I like discipline. I like to be part of an institution. It gives one
more liberty than is possible among three or four observant friends.
It is always cool and wonderful after the monotone of the dim hospital,
its half-lit corridors stretching as far as one can see, to come out
into the dazzling starlight and climb the hill, up into the trees and
shrubberies here.
The wind was terrible to-night. I had to battle up, and the leaves were
driven down the hill so fast that once I thought it was a motor-bicycle.
Madeleine's garden next door is all deserted now: they have gone up to
London. The green asphalt tennis-court is shining with rain, the blue
pond brown with slime; the little statues and bowls are lying on their
sides to keep the wind from putting them forcibly there; and all over
the house are white draperies and ghost chairs.
When I walk in the garden I feel like a ghost left over from the summer
too.
I became aware to-night of one face detaching itself from the rest. It
is not a more pleasing face than the others, but it is becoming
conspicuous to me.
Twice a week, when there is a concert in the big hall, the officers and
the V.A.D.'s are divided, by some unspoken rule--the officers sitting at
one side of the room, the V.A.D.'s in a white row on the other.
When my eyes rest for a moment on the motley of dressing-gowns,
mackintoshes, uniforms, I inevitably see in the line one face set on a
slant, one pair of eyes forsaking the stage and fixed on me in a steady,
inoffensive beam.
This irritates me. The very lack of offence irritates me. But one grows
to look for everything.
Afterwards in the dining-room during Mess he will ask politely: "What
did you think of the concert, Sister? Good show...."
How wonderful to be called Sister! Every time the uncommon name is used
towards me I feel the glow of an implied relationship, something which
links me to the speaker.
My Sister remarked: "If it's only a matter of that, we can provide
thrills for you here very easily."
The name of my ... admirer ... is, after all, Pettitt. The other nurse
in the Mess, who is very grand and insists on pronouncing his name in
the French way, says he is "of humble origin."
He seems to have no relations and no visitors.
Out in the corridor I meditate on love.
Laying trays soothes the activity of the body, and the mind works
softly.
I meditate on love. I say to myself that Mr. Pettitt is to be envied. I
am still the wonder of the unknown to him: I exist, walk, talk, every
day beneath the beam of his eye, impenetrable.
He fell down again yesterday, and his foot won't heal. He has time
before him.
But in a hospital one has never time, one is never sure. He has perhaps
been here long enough to learn that--to feel the insecurity, the
impermanency.
At any moment he may be forced to disappear into the secondary stage of
convalescent homes.
Yes, the impermanency of life in a hospital! An everlasting dislocation
of combinations.
Like nuns, one must learn to do with no nearer friend than God.
Bolts, in the shape of sudden, whimsical orders, are flung by an
Almighty whom one does not see.
The Sister who is over me, the only Sister who can laugh at things other
than jokes, is going in the first week of next month. Why? Where? She
doesn't know, but only smiles at my impatience. She knows life--hospital
life.
It unsettles me as I lay my spoons and forks. Sixty-five trays. It takes
an hour to do. Thirteen pieces on each tray. Thirteen times sixty-five
... eight hundred and forty-five things to collect, lay, square up
symmetrically. I make little absurd reflections and arrangements--taking
a dislike to the knives because they will not lie still on the polished
metal of the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles
after my fingers have left them.
I love the long, the dim and lonely, corridor; the light centred in the
gleam of the trays, salt-cellars, yellow butters, cylinders of glass....
Impermanency.... I don't wonder the Sisters grow so secret, so uneager.
How often stifled! How often torn apart!
It's heaven to me to be one of such a number of faces.
To see them pass into Mess like ghosts--gentleman, tinker, and tailor;
each having shuffled home from death; each having known his life rock on
its base ... not talking much--for what is there to say?--not laughing
much for they have been here too long--is a nightly pleasure to me.
Creatures of habit! All the coloured dressing-gowns range themselves
round the two long tables--this man in this seat, that man by the
gas-fire; this man with his wheel-chair drawn up at the end, that man at
the corner where no one will jostle his arm.
Curious how these officers leave the hospital, so silently.
Disappearances.... One face after another slips out of the picture, the
unknown heart behind the face fixed intently on some other centre of
life.
I went into a soldiers' ward to-night to inquire about a man who has
pneumonia.
Round his bed there stood three red screens, and the busy, white-capped
heads of two Sisters bobbed above the rampart.
It suddenly shocked me. What were they doing there? Why the screens? Why
the look of strain in the eyes of the man in the next bed who could see
behind the screens?
I went cold and stood rooted, waiting till one of them could come out
and speak to me.
Soon they took away the screen nearest to me; they had done with it.
The man I was to inquire for has no nostrils; they were blown away, and
he breathes through two pieces of red rubber tubing: it gave a more
horrible look to his face than I have ever seen.
The Sister came out and told me she thought he was "not up to much." I
think she means he is dying.
I wonder if he thinks it better to die.... But he was nearly well before
he got pneumonia, had begun to take up the little habits of living. He
had been out to tea.
Inexplicable, what he thinks of, lying behind the screen.
To-night I was laying my trays in the corridor, the dim corridor that I
am likely often to mention--the occasional blue gas-lamps hanging at
intervals down the roof in a dwindling perspective.
The only unshaded light in the corridor hangs above my head, making the
cutlery gleam in my hands.
The swish-swish of a lame foot approached down the stone tiling with the
tapping, soft and dull, of a rubber-tipped walking-stick.
He paused by the pillar, as I knew he would, and I busied myself with an
added rush and hurry, an added irritating noise of spoons flung down.
He waited patiently, shyly. I didn't look up, but I knew his face was
half smiling and suppliant.
"We shall miss you," he said.
"But I shall be back in a week!"
"We shall miss you ... laying the trays out here."
"Everything passes," I said gaily.
He whistled a little and balanced himself against his stick.
"You are like me, Sister," he said earnestly; and I saw that he took me
for a philosopher.
He shuffled on almost beyond the circle of light, paused while my lips
moved in a vague smile of response, then moved on into the shadow. The
low, deep quiet of the corridor resumed its hold on me. The patter of
reflection in my brain proceeded undisturbed.
"You are like me!" The deepest flattery one creature pays its fellow ...
the cry which is uttered when another enters "our country."
Far down the corridor a slim figure in white approaches, dwarfed by the
smoky distance; her nun-like cap floating, her scarlet cape, the "cape
of pride," slipped round her narrow shoulders.
How intent and silent They are!
I watched this one pass with a look half-reverence, half-envy. One
should never aspire to know a Sister intimately. They are disappointing
people; without candour, without imagination. Yet what a look of
personality hangs about them....