They know so little about each other, and they don"t ask. It is only I who wonder--I, a woman, and therefore of the old, burnt-out world. These men watch without curiosity, speak no personalities, form no sets, express no likings, a.n.a.lyse nothing. They are new-born; they have as yet no standards and do not look for any.
Ah, to have had that experience too!... I am of the old world.
Again and again I realize, "A nation in arms...."
Watchmakers, jewellers, station-masters, dress-designers, actors, travellers in underwear, bank clerks ... they come here in uniforms and we put them into pyjamas and nurse them; and they lie in bed or hobble about the ward, watching us as we move, accepting each other with the unquestioning faith of children.
The outside world has faded since I have been in the hospital. Their world is often near me--their mud and trenches, things they say when they come in wounded.
The worst of it is it almost bores me to go to London, and London was always my Mecca. It is this garden at home, I think. It is so easy not to leave it.
When you wake up the window is full of branches, and last thing at night the moon is on the snow on the lawn and you can see the pheasants"
footmarks.
Then one goes to the hospital....
When Madeleine telephones to me, "I"m living in a whirl...." it disturbs me. Suddenly I want to too, but it dies down again.
Not that it is their world, those trenches. When they come in wounded or sick they say at once, "What shows are on?"
Mr. Wicks has ceased to read those magazines his sister sends him; he now stares all day at his white bedrail.
I only pa.s.s him on my way to the towel-cupboard, twice an evening, and then as I glance at him I am set wondering all down the ward of what he thinks, or if he thinks....
I may be quite wrong about him; it is possible he doesn"t think at all, but stares himself into some happier dream.
One day when he is dead, when he is as totally dead as he tells me he hopes to be, that bed with its haunted bedrail will bend under another man"s weight. Surely it must be haunted? The weight of thought, dream or nightmare, that hangs about it now is almost visible to me.
Mr. Wicks is an uneducated and ordinary man. In what manner does his dream run? Since he has ceased to read he has begun to drop away a little from my living understanding.
He reflects deeply at times.
To-night, as I went quickly past him with my load of bath-towels, his blind flapped a little, and I saw the moon, shaped like a horn, behind it.
Dropping my towels, I pulled his blind back:
"Mr. Wicks, look at the moon."
Obedient as one who receives an order, he reached up to his supporting handle and pulled his shoulders half round in bed to look with me through the pane.
The young moon, freed from the trees, was rising over the hill.
I dropped the blind again and took up my towels and left him.
After that he seemed to fall into one of his trances, and lay immovable an hour or more. When I took his dinner to him he lifted his large, sandy head and said:
"Seems a queer thing that if you hadn"t said "Look at the moon" I might have bin dead without seeing her."
"But don"t you ever look out of the window?"
The obstinate man shook his head.
There was a long silence in the ward to-night. It was so cold that no one spoke. It is a gloomy ward, I think; the pink silk on the electric lights is so much too thick, and the fire smokes dreadfully. The patients sat round the fire with their "British warms" over their dressing-gowns and the collars turned up.
Through the two gla.s.s doors and over the landing you can see the T.B."s moving like little cinema figures backwards and forwards across the lighted entrance.
Suddenly--a hesitating touch--an ancient polka struck up, a tune remembered at children"s parties. Then a waltz, a very old one too. The T.B."s were playing dance music.
I crept to their door and looked. One man alone was taking any notice, and he was the player; the others sat round coughing or staring at nothing in particular, and those in bed had their heads turned away from the music.
The man whose face is like a bird-cage has now more than ever a look of ... an empty cage. He allows his mouth to hang open: that way the bird will fly.
What is there so rapturous about the moon?
The radiance of a floating moon is unbelievable. It is a figment of dream. The metal-silver ball that hung at the top of the Christmas tree, or, earlier still, the shining thing, necklace or spoon, the thing the baby leans to catch ... the magpie in us....
Mr. Beecher is to be allowed to sleep till eight. He sleeps so badly, he says. He woke up crying this morning, for he has neurasthenia.
That is what Sister says.
He should have been in bed all yesterday, but instead he got up and through the door watched the dead T.B. ride away on his stretcher (for the bird flew in the night).
"How morbid of him!" Sister says.
He has seen many dead in France and snapped his fingers at them, but I agree with him that to die of tuberculosis in the backwaters of the war isn"t the same thing.
It"s dreary; he thought how dreary it was as he lay awake in the night.
But then he has neurasthenia....
Pity is exhaustible. What a terrible discovery! If one ceases for one instant to pity Mr. Wicks he becomes an awful bore. Some days, when the sun is shining, I hear his grieving tenor voice all over the ward, his legendary tale of a wrong done him in his promotion. The men are kind to him and say "Old man," but Mr. Gray, who lies in the next bed to him, is drained of everything except resignation. I heard him say yesterday, "You told me that before...."
We had a convoy last night.
There was a rumour at tea-time, and suddenly I came round a corner on an orderly full of such definite information as:
"There"s thirty officers, nurse; an "undred an" eighty men."
I flew back to the bunk with the news, and we sat down to our tea wondering and discussing how many each ward would get.
Presently the haughty Sister from downstairs came to the door: she held her thin, white face high, and her rimless gla.s.ses gleamed, as she remarked, overcasually, after asking for a hot-water bottle that had been loaned to us: