I turned away with a great shrinking.
In a very few minutes the citizen went past my bunk door, his hat in his hand, his black coat b.u.t.toned; taking back to his home and his family the last facts that he might ever learn.
At the end of the pa.s.sage he almost collided with that stretcher which bears a flag.
Of the two, the stretcher moved me least.
_My_ Sister is afraid of death. She told me so. And not the less afraid, she said, after all she has seen of it. That is terrible.
But the new Sister is afraid of life. She is shorter-sighted.
The rain has been pouring all day.
To-night it has stopped, and all the hill is steam and drizzle and black with the blackness that war has thrust upon the countryside.
_My_ Sister has gone.
Two nights ago I went up to a dinner at Madeleine"s and to stay the night. My Sister said, "Go and enjoy yourself!" And I did. It is very amusing, the change into rooms full of talk and light; I feel a glow of pleasure as I climb to the room Madeleine calls mine and find the reflection of the fire on the blue wall-paper.
The evening wasn"t remarkable, but I came back full of descriptions to the bunk and Sister next day.
I was running on, inventing this and that, making her laugh, when suddenly I looked up, and she had tears in her eyes.
I wavered and came to a stop. She got up suddenly and moved about the room, and then with a muttered "Wash my hands," disappeared into the corridor.
I sat and thought: "Is it that she has her life settled, quietly continuous, and one breaks in...? Does the wind from outside hurt?"
I regretted it all the evening.
Yesterday I arrived at the hospital and couldn"t find the store-cupboard keys, then ran across to her room and tapped at the door.
Her voice called "Come in!" and I found her huddled in an arm-chair, unnerved and white. I asked her for the keys, and when she gave them to me she held out her hand and said: "I"m going away to-morrow. They are sending me home; they say I"m ill."
I muttered something with a feeling of shock, and going back to my bunk I brooded.
The new Sister came in, and a new V.A.D. too, explaining that my former companion was now going into a ward.
A sense of desolation was in the air, a ruthlessness on the part of some one unknown. "Shuffle, shuffle ... they shuffle us like cards!"
I rose and began to teach the new V.A.D. the subtle art of laying trays.
She seemed stupid.
I didn"t want to share my trays with her. I love them; they are my recreation. I hung over them idly, hardly laying down the spoons I held in my hand, but, standing with them, chivied the new V.A.D. until her movements became fl.u.s.tered and her eye distraught.
She was very ugly. I thought: "In a day or two I shall get to like her, and then I shan"t be able to chivy her."
Out in the corridor came a tremendous tramping, boots and jingling metal. Two armed men with fixed bayonets arrived, headed by a sergeant.
The sergeant paused and looked uncertainly this way and that, and then at me.
I guessed their destination. "In there," I nodded, pointing through a closed gla.s.s door, and the sergeant marched his men in and beyond the door.
An officer had been brought back under arrest; I had seen him pa.s.s with his escort. The rumour at tea had been that he had extended his two days" leave into three weeks.
The V.A.D. looked at me questioningly but she didn"t dare, and I couldn"t bear, to start any elucidations on the subject.
I couldn"t think; she worried me. Her odds and ends of conversation pecked at me like a small bird. She told me a riddle which filled me with nausea, and finally a limerick which I had heard three times in the Mess.
I left her and went into the bunk.
Here the new Sister had installed herself, gentle and pink and full of quiet murmurs.
The rain, half snow, half sleet, dabbled against the window-pane, and I lifted the blind to watch the flakes stick and melt on the gla.s.s.
The V.A.D., her trays finished, appeared in the doorway. The little room seemed full of people.
"There"s a concert," I said, looking at the V.A.D. with distaste.
She looked at me uncertainly: "Aren"t you coming?"
"No," I said, "I"ve a note to write," forgetting that the new Sister might not allow such infringements. She gave no sign.
The V.A.D. gave in and disappeared concertwards.
The Sister rose too and went out into the kitchen to consult with the _chef_.
I slipped out behind her and down the steps into the garden--into the wet, dark garden, down the channels that were garden-paths, and felt my way over to the Sisters" quarters.
My Sister hadn"t moved. There by the gas-fire, her thin hand to her face, she sat as she had two hours before.
"Come in," she offered, "and talk to me."
Her collar, which was open, she tried to do up. It made a painful impression on me of weakness and the effort to be normal.
I remembered that she had once told me she was so afraid of death, and I guessed that she was suffering now from that terror.
But when the specialist is afraid, what can ignorance say...?
Life in the bunk is wretched (except that the new V.A.D. tells fortunes by hands).
The new Sister is at the same time timid and dogged. She looks at me with a sidelong look and gives me little flips with her hand, as though (_a_) she thought I might break something and (_b_) that she might stave it off by playfulness.
Pain....
To stand up straight on one"s feet, strong, easy, without the surging of any physical sensation, by a bedside whose coverings are flung here and there by the quivering nerves beneath it ... there is a sort of shame in such strength.
"What can I do for you?" my eyes cry dumbly into his clouded brown pupils.