Vigil in the Night

by A. J. Cronin

  There were perhaps twenty children in the ward. Several of them were at the stage of recovery. The others, though acutely ill, were progressing favorably and were expected to recover. But there was an exception—one child was mortally ill. Dr. Forrest had expressed the opinion that she could not live beyond the week.

  It was not unduly depressing for a ward sister to have one dangerous case in twenty. It was, considering the severity of the epidemic, a cheerful percentage. Yet Lucy, for some queer reason, was not content. Her brow was anxious, her demeanor reserved, all her energy bent, it seemed, upon that one child.

  So marked was this, Anne could not fail to notice it. And today, just four weeks after Lucy’s promotion, as Anne came into the ward, she had to pause at the unexpectedness of what she saw. Lucy was sponging the child gently and systematically in an effort to reduce her temperature. There was nothing unusual in this routine procedure. The wonder was that Lucy, as ward sister, should, with two nurses available in the ward, be doing it herself.

  Unobserved, beside the screens, Anne studied Lucy’s actions. The more she gazed, the more she became convinced of a great tenderness, a deep and secret motive, behind everything that Lucy did. The child was a little girl of four years, the only daughter of a decent couple in the town. The father spent most of his day walking up and down outside the hospital, waiting for news of his little Gracie.

  Certainly, despite the ravages of the fever, Gracie Hedley was a sweet child. Even now her fine-spun golden hair clustered in ringlets on the pillow. And as Anne looked at the unconscious Gracie, a chord of recollection vibrated in her memory. How and why she could not tell—yet, nevertheless, there was some strange resemblance between this dying child and the little boy who had died at Shereford of diphtheria.

  In a flash Anne saw it all. Lucy, touched by this resemblance, too, was fighting a hopeless battle for this other life.

  A troubled line drew between Anne’s brows. She dreaded instinctively the psychological effect, the disappointment, of inevitable failure on Lucy’s part. As she watched, too, she felt that Lucy was holding the child nearer her than was needful, exposing herself heedlessly to that infection against which all the nurses had been warned to take precautions.

  The next day came, and the next. Then it was Saturday. The weekend passed. And Gracie Hedley still breathed, still swung by her slender thread of life. On Tuesday morning Dr. Forrest spent a long time with the still unconscious girl. He declared that should Gracie survive the crisis of the next twenty-four hours, she would positively recover. He added gruffly that, in his opinion, the crisis would prove fatal.

  CHAPTER 56

  Twenty-four hours! Eyes on the clock, Lucy summoned up the last of her reserves. The seconds slowly ticked away, the minutes dragged along. Somehow the day went on. Lucy had barely been out of the ward for twelve hours. Nevertheless, immune to all Anne’s remonstrances, she determined to spend the night there, too.

  And so, when darkness fell and the lamps were lit, Lucy settled herself to watch beside the cot. She had no sense of tiredness. She felt light, impervious to fatigue, filled by a predestined force that nothing could impair.

  All that day Gracie had seemed to be holding her own. But now, as the shadows deepened, it seemed as though the last remnants of her feeble strength were leaving her. She began to breathe with a faint stertor, and her temperature suddenly shot up. And worst of all, her head, pulled back by spasm, was locked between her thin shoulder blades.

  Lucy’s eyes never left the dying child’s face. Through all her ministrations her own gaze remained fixed upon those poor sightless, squinting eyes. She held the limp hand in hers. It was as though she poured some fierce, implacable current into that emaciated little frame.

  About two o’clock in the morning Gracie’s breathing began to fail. And her pulse, under Lucy’s finger, flickered and was almost still. Lucy’s face went deathly pale. Was she to fail, at the eleventh hour, after all that she had done? She bent forward frantically and, lifting the limp form of the child, pressed her mouth against the almost lifeless lips. Desperately she inflated the collapsed chest with her own breath. Then she started swiftly the movements of artificial respiration.

  How long she continued she did not know. But there came a moment when she stopped. The child was breathing again, softly but regularly. Beads of perspiration had broken on her brow.

