Rees told me, "She turned her head away when she saw me arm."
"I did once, Rees."
He looked down at the almost unrecognizable twelve inches which we call "Rees"s wound," and considered how this red inch had paled and the lips of that incision were drawing together. ""Tisn" no more me arm," he said at length, "than...." he paused for a simile. ""Tisn" me arm, it"s me wound," he finally explained.
His arm is stretched out at right angles from his bed in an iron cradle, and has been for six months.
"Last night," he said, "I felt me arm layin" down by me side, an" I felt the fingers an" tried to scratch me knee. It"s a feeling that"s bin comin" on for some time, but last night it seemed real."
The pain of the dressing forces Rees"s reason to lay some claim to his arm, but when it ceases to hurt him he detaches himself from it to such a point that the ghost-arm familiar to all amputations has arrived, as it were, by mistake.
The new V.A.D. doesn"t talk much at present, being shy, but to-night I can believe she will write in her diary as I wrote in mine: "My feet ache, ache, ache...." Add to that that she is hungry because she hasn"t yet learnt how to break the long stretches with hurried gnawings behind a door, that she is sick because the philosophy of Rees is not yet her philosophy, that her hands and feet grow cold and her body turns to warm milk, that she longs so to sit on a bed that she can almost visualize the depression her body would make on its counterpane, and I get a glimpse of the pa.s.sage of time and of the effect of custom.
With me the sickness and the hunger and the ache are barely remembered.
It makes me wonder what else is left behind.... The old battle is again in my mind--the struggle to feel pain, to repel the invading familiarity.
Here they come!
One convoy last night and another this morning. There is one great burly man, a sort of bear, whose dried blood has squeezed through bandages applied in seven places, and who for all that mumbles "I"m well" if one asks him how he feels.
Long before those wounds are healed he will diagnose himself better than that!
"I"m well...." That"s to say: "I"m alive, and I have reached this bed, and this bit of meat, and this pudding in a tin!" He answers by his standards.
But in a few days he will think, "I am alive, but I might be better..."; and in a few weeks, "Is this, after all, happiness?"
How they sleep, the convoy men! Watching their wounds as we dress them, almost with a grave pleasure--the pa.s.sports to this wonderful sleep.
Then when the last safety-pin is in they lie back without making themselves in the least comfortable, without drawing up a sheet or turning once upon the pillow, and sleep just as the head falls.
How little women can stand! Even the convoy cannot mend the pains of the new V.A.D. I dare not speak to her: she seems, poor camel, to be waiting for the last straw.
But when we wash the bowls together we must talk. She and I together this morning washed and scrubbed, rinsed, dried, and piled basins into little heaps, and while we washed we examined each other.
She is a born slave; in fact, I almost think she is born to be tortured.
Her manner with the Sisters invites and entices them to "put upon" her.
Her spiritual back is already covered with sores.
I suppose she is hungry for sympathy, but it isn"t really a case in which sympathy can do as much as custom. I showed her the white b.u.t.terflies, without supposing them to be very solid food.
She reminds me of the man of whom the Sister said, "He must stick it out." I might have pointed to the convoy and suggested comparisons; but one cannot rub a sore back.
Some one has applied the last straw in the night.
When I came on duty a brisk little war-hardened V.A.D. was brushing a pile of dust along the long boards to the door. The poor camel whose back is broken is as though she had never existed; either she is ill or she is banished.
Such is the secret diplomacy of these establishments that nothing is known of her except her disappearance--at least among those whom one can ask. Matron knows, Sister knows.... But these are the inscrutable, smiling G.o.ds.
There is only one man in the ward I don"t much care for--a tall boy with a lock of fair hair and broken teeth. He was a sullen boy whose bad temper made his mouth repulsive. I say "was," for he is different now.
Now he is feeble, gentle, grateful, and he smiles as often as one looks at him.
Yesterday he went for his operation in the morning, and in the afternoon when I came on duty he was stirring and beginning to groan. Sister told me to sit beside him.
I went up to the little room of screens in which he lay, and taking a wooden chair, I slipped it in between the screen and the bed and sat down.
Is it the ether which rushes up from between his broken teeth?--is it the red glare of the turkey-twill screens?--but in ten minutes I am altered, mesmerized. Even the size of my surroundings is changed. The screens, high enough to blot out a man"s head, are high enough to blot out the world. The narrow bed becomes a field of whiteness. The naked arm stretched towards me is more wonderful than any that could have belonged to a boy with dirty fair hair and broken teeth; it has sea-green veins rising along it, and the bright hairs are more silver than golden.
The life of the ward goes on, the clatter of cups for supper, the shuffling of feet clad in loose carpet-slippers, but here within he and I are living together a concentrated life.
"Oh, me back!"
"I know, I know...."
Do I know? I am getting to know. For while the men are drinking their cocoa I am drinking ether. I know how the waves of the pain come up and recede; how a little sleep just brushes the spirit, but never absorbs it; how the arms will struggle up to the air, only to be covered and enmeshed again in heat and blankets.
"Was it in me lung?" (He p.r.o.nounces the "g"--a Lancashire boy....)
"The shrapnel?"
He nods. I hold up the piece of metal which has lain buried in him these past three weeks. It has the number 20 engraved on it. That satisfies him. The blood which has come from between his lips is in a bowl placed too high for him to see.
Through the crack in the screens the man in the bed opposite watches us unwinkingly.
Eight o"clock.... Here is Sister with the syringe: he will sleep now and I can go home.
If one did not forget the hospital when one leaves it, life wouldn"t be very nice.
From pillar to post....
The dairyman, who has been gone to another hospital these five weeks, returned to-day, saying miserably as he walked into the ward, "Me "ead"s queerer than ever." His eyes, I think, are larger too, and he has still that manner of looking as though he thought some one could do something for him.
I can"t--beyond raising the smallest of tablets to him with the inscription, "Another farthing spent...."
Waker had a birthday yesterday and got ten post cards and a telegram.
But that is as nothing to another anniversary.
"A year to-morrow I got my wound--two o"clock to-morrow morning."
"Shall you be awake, Waker?"
"Yes."