Measles....
(Unposted.)
"DEAR SISTER,--Four more days before they will let me out of bed....
Whatever I promise to a patient in future I shall do, if I have to wear
a notebook hanging on my belt.
"By which you will see that I am making discoveries!
"The quality of _expectation_ in a person lying horizontally is wrought
up to a high pitch. One is always expecting something. Generally it is
food; three times a day it is the post; oftener it is the performance of
some promise. The things that one asks from one's bed are so small: 'Can
you get me a book?' 'Can you move that vase of flowers?' 'When you come
up next time could you bring me an envelope?'
"But if one cannot get them life might as well stop.
"The wonder to me is how they stood me!
"I was always cheerful--I thought it a merit; I find instead it is an
exasperation.
"I make a hundred reflections since my eyes are too bad to read. I stare
at the ceiling, and if a moth comes on it--and just now that happened,
or I would not have thought of mentioning it--I watch the pair of them,
the moth and its leaping shadow, as they whirl from square to square of
the smoke-ripened ceiling. This keeps my thoughts quiet.
"Then in the daytime there is the garden, the dog that crosses the lawn,
the gardener talking to himself, the girl who goes to feed the hens....
"I don't say that in any of these things I find a substitute for
reading, but since I can't and mayn't read....
"I am thinking, you know, of the beds down the right-hand side of the
ward.
"There's Mr. Wicks, now: he has his back to the road with the trams on
it.
"Do you see anything in that?
"I do. But then I have the advantage of you; my position is horizontal.
"Mr. Wicks's position is also ... strictly ... horizontal. It seems to
me that if he could see those trams, mark Saturdays and Sundays by the
increase of passengers, make little games to himself involving the
number of persons to get on and off (for the stopping-place is within
view: I know, for I looked) it might be possible to draw him back from
that apathy which I too, as well as you, was ceasing to notice.
"Mr. Wicks, Sister, not only has his back to the road with trams on it,
but for eleven months he has had his eyes on the yellow stone of the
wall of the German ward; that is, when they are not on his own
bedrail....
"But if his bed were turned round to range alongside the window...? For
he is a man with two eyes; not one who can write upon a stone wall with
his thoughts.
"And yet ... it would be impossible! There's not a ward in the hospital
whose symmetry is so spoilt.
"And that, you know, is a difficulty for you to weigh. How far are you a
dictator?
"I have been thinking of my rôle and yours.
"In the long run, however 'capable' I become, my soul should be given to
the smoothing of pillows.
"You are barred from so many kinds of sympathy: you must not sympathize
over the deficiencies of the hospital, over the food, over the M.O.'s
lack of imagination, over the intolerable habits of the man in the next
bed; you must not sigh 'I know ...' to any of these plaints.
"Yours is the running of the ward. Yours the isolation of a crowned
head.
"One day you said a penetrating thing to me:
"'He's not very ill, but he's feeling wretched. Run along and do the
sympathetic V.A.D. touch!'
"For a moment I, just able to do a poultice or a fomentation, resented
it.
"But you were right.... One has one's _métier_."