  With shaking fingers Lucy fumbled for her thermometer. She could scarcely take the reading. But when she did, she almost cried aloud. The fever had broken. Quickly she reached for the feeding pipette, dropped a few drachms of peptone solution on Gracie’s tongue. Her heart gave a great bound when she saw the child swallowing naturally. The breathing strengthened, as did the pulse. The temperature fell another degree. More nourishment, taken more easily. And then, as the first streaks of dawn filtered through the blinds, Gracie’s eyelids lifted. She looked up at Lucy with consciousness, with intelligence. She could not speak—that was yet to come. But there it was, the gleam of life and understanding. The crisis was over at last.

  A great rush of joy broke over Lucy. Tears came blindingly and stingingly, tears of ecstatic joy. She pressed her hands together, lifted them up in a prayer of gratitude. Then stumblingly she rose and rolled up the window blind. There, against the opposite wall, keeping vigil, staring up toward her, was Tom Hedley. She made a gesture of abandoned joy. And as he started forward, she went dizzily to the door to meet him. There, on the threshold, as she told him, the rising sun set a light about them both.

  The recovery of little Gracie Hedley sent a happy stir throughout the hospital, the more so as it synchronized with a general abatement of the epidemic. To Anne, sitting quietly in her room writing letters, it seemed as though the major portion of her work were done. Looking ahead, she allowed her thoughts to dwell on her return with Lucy to London. Lucy, after her noble showing here, would surely get a ward from Miss Melville. How wonderful that would be—she and Lucy, ward sisters together at the Trafalgar!

  And now she was writing her last and most difficult letter. It was to Dr. Prescott. Why she should find it difficult, she could scarcely comprehend. She said little of her own achievement and much of Lucy’s. She thanked him again for having given them the opportunity to do this work. She quickly exhausted her budget of news. She had thought of Prescott so often during these past weeks, it was odd she could not put these thoughts in words. She felt toward him a strange confusion, a vague conflict of emotions, disturbing, not fully apprehended, as though she wished, yet feared, to see him. This idea made her smile a little.

  It was at this moment that Nora burst, without knocking, into the room. She stood, out of breath, very pale, trying to conquer her distress. And then she panted, “Lucy has fainted in the ward. She—she just collapsed.”

  Anne half-turned, rigidly, in her chair.

  “It’s nothing.” Nora stammered lamely, her looks belying her words. “Only—Dr. Forrest—he sent me to fetch you.”

  A dozen questions trembled on Anne’s lips. But she knew, with sudden and awful foreboding, the cause of Lucy’s collapse. Still rigid, like a sleepwalker, she rose and followed Nora toward the ward.

  It was not there, but in the small outer room used as a ward kitchen, that they found Lucy. She lay on some pillows, thrown hastily upon the floor, with Dr. Forrest on one knee beside her and two nurses standing close behind him. Even before she glanced at Dr. Forrest, one look at Lucy told Anne the worst. Lucy had not fainted—she was unconscious, breathing rapidly, her face deeply flushed. Already the first faint, ugly mottling of the rash was showing beneath her skin. Anne’s heart went cold as ice. She knew that Lucy was stricken with the fever.

  With a creaking of his old joints, Dr. Forrest rose up from his knee. He kept his eyes away from Anne for fear that she should read in them the ominous truth. But Anne had seen enough of this terrible disease to understand that Lucy had been taken by its worst and most malignant form. With a great effort she pulled herself together,
turned to Nora.

  “Get the bed ready in the end room. Then tell Nurse Glen I shall want her.”

  Ten minutes later they carried Lucy through the yard to the sickroom beyond. Immediately Dr. Forrest made a spinal puncture and injected a massive dose of serum. Nora and Glennie were standing by. With a desperate effort, Anne controlled her anguished senses. She deputed to Glennie the first stretch of duty and to Nora the second, resolving to be there continuously herself.

  CHAPTER 57

  The news traveled swiftly through the hospital, and a shadow settled on the place. Lucy’s winning ways and unflagging service had made her truly popular among the staff, and now they were doing everything—everything, to pull Lucy through. Yet Lucy was not responding to treatment.

  At four o’clock she became delirious. Tossing about under the toxins of the infection, she babbled a jumble of broken phrases, memories of her childhood, her schooldays, her early days at the County. Always she spoke of Anne. And once in her thin, high voice she tried to sing a hymn that had been a favorite of her mother’s.

