As one bends one's head low over the splint one sits unnoticed, a part
of the furniture of the ward. The sounds of the ward rise and fill the
ears; it is like listening to a kettle humming, bees round a bush of
flowers, the ticking of a clock, the passing of life....
Now and then there are incidents, as just now. Two orderlies came in
with a stretcher to fetch Mr. Smith (an older man than Smiff and a more
dignified) away to a convalescent home. Mr. Smith has never been to
France, but walked into our ward one day with a sore on his foot which
had to be cut. He was up and dressed in his bedraggled khaki uniform
when the stretcher-bearers came for him.
He looked down his nose at the stretcher. "I don't much like the look of
that," he said. The stretcher-bearers waited for him.
He stood irresolute. "I never bin in one of them, and I don't want to
make a start."
"Its bad luck to be our name," called out Smiff, waving his amputated
ankle. "Better get your hand in!"
Mr. Smith got in slowly and departed from the ward, sitting bolt
upright, gripping the sides with his hands.
Some of the wards and the Sisters' bunks are charming at this time of
the year, now that larkspur and rambler-roses are cheap in the market.
But the love of decoration is not woman's alone. Through the dispensary
hatchway I saw three empty poison-bottles, each with a poppy stuck in
its neck.
Everything in the dispensary is beautiful--its glasses, its flames, its
brass weights, its jars and globes; but much more beautiful because it
is half a floor higher than the corridor in which we stand and look up
into it, through a hatchway in the wall. There is something in that: one
feels like Gulliver.
No woman has ever been into this bachelors' temple.
On tapping at a small square panel set in the wall of the corridor the
panel flies up and a bachelor is seen from the waist to the knees. If he
feels well and my smile is humble he will stoop, and I see looking down
at me a small worn face and bushy eyebrows, or a long ascetic face and
bleached hair, or a beard and a pair of bearded nostrils.
Between them the three old things, priests in their way, measure and
weigh and mix and scold and let up the panel and bang it down through
the long day, filling the hospital with their coloured bottles, sealed
packets of pills, jars and vaccines, and precious syringes in boxes
marked "To be returned at once" (I never knew a Sister fail to toss her
head when she saw this message).
It is a very social spot outside the panel of the dispensary: each
V.A.D. goes there each morning as one might do one's marketing, and,
meeting there, puts down her straw basket, taps at the panel, and
listens to the scolding of the old men with only half an ear.
For the bachelors amuse themselves when they are not mixing and weighing
by inventing odd rules and codes of their own, and, reaching a skinny
arm through the hatchway, they pin them on, little scraps of paper which
fall down and are swept to heaven in the charwomen's pails.
And the V.A.D.'s, who are not at all afraid, because one cannot be
afraid of a man of whom one has never seen more than half, turn a blind
eye to the slips and a deaf ear to the voices, bringing their bottles
and their jars just in the manner they were taught to do when first they
entered the hospital. And they gossip! They have just seen the morning
papers on all the beds; they have just heard about the half-days for the
week; they have collected little rags and ends of news as they came
along the corridor.
They gossip. And once a bearded bachelor thumped the panel down almost
on my finger, leaving three startled faces staring at a piece of painted
wood. But a little dark girl worked the panel up an inch with her nails
and cajoled through the crack.
I have said before that the long corridor is wonderful. In the winter
afternoons and evenings, when the mist rolled up and down over the tiles
like the smoke in a tunnel, when one walked almost in darkness and
peered into the then forbidden wards, when dwarfs coming from the G
block grew larger and larger till the A block turned them into beings of
one's own size, the corridor always made a special impression on me.
But in the summer mornings it is remarkable too. Then regiments of
charwomen occupy it, working in close mass formation. Seven will work
abreast upon their knees, flanked by their pails, their hands moving
backwards and forwards in so complicated a system that there appears to
be no system at all.
Patches of the corridor are thick with soapsuds; patches are dry. The
art of walking the corridor in the morning can be learnt, and for a year
and five months I have done it with no more than a slip and a slide.
But yesterday I stepped on a charwoman's hand. It was worse than
stepping on a puppy: one knows that sickening lift of the heart, as
though the will could undo the weight of the foot....
The stagger, the sense of one's unpardonable heaviness.... I slipped on
her hand as on a piece of orange-peel, and, jumping like a chamois, sent
the next pail all over the heels of the front rank.
It was the sort of situation with which one can do nothing.
I met a friend yesterday, one of the old Chelsea people. He has followed
his natural development. Although he talks war, war, war, it is from his
old angle, it wears the old hall-mark.
He belongs to a movement which believes it "feels the war." Personal
injury or personal loss does not enter the question; the heart of this
movement of his bleeds perpetually, but impersonally. He claims for it
that this heart is able to bleed more profusely than any other heart,
individual or collective, in ... let us limit it to England!
In fact it is the only blood he has noticed.
When the taxes go up he says, "Well, now perhaps it will make people
feel the war!" For he longs that every one should lose their money so
that at last they may "feel the war," "stop the war" (interchangeable!)
He forgets that even in England a great many quite stupid people would
rather lose their money than their sons.
How strange that these people should still picture the minds of soldiers
as filled with the glitter of bright bayonets and the glory of war! They
think we need a vision of blood and ravage and death to turn us from our
bright thoughts, to still the noise of the drum in our ears. The drums
don't beat, the flags don't fly....
He should come down the left-hand side of the ward and hear what the
dairyman says.
"I 'ates it, nurse; I 'ates it. Them 'orses'll kill me; them drills....
It's no life for a man, nurse."
The dairyman hasn't been to the Front; you needn't go to the Front to
hate the war. Sometimes I get a glimpse from him of what it means to the
weaklings, the last-joined, feeble creatures.
"Me 'ead's that queer, nurse; it seems to get queerer every day. I can't
'elp worryin'. I keep thinkin' of them 'orses."
Always the horses....