"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.
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 amusement.
"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 unappeasement of
life?