  What agony it was for Anne, both Nora and Glennie could only guess. Anne gave no sign as, with tireless hands, she kept renewing the ice cap on her sister’s burning head. Lucy’s temperature was still rising. Dr. Forrest, coming in each hour, could find no more to say. He could only shake his head.

  At half-past six came the onset of the first fit. Anne seemed turned to stone with horror. But it was she who gave Lucy her injection of morphine.

  “Anne!” for God’s sake, go out,” Nora pleaded.

  “Only for a minute,” Anne answered in a hollow tone. “I must send a wire. Her husband must be sent for.

  “She went to the office and telephoned a telegram to Joe, care of Transport, Limited. Then, as an afterthought, fearing that such a wire might not find Joe, that if he were up north it might lie about the office, she dispatched a long telegram to Dr. Prescott, asking him to locate Joe, send him immediately to Bryngower.

  Night came, and with it Lucy’s delirium increased. Despite the opiates, she tossed and raved. More than once Anne had to hold her tightly to restrain her. As she did so she felt, with a dreadful pang, the thinness of Lucy’s arms. It was not the fever that had worn her out, but those weeks of ceaseless work that had gone before. Then, all at once, Lucy’s temperature fell. It did not fall so much as drop like a stone.

  Nora, reading the thermometer, gasped. “It was 105 half an hour ago. And now it’s 99.”

  Far from being favorable, it was the worst sign possible, inevitable precursor of the end.

  “Fetch Dr. Forrest,” Anne said. “And please bring Glennie, too.”

  Shortly after eleven Lucy’s delirium stopped. Her features, no longer flushed and swollen, wore a pinched and sunken look. Then, feebly, her eyelids flickered. She stared up at Anne. “Anne,” she whispered, “some water.”

  When they had given her a drink, she lay quietly a moment on her back. She was quite conscious, and they read in her eyes that she knew she was dying. Then she stirred. Her gaze traveled feebly around the room, resting on Nora and on Glennie. She made an effort to reach out her hand toward them.

  “It was grand knowing you—working with you—” Her voice was scarcely audible.

  Tears were running down Nora’s face, and Glennie’s cheek was twitching. The hardy Scots nurse choked as she said, “We’ll soon be working together again.”

  Lucy tried to smile, but her dry lips barely parted. “Not this time, Glennie.” Then she whispered, “Please, would you let me be alone a little while with Anne?”

  CHAPTER 58

  They did as they were bid. Nora’s sobs, as she went out, were stifling her. Anne sat by the bed, holding her sister’s hand.

  “Anne,” said Lucy at length, feebly, yet with complete lucidity, “do you remember at the County—the little child that died? I’ve made up for that now, I think.”

  Because of the wild turmoil of emotion surging in Anne’s breast, she could only nod her head.

  “Lucky, wasn’t it,” Lucy reflected, “that I had the chance to get back a life for the one I lost?”

  “Yes, darling,” Anne whispered.

  “Another thing I’d like you to know,” murmured Lucy. “Before I came here I wrote to Matron at the County. I told her everything.” She was silent, then she asked, “Have you sent for Joe?”

  Anne nodded. “There’s a train comes in at midnight.”

  The vestige of a smile flickered on Lucy’s cracked lips. “Maybe,” she paused for breath, “maybe my train will have gone by then.” She added, “Poor Joe! Help him if you can, Anne dear. I didn’t help him much.”

  Lucy’s breathing was more shallow now, a film was settling on her eyes. She wandered a little, then suddenly she said, “Anne, sing that hymn we sang when we were kids. You remember—‘The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended.’ ”

  It was the hymn she had been singing in her delirium.

  Anne fought back her blinding tears. “O God,” she prayed, “don’t let me break down yet, let me do this last thing for Lucy.” She slipped her arm around Lucy’s shoulders and, holding her close, in a low, sweet voice she began to sing.

  “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,

  The darkness falls at Thy behest;

  To Thee our morning hymns ascended,

  Thy praise shall sanctify our rest. . . .”

