Mr. Wicks has set his heart on crutches.
"If you won't try me on them I'll buy me own and walk out of here!"
Then I realize the vanity of his threat and the completeness of his
imprisonment, and hurry to suggest a new idea before he sees it too....
We set him on crutches....
He is brave. He said with anger, "I can't stand on these, they're too
long. You go and ask for some shorter ones...."
And thus together we slurred over the fact of that pendulous, nerveless
body which had hung from the crutches like an old stocking.
But all the evening he was buried in his own silence, and I suppose he
was looking at the vision on the bedrail.
A boy of seventeen was brought in yesterday with pneumonia.
He was so ill that he couldn't speak, and we put screens round his bed.
All the other patients in the ward immediately became convalescents.
I helped Sister to wash him, holding him on his side while he groaned
with pain; and Sister, no longer cynical, said, "There you are Sonnie,
it's almost finished...."
When I rolled back the blanket it gave me a shock to see how young his
feet were--clean and thin, with the big toe curling up and the little
toes curling back.
"Will you brush my hair?" he managed to say to me, and when I had
finished: "This is a pretty ward...."
It isn't, but I am glad it seems so to him.
The boy is at his worst. Whenever we come near him he lifts his eyes and
asks, "What are you going to do now?"
But to whatever we do he submits with a terrible docility.
Lying there propped on his pillow, with his small yellow face staring
down the ward, he is all the centre of my thoughts; I am preoccupied
with the mystery that is in his lungs.
Five days ago he was walking on his legs: five days, and he is on the
edge of the world--to-night looking over the edge.
There is no shell, no mark, no tear.... The attack comes from within.
The others in the ward are like phantoms.
When I say to-morrow, "How is the boy?" what will they say?
The sun on the cobwebs lights them as it lights the telephone-wires
above. The cocks scream from every garden.
To-day the sky is like a pale egg-shell, and aeroplanes from the two
aerodromes are droning round the hill.