After that he seemed to fall into one of his trances, and lay immovable
an hour or more. When I took his dinner to him he lifted his large,
sandy head and said:
"Seems a queer thing that if you hadn't said 'Look at the moon' I might
have bin dead without seeing her."
"But don't you ever look out of the window?"
The obstinate man shook his head.
There was a long silence in the ward to-night. It was so cold that no
one spoke. It is a gloomy ward, I think; the pink silk on the electric
lights is so much too thick, and the fire smokes dreadfully. The
patients sat round the fire with their "British warms" over their
dressing-gowns and the collars turned up.
Through the two glass doors and over the landing you can see the T.B.'s
moving like little cinema figures backwards and forwards across the
lighted entrance.
Suddenly--a hesitating touch--an ancient polka struck up, a tune
remembered at children's parties. Then a waltz, a very old one too. The
T.B.'s were playing dance music.
I crept to their door and looked. One man alone was taking any notice,
and he was the player; the others sat round coughing or staring at
nothing in particular, and those in bed had their heads turned away from
the music.
The man whose face is like a bird-cage has now more than ever a look of
... an empty cage. He allows his mouth to hang open: that way the bird
will fly.
What is there so rapturous about the moon?
The radiance of a floating moon is unbelievable. It is a figment of
dream. The metal-silver ball that hung at the top of the Christmas tree,
or, earlier still, the shining thing, necklace or spoon, the thing the
baby leans to catch ... the magpie in us....
Mr. Beecher is to be allowed to sleep till eight. He sleeps so badly, he
says. He woke up crying this morning, for he has neurasthenia.
That is what Sister says.
He should have been in bed all yesterday, but instead he got up and
through the door watched the dead T.B. ride away on his stretcher (for
the bird flew in the night).
"How morbid of him!" Sister says.
He has seen many dead in France and snapped his fingers at them, but I
agree with him that to die of tuberculosis in the backwaters of the war
isn't the same thing.
It's dreary; he thought how dreary it was as he lay awake in the night.
But then he has neurasthenia....
Pity is exhaustible. What a terrible discovery! If one ceases for one
instant to pity Mr. Wicks he becomes an awful bore. Some days, when the
sun is shining, I hear his grieving tenor voice all over the ward, his
legendary tale of a wrong done him in his promotion. The men are kind to
him and say "Old man," but Mr. Gray, who lies in the next bed to him, is
drained of everything except resignation. I heard him say yesterday,
"You told me that before...."
We had a convoy last night.
There was a rumour at tea-time, and suddenly I came round a corner on an
orderly full of such definite information as:
"There's thirty officers, nurse; an 'undred an' eighty men."
I flew back to the bunk with the news, and we sat down to our tea
wondering and discussing how many each ward would get.
Presently the haughty Sister from downstairs came to the door: she held
her thin, white face high, and her rimless glasses gleamed, as she
remarked, overcasually, after asking for a hot-water bottle that had
been loaned to us:
"Have you many beds?"
"Have they many beds?" The one question that starts up among the
competing wards.
And, "I don't want any; I've enough to do as it is!" is the false,
cloaking answer that each Sister gives to the other.
But my Sisters are frank women; they laughed at my
excitement--themselves not unstirred. It's so long since we've had a
convoy.
The gallants of the ward showed annoyance. New men, new interests....
They drew together and played bridge.
A little flying boy with bright eyes said in his high, piping voice to
me across the ward:
"So there are soldiers coming into the ward to-night!"