"I couldn't trust that man!" the youngest Sister will say equally often.
This goes deeper....
But whom need one trust? Brother, lover, friend ... no more. Why wish to
trust all the world?...
"They are not real men," she says, "not men through and through."
That's where she goes wrong; they are men through and through--patchy,
ordinary, human. She means they are not men after her pattern.
Something will happen in the ward. Once I have touched this bedrock in
her I shall be for ever touching it till it gets sore!
One should seek for no response. They are not elastic, these nuns....
In all honesty the hospital is a convent, and the men in it my brothers.
This for months on end....
For all that, now and then some one raises his eyes and looks at me; one
day follows another and the glance deepens.
"Charme de l'amour qui pourrait vous peindre!"
Women are left behind when one goes into hospital. Such women as are in
a hospital should be cool, gentle; anything else becomes a torment to
the "prisoner."
For me, too, it is bad; it brings the world back into my eyes; duties
are neglected, discomforts unobserved.
But there are things one doesn't fight.
"Charme de l'amour...." The ward is changed! The eldest Sister and the
youngest Sister are my enemies; the patients are my enemies--even Mr.
Wicks, who lies on his back with his large head turned fixedly my way to
see how often I stop at the bed whose number is 11.
Last night he dared to say, "It's not like you, nurse, staying so much
with that rowdy crew...." The gallants ... I know! But one among them
has grown quieter, and his bed is No. 11.
Even Mr. Wicks is my enemy.
He watches and guards. Who knows what he might say to the eldest Sister?
He has nothing to do all day but watch and guard.
In the bunk at tea I sit among thoughts of my own. The Sisters are my
enemies....