I was told to carry trays from a ward where I had never been before--just to carry trays, orderly"s work, no more.
No. 22 was lying flat on his back, his knees drawn up under him, the sheets up to his chin; his flat, chalk-white face tilted at the ceiling.
As I bent over to get his untouched tray his tortured brown eyes fell on me.
"I"m in pain, Sister," he said.
No one has ever said that to me before in that tone.
He gave me the look that a dog gives, and his words had the character of an unformed cry.
He was quite alone at the end of the ward. The Sister was in her bunk.
My white cap attracted his desperate senses.
As he spoke his knees shot out from under him with his restless pain.
His right arm was stretched from the bed in a narrow iron frame, reminding me of a hand laid along a harp to play the chords, the fingers with their swollen green flesh extended across the strings; but of this harp his fingers were the slave, not the master.
"Shall I call your Sister?" I whispered to him.
He shook his head. "She can"t do anything. I must just stick it out.
They"re going to operate on the elbow, but they must wait three days first."
His head turned from side to side, but his eyes never left my face. I stood by him, helpless, overwhelmed by his horrible loneliness.
Then I carried his tray down the long ward and past the Sister"s bunk.
Within, by the fire, she was laughing with the M.O. and drinking a cup of tea--a harmless amus.e.m.e.nt.
"The officer in No. 22 says he"s in great pain," I said doubtfully. (It wasn"t my ward, and Sisters are funny.)
"I know," she said quite decently, "but I can"t do anything. He must stick it out."
I looked through the ward door once or twice during the evening, and still his knees, at the far end of the room, were moving up and down.
It must happen to the men in France that, living so near the edge of death, they are more aware of life than we are.
When they come back, when the postwar days set in, will they keep that vision, letting it play on life ... or must it fade?
And some become so careless of life, so careless of all the whims and personalities and desires that go to make up existence, that one wrote to me:
"The only real waste is the waste of metal. The earth will be covered again and again with Us. The corn will grow again; the bread and meat can be repeated. But this metal that has lain in the earth for centuries, the formation of the beginning, that men have sweated and grubbed for ... that is the waste."
What carelessness of worldly success they should bring back with them!
Orderlies come and go up and down the corridor. Often they carry stretchers--now and then a stretcher with the empty folds of a flag flung across it.
Then I pause from laying my trays, and with a bunch of forks in my hand I stand still.
They take the stretcher into a ward, and while I wait I know what they are doing behind the screens which stand around a bed against the wall.
I hear the shuffle of feet as the men stand to attention, and the orderlies come out again, and the folds of the flag have ballooned up to receive and embrace a man"s body.
Where is he going?
To the mortuary.
Yes ... but where else...?
Perhaps there is nothing better than the ecstasy and unappeas.e.m.e.nt of life?
II
INSIDE THE GLa.s.s DOORS
My feet ache, ache, ache...!
End of the first day.
Life in a ward is all scurry and rush. I don"t reflect; I"m putting on my cap anyhow, and my hands are going to the dogs.
I shall never get to understand Sisters; they are so strange, so tricky, uncertain as collies. Deep down they have an ineradicable axiom: that any visitor, any one in an old musquash coat, in a high-boned collar, in a spotted veil tied up at the sides, any one with whom one shakes hands or takes tea, is more important than the most charming patient (except, of course, a warded M.O.).
For this reason the "mouths" of the pillow-cases are all turned to face up the ward, away from the door.
I think plants in a ward are a barbarism, for as they are always arranged on the table by the door, it is again obvious that they are intended only to minister to the eye of the visitor, that race of G.o.ds.
In our ward there are eighteen fern-pots, some in copper, some in pink china, three in mauve paper, and one hanging basket of ferns. All of these have to be taken out on the landing at night and in again in the morning, and they have to be soaked under the tap.
The Sisters" minds are as yet too difficult for me, but in the minds of the V.A.D."s I see certain salient features. I see already manifested in them the ardent longing to be alike. I know and remember this longing; it was present through all my early years in a large boarding-school; but there it was naturally corrected by the changes of growth and the inexpertness of youth. Here I see for the first time grown women trying with all the concentration of their fuller years to be as like one another as it is possible to be.
There is a certain dreadful innocence about them too, as though each would protest, "In spite of our tasks, our often immodest tasks, our minds are white as snow."
And, as far as I can see, their conception of a white female mind is the silliest, most mulish, incurious, unresponsive, condemning kind of an ideal that a human creature could set before it.
At present I am so humble that I am content to do all the labour and take none of the temperatures, but I can see very well that it is when I reach a higher plane that all the trouble will begin.
The ranklings, the heart-burnings, the gross injustices.... Who is to make the only poultice? Who is to paint the very septic throat of Mr.
Mullins, Army Service Corps? Who is to--dizzy splendour--go round with the M.O. should the Sister be off for a half-day?
These and other questions will form the pride and anguish of my inner life.
It is wonderful to go up to London and dine and stay the night with Madeleine after the hospital.