  The last verse ended. Lucy sighed. “Thank you, Anne.” Her eyes were wide and distant. “What a dark night it has been.” Her cheek, on Anne’s, was very cold. “But now it’s getting lighter. Anne, darling, it must be morning.” With that she sank back on the pillow, her head fell sideways, and, peacefully, for her it was eternal morning.

  Anne sat a long time by the bedside Tears would not come to her now. Chilled and impotent, she felt she could not move. Blindly she kissed Lucy’s brow, closed her eyes, pulled up the sheet. Distantly she heard the shriek of an engine. Later, the sound of an arriving car. It was Joe’s entrance that roused her.

  She turned slowly toward him as he stood in the doorway, twisting his cap in his hands, with apprehensive gaze directed toward the shrouded figure on the bed. She saw that he was prepared, that they had broken the news to him outside.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” she said quietly. “It was so unexpected.”

  He took a step forward, timidly. Aware of what had happened, he struggled between nervousness and grief. She tried to help him as best she could.

  “It’s so terribly sudden, this fever.”

  “Yes,” he muttered, finding his tongue at last. “That’s what Dr. Prescott told me, coming in the train.”

  She gazed at him dully. “Dr. Prescott. Is he here?”

  Joe inclined his head. “He brought me. He’s been decent.” Again he took a nervous step toward the bed. And once more Anne, in her kindness, helped him. Silently she drew back the sheet. Only then, at the sight of the marred features of the pretty girl who had been his wife, did Joe break down. He knelt by the bedside and began to cry.

  CHAPTER 59

  Anne left him there. With lowered head and suffocating heart, she stumbled from the room. Outside, the first person she saw was Prescott. Her dull, incredulous gaze envisaged his dark and clean-cut features, now stamped with a grave concern. Dimly she was aware of him taking her arm, leading her away from those who would hurt her with well-meant sympathy. At the end of the corridor he halted, still holding her arm, and faced her directly.

  “Anne,” he said, in a tone which for once betrayed his deep emotion, “what am I to say to you, my dear? The moment I got your wire I hurried Joe here. I am sorry we are too late.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she murmured hopelessly. “Nothing matters now.”

  “You’re wrong, my dear.” His voice shook slightly. He nerved himself to continue, to fulfill the resolution he had made through weeks of missing her. “You matter. You matter very much.”

  She looked at him stupidly. He continued, indescribably moved by
her sorrow, carried away by his feelings for her, so long repressed, determined to tell her at all costs that he loved her.

  “Anne, my dearest. Don’t look so sad and broken. I love you. I love you with all my heart, and I have done so for months. Give me the chance to comfort you, to make you happy again as my wife.

  He tried to take her in his arms. But she broke away from him frantically.

  “No, no,” she cried wildly. “Not that. Don’t you see—that Lucy—my sister—Lucy is dead?”

  Wildly, like a wounded bird, she gazed at him. Then all her suffering, liberated at last, rushed into her throat, chocking her. Tears, hot merciful tears, came welling to her eyes. Sobbing bitterly, she rushed down the stairs and out of the hospital into the cold morning air.

  CHAPTER 60

  Two months later, in the London office of the Nurses’ Union, Anne sat behind her desk dealing with her correspondence. No longer in uniform, she had, nevertheless, in her plain black dress, an air of quiet efficiency. It fitted the background of the simple office. And so, indeed, did Anne.

  For a full two weeks she had been joint secretary of the Union with Miss Gladstone. On her return from Bryngower, her ward at the Trafalgar had still been open for her. But Susan Gladstone had pressed her to accept this post and to share her flat above the office. Though it cost Anne a struggle to forswear the active life of nursing, she saw the infinitely greater possibilities of helping her profession in this administrative work. The final argument had come from Susan herself. Next year she would reach the age limit and be forced to resign from the Union. She wished Anne to follow on as her successor.

  This June morning, as Anne was finishing her letters, Susan tapped at the door and entered. Lighting a cigarette, she rested against the edge of the desk and contemplated her friend quizzically.

  “There’s a couple of newspapermen outside.” She made a gesture with her cigarette toward the waiting room. “Does the honorable C. B. E. want to talk to them or doesn’t she?”