But my left shoe began to hurt me, and stopping at the house of a girl I
knew, I borrowed a country pair of hers: no taller than I, she takes two
sizes larger; they were like boats.
I started to trudge the three miles home in the boats: the slightest
flick of the foot would have sent one of them flying beyond the eye of
God or man. After a couple of miles the shoes began to tell, and I stood
still and lifted up one foot behind me, craning over my shoulder to see
if I could catch sight of the glimmer of skin through the heel of the
stocking. The fog was too thick for that.
Another half-mile and I put my finger down to my heel and felt the wet
blood through a large hole in my stocking, so I took off the shoes and
tied them together ... and, more silent than ever in the tomb of fog,
padded along as God had first supposed that woman would walk, on the wet
surface of the road.
A warded M.O. is pathetic. He knows he can't get well quicker than time
will let him. He has no faith.
To-morrow I have to take down all the decorations that I put up for
Christmas. When I put them up I never thought I should be the one to
take them down. When I was born no one thought I should be old.
While I was untying a piece of holly from the electric-light cords on
the ceiling and a patient was holding the ladder for me, a young _padre_
came and pretended to help us, but while he stood with us he whispered
to the patient, "Are you a communicant?" I felt a wave of heat and
anger; I could have dropped the holly on him.
They hung up their stockings on Christmas night on walking-sticks
hitched over the ends of the beds and under the mattresses. Such big
stockings! Many of them must have played Father Christmas in their own
homes, to their own children, on other Christmases.
On Christmas Eve I didn't leave the hospital till long after the
Day-Sisters had gone and the Night-Sisters came on. The wards were all
quiet as I walked down the corridor, and to left and right through the
glass doors hung the rows of expectant stockings.
Final and despairing postscript on Mr. Pettitt.
When a woman says she cannot come to lunch it is because she doesn't
want to.
Let this serve as an axiom to every lover: A woman who refuses lunch
refuses everything.
The hospital is alive; I feel it like a living being.
The hospital is like a dream. I am afraid of waking up and finding it
commonplace.
The white Sisters, the ceaselessly-changing patients, the long passages,
the sudden plunges into the brilliant wards ... their scenery hypnotizes
me.
Sometimes in the late evening one walks busily up and down the ward
doing this and that, forgetting that there is anything beyond the drawn
blinds, engrossed in the patients, one's tasks--bed-making, washing, one
errand and another--and then suddenly a blind will blow out and almost
up to the ceiling, and through it you will catch a glimpse that makes
you gasp, of a black night crossed with bladed searchlights, of a moon
behind a crooked tree.
The lifting of the blind is a miracle; I do not believe in the wind.
A new Sister on to-night ... very severe. We had to make the beds like
white cardboard. I wonder what she thinks of me.
Mr. Pettitt (who really is going to-morrow) wandered up into the ward
and limped near me. "Sister...." he began. He _will_ call me "Sister." I
frowned at him. The new Sister glanced at him and blinked.
He was very persistent. "Sister," he said again, "do you think I can
have a word with you?"
"Not now," I whispered as I hurried past him.
"Oh, is that so?" he said, as though I had made an interesting
statement, and limped away, looking backwards at me. I suppose he wants
to say good-bye.
He sat beside Mr. Wicks's bed (Mr. Wicks who is paralysed) and looked
at me from time to time with that stare of his which contains so little
offence.
It is curious to think that I once saw Mr. Wicks on a tennis-lawn,
walking across the grass.... Mr. Wicks, who will never put his foot on
grass again, but, lying in his bed, continues to say, as all Tommies
say, "I feel well in meself."
So he does; he feels well in himself. But he isn't going to live, all
the same.
Still his routine goes on: he plays his game of cards, he has his joke:
"Lemonade, please, nurse; but it's not from choice!"
When I go to clear his ash-tray at night I always say, "Well, now I've
got something worth clearing at last!"
And he chuckles and answers, "Thought you'd be pleased. It's the others
gets round my bed and leaves their bits."
He was once a sergeant: he got his commission a year ago.
My ruined charms cry aloud for help.
The cap wears away my front hair; my feet are widening from the
everlasting boards; my hands won't take my rings.
I was advised last night on the telephone to marry immediately before it
was too late.
A desperate remedy. I will try cold cream and hair tonics first.
There is a tuberculosis ward across the landing. They call it the T.B.
ward.
It is a den of coughs and harrowing noises.
One night I saw a negro standing in the doorway with his long hair done
up in hairpins. He is the pet of the T.B. ward; they call him Henry.
Henry came in to help us with our Christmas decorations on Christmas
Eve, and as he cleverly made wreaths my Sister whispered to me, "He's
never spitting ... in the ward!"
But he wasn't, it was part of his language--little clicks and ticks. He
comes from somewhere in Central Africa, and one of the T.B.'s told me,
"He's only got one wife, nurse."
He is very proud of his austerity, for he has somehow discovered that he
has hit on a country where it is the nutty thing only to have one wife.
No one can speak a word of his language, no one knows exactly where he
comes from; but he can say in English, "Good morning, Sister!" and
"Christmas Box!" and "One!"
Directly one takes any notice of him he laughs and clicks, holding up
one finger, crying, "One!"
Then a proud T.B. (they regard him as the Creator might regard a
humming-bird) explains: "He means he's only got one wife, nurse."
Then he did his second trick. He came to me with outstretched black hand
and took my apron, fingering it. Its whiteness slipped between his
fingers. He dropped it and, holding up the hand with its fellow, ducked
his head to watch me with his glinting eyes.
"He means," explained the versatile T.B., "that he has ten piccaninnies
in his village and they're all dressed in white."
It took my breath away; I looked at Henry for corroboration. He nodded
earnestly, coughed and whispered, "Ten!"
"How do you know he means that?" I asked. "How can you possibly have
found out?"
"We got pictures, nurse. We showed 'im kids, and 'e said 'e got ten--six
girls and four boys. We showed 'im pictures of kids."
I had never seen Henry before, never knew he existed. But in the ward
opposite the poor T.B.'s had been holding conversations with him in
window-seats, showing him pictures, painfully establishing a communion
with him ... Henry, with his hair done up in hairpins!
Although they showed him off with conscious pride, I don't think he
really appeared strange to them, beyond his colour. I believe they
imagine his wife as appearing much as their own wives, his children as
the little children who run about their own doorsteps. They do not
stretch their imaginations to conceive any strangeness about his home
surroundings to correspond with his own strangeness.
To them Henry has the dignity of a man and a householder, possibly a
rate-payer.
He seems quite happy and amused. I see him carrying a bucket sometimes,
sharing its handle with a flushed T.B. They carry on animated
conversations as they go downstairs, the T.B. talking the most. It
reminds me of a child and a dog.
What strange machinery is there for getting him back? Part of the cargo
of a ship ... one day ... "a nigger for Central Africa...."
"Where's his unit?"
"Who knows! One nigger and his bundle ... for Central Africa!"
The ward has put Mr. Wicks to Coventry because he has been abusive and
violent-tempered for three days.
He lies flat in his bed and frowns; no more jokes over the lemonade, no
wilfulness over the thermometer.
It is in these days that Mr. Wicks faces the truth.
I lingered by his bed last night, after I had put his tea-tray on his
table, and looked down at him; he pretended to be inanimate, his open
eyes fixed upon the white rail of the bed. His bedclothes were stretched
about him as though he had not moved since his bed was made, hours
before.
His worldly pleasures were beside him--his reading-lamp, his Christmas
box of cigars, his _Star_--but his eyes, disregarding them, were upon
that sober vision that hung around the bedrail.
He began a bitter conversation:
"Nurse, I'm only a ranker, but I had a bit saved. I went to a private
doctor and paid for myself. And I went to a specialist, and he told me I
should never get this. I paid for it myself out of what I had saved."
We might have been alone in the world, he and I. Far down at the other
end of the room the men sat crouched about the fire, their trays before
them on chairs. The sheet of window behind Mr. Wicks's head was flecked
with the morsels of snow which, hunted by the gale, obtained a second's
refuge before oblivion.
"I'd sooner be dead than lying here; I would, reely." You hear that
often in the world. "I'd sooner be dead than----" But Mr. Wicks meant
it; he would sooner be dead than lying there. And death is a horror, an
end. Yet he says lying there is worse.
"You see, I paid for a specialist myself, and he told me I should never
be like this."
There was nothing to be said.... One must have one's tea. I went down
the ward to the bunk, and we cut the pink iced cake left over from
Christmas....
I did not mean to forget him, but I forgot him. From birth to death we
are alone....
But one of the Sisters remembered him.
"Mr. Wicks is still in the dumps," she remarked.
"What is really the matter with him, Sister?"
"Locomotor ataxy." And she added as she drank her tea, "It's his own
fault."
"Oh, hush, hush!" my heart cried soundlessly to her, "You can't judge
the bitterness of this, nun, from your convent...!"
Alas, Mr. Wicks!... No wonder you saved your money to spend upon
specialists! How many years have you walked in fear of this? He took
your money, the gentleman in Harley Street, and told you that you might
go in peace. He blessed you and gave you salvation.
And the bitterest thing of all is that you paid for him like an officer
and he was wrong.
How the blinds blew and the windows shook to-night...! I walked out of
the hospital into a gale, clouds driving to the sea, trees bending back
and fore across the moon.