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 gods.
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.
The hospital--a sort of monotone, a place of whispers and wheels moving
on rubber tyres, long corridors, and strangely unsexed women moving in
them. Unsexed not in any real sense, but the white clothes, the hidden
hair, the stern white collar just below the chin, give them an air of
school-girlishness, an air and a look women don't wear in the world.
They seem unexpectant.
Then at Madeleine's ... the light, the talk, the deep bath got ready for
me by a maid, instead of my getting it ready for a patient....
Not that I mind getting it ready; I like it. Only the change! It's like
being turn and turn about maid and mistress.
There is the first snow here, scanty and frozen on the doorstep.
I came home last night in the dark to dinner and found its faint traces
on the road and in the gutter as I climbed the hill. I couldn't see
well; there were stars, but no moon. Higher up it was unmistakable; long
white tracks frozen in the dried mud of the road, and a branch under a
lamp thickened with frozen snow.
Shall I ever grow out of that excitement over the first bit of snow...?