the casualties, the sick and the maimed, of the city’s strife. Anne had not yet attuned herself to the beat of the machine, nor fully adjusted herself to her changed environment. Since her heart was set so passionately upon surgery, it was something of a disappointment to find that her ward, the Bolingbroke, was a medical one. Still, her chief, Dr. Verney, was appreciative, her staff willing, and the hurt of her departure from Manchester beginning to heal.

  Nevertheless, as she walked rapidly along Regent Street in the direction of the Black Cat, a quiet tea shop where Lucy had agreed to meet her, Anne’s expression was vaguely troubled. At the sight of her sister a swift light rushed into her face. She hastened forward with eager warmth to embrace her.

  “Well!” exclaimed Anne with a little gasp. “I’m so glad you’re here. I had an awful feeling that you might have to disappoint me again.”

  “It wasn’t my fault last time,” said Lucy, with a faint note of pettishness in her tone. “I simply had to take extra duty at the home.”

  “Of course, my dear,” Anne said soothingly.

  The two girls went into the Black Cat, ordered tea and toast, and took stock of each other across the narrow table.

  Lucy had changed somewhat since those days, not so long ago, when she had queened it over her small suburban domain at Muswell Hill. A shade harder, perhaps, her attitude toward the universe a trifle more defiant. She wore more make-up, and her clothes were decidedly smarter.

  “Have you heard from Joe?” Anne’s first question came tactfully.

  Lucy shook her head, then added, “Oh, I suppose I have—in a kind of way. He keeps asking me to go back to him. Really, Anne, it makes me mad even to think of it. Him, driving a bus, like a common chauffeur, after all we had or might have had. My lovely house and furniture gone, just because of his stupidity. I can’t forgive him. I won’t go back to him. I’m not cut out for marriage—not that kind, anyhow. I prefer to paddle my own canoe. And I’m pretty well off where I am.”

  There was a silence. Though Anne might ha
ve said much in extenuation of Joe, she held her peace. For Lucy, in these last few words, had raised the question that was really troubling her.

  “That’s something I must talk to you about, Lucy.” Anne spoke slowly, diffidently. “I’m sorry, dear, but I don’t—I don’t think you’re at all well off where you are.”

  “Don’t start that again,” said Lucy.

  “But I must, Lucy. I’m not happy about your being in that home. It hasn’t got too good a reputation.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up. Just because the Rolgrave is a private home and not a beastly public institution, you’ve got your knife into it—and me, too. I tell you straight—when Joe let me down, I determined to do the best for myself I could. At the Rolgrave old Ma Sullivan pays her nurses three times the money you get, our uniforms are real silk, the food is marvelous, and we have absolutely classy patients. Why, all this week I’ve been specialing on Irene Dallas, the film star. You’ve heard of her, surely! She’s talking of taking me with her to California. I tell you there’s a fine chance for a nurse at the Rolgrave—in different ways. But what’s the use of talking. You have a grudge against private nursing homes.”

  “That’s not true, Lucy,” Anne answered steadily. “But I have my reasons for hating the Rolgrave.”

  CHAPTER 36

  She broke off, afraid of arousing further antagonism. Yet her very silence gave account of her anxiety. The Rolgrave, a luxury establishment in the heart of Mayfair—a locality from which the home mainly drew its clients—was one of the most notorious homes in London. Mrs. Sullivan, who owned the place, treated her nurses with a kind of prodigal liberality—she could, indeed, have obtained a staff on no other terms—but only the queer fish, the dubious characters, of the profession were to be found there. The home was on the black list, one of those places where shady operations were performed at a price, where wealth could command that kind of surgery forbidden by the law, where neurotics and overstrung women received the sedatives they craved and which an orthodox institution would have denied them. Since Anne had become aware of Lucy’s new post, she lived in perpetual dread of the consequences that might devolve on her sister.

  “Lucy,” she said earnestly, “give up the Rolgrave and come to the Trafalgar. I’ve suggested you for a vacancy there. You remember all the grand things we planned to do together. Now’s our chance, Lucy. We’ve had our ups and downs, both of us, but now we’re in London, in the very heart of things. Last week I went to the offices of the Nurses’ Union, saw the secretary, Miss Gladstone, got heaps of information. We can do things, Lucy, if we work together.”

  Lucy fidgeted with her teaspoon. Gradually her mouth set in a sulky, stubborn line. “I daresay it’s kind of you, Anne,” she said at length. “But I don’t see things as you do. I know you’re out to improve conditions for the nurses. But that’ll happen about two thousand years after we’re both dead. A lot of good it’ll do us. I want to get something out of life. If you go the ordinary way in nursing, you’re on the treadmill all your days. I’ve tried it. On the other hand, if you’re clever, being a nurse helps you to a pretty good time. And, the world being what it is, that seems to me about all that matters.”

  There was a pause. Anne made a last effort. “I don’t want to appear absurd, but I beg of you to give up the Rolgrave.”

  Lucy made an emphatic gesture of negation. “I’m sorry,” she answered stiffly. “But it simply can’t be done.”

  The finality in Lucy’s tone was unmistakable. Anne knew from experience that to press her further would only promote a scene.

  CHAPTER 37

  It was the following day, and Matron Melville had just finished her weekly inspection of the Bolingbroke Ward, which lay, shining and spotless, before her piercing eye. She was pleased. And her glance, traveling sideways toward Anne walking beside her, noted the perfect white uniform, the unblemished cuffs, neat hair, and fine hands of her new sister with genuine approval.

  “You have made an excellent beginning here, Sister,” she said. “I ought to be grateful to Dr. Prescott for sending you to me. By the way, I daresay you haven’t heard of his appointment to St. Martin’s Nerve Hospital.”

  Anne’s heart gave an unexpected leap. But she answered quietly, “I had no idea he was in London.”

  “I fancied you wouldn’t hear.” The matron smiled tolerantly. “But his arrival has created quite a stir, I assure you. He has taken a house in Wimpole Street and is to read a paper on surgery of the cerebellum before the Lister Association next month. Dr. Verney tells me it will be a big thing. I am very glad. I have known Bob Prescott since he was a little boy.”

  Anne was silent. She felt oddly uplifted that Prescott should be in London renewing his assault on the fortress of his ideal, undaunted by Bowley’s defection. She found herself wishing that Miss Melville might continue to speak of him. But the matron, resuming her professional air, returned at once to the business of the ward.

  “I am sorry your sister could not come here, as you suggested,” she said. “However, I have filled the vacancy. Your new nurse will report for duty tomorrow.”

  “Very well, Matron.” Anne could do no more than acquiesce. A faint hope had lingered that she might still persuade Lucy to join her. Failing that, Nora or Glennie might have come to her from the Hepperton. But now, of course, there was nothing to be done.

  All that day as she went about her work her heart was lighter than it had been for days. Despite the coldness of Prescott’s final interview with her, there was some hidden bond, a unity of purpose, of endeavor, that made her wish for his success. It could be nothing else, no stupid sentiment, no sickly manifestation of affection. Of this she was convinced.

  The thought of Prescott gave impetus to her own ideals. That evening, when she went off duty, she hurried to the nurses’ home and slipped a coat over her uniform. Leaving the hospital, she walked rapidly toward Kingsway, where she took a bus to the office of the Nurses’ Union in Museum Square. The office itself was closed, but in the tiny flat above, inhabited by her new friend, Miss Gladstone, the secretary, she found a warm welcome awaiting her.

  “Hello, Lee,” said Miss Gladstone. “I hoped you might drop in. Help yourself to coffee—it’s on the stove. And there’s a bun in that bag, if you feel like eating.”

  Susan Gladstone was a short, gray-haired, untidy woman of nearly sixty, with a worn, humorous, dogged face. A woman who thought nothing of her appearance and less of her comfort, whose entire existence was dedicated to a cause.

  “Take a look at this, Lee,” she continued when Anne had seated herself. And she passed over a copy of the Evening Times with a paragraph marked in blue pencil. “Nice reading for a winter evening.”

  Anne read the paragraph through. It related briefly and unemotionally that an elderly woman named Robertson had taken her own life by gas asphyxiation in a single apartment in Bayswater. At the end was a short line: “The woman, who was apparently destitute, was stated to have been a nurse.”

  “She was a nurse,” said Miss Gladstone quietly as Anne glanced up. “And had been for forty years. I knew her. She applied to the Union for help. We did what we could. It wasn’t enough.”

  “It’s horrible,” said Anne, her eyes wide with distress.

  “Yes, it’s horrible,” said Miss Gladstone somberly. “And it isn’t as if she were the only one. I’ve got a list here of old nurses who have spent their entire lives conscientiously working in the profession and who haven’t got a penny in the world. Through no fault of their own, mind you. Simply because they’ve never had a living wage. When they’re too old and can’t get work—they’re flung on the scrap-heap.”

  “It’s not fair,” said Anne. “It’s not an honest deal.”

  “There are tens of thousands of hardworking women who aren’t getting, and have never had, an honest deal. I could show you letters, written by nurses all over the country, letters of protest and entreaty, plain evidence in black and white, of victimization. It makes my
blood boil! We’re not properly organized, Lee. We ought to have a strong trade union.”

  “We need more than that,” Anne said. “We need public opinion behind us. If only the people of this country could be stirred up, shown the abuses in the nursing profession, we’d get things put right.”

  Susan Gladstone made a vigorous gesture of approval.

  CHAPTER 38

  Surely the time’s ripe for reform,” Anne went on slowly. “Workers in other jobs are getting better conditions, an eight-hour day, holidays with pay. Why should the poor nurses be left out? Their work is as hard, and far more dangerous, than most jobs. Why shouldn’t they get a decent wage?”

  “Why not,” echoed Miss Gladstone bitterly. “It’s just superstition, a kind of hoodoo, the Florence Nightingale tradition that has been a ball and chain on us for years. This lady-bountiful, pillow-patting, nursing-for-sweet-charity idea! Let me tell you, most of the sweet-charity stuff I’ve come across has been damned bad nursing.” Miss Gladstone blew her nose loudly. “If only we could start a big campaign, shake up the people. After all, they are the ones who benefit by our work. Damn it all, in this very paper that reports the suicide of poor old Robertson there’s an appeal for nurses to go down to South Wales to help in the epidemic of cerebro-spinal fever that’s just broken out. Oh, blast! I hate to get emotional like this. You’d hardly think it possible after all these years.” She smiled suddenly. “Anyhow, I’m glad you’ve seen me at my worst. I’d like you to come in on this game, Lee. You’re so handy at the Trafalgar, you could put in a lot of work with me in your off time. All voluntary, of course. We haven’t got a bean. But it would give you the chance to shift a few mountains.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Anne said quietly. “Even if I only move some molehills.”