each student privately on the subject of the previous instructions. The
Signorina happened to be quite close to a little old lady with bonnet
and strings, and a small, eager, withered, agitated face under bands
of frizzled grey hair--the kind of little old lady who is always ready
to respond to the call of duty, and who is in the van of knitters for
“our dear, brave soldiers” or “our gallant tars.”