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 flustered 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 glass door, and the sergeant marched his men in and beyond the
door.
An officer had been brought back under arrest; I had seen him pass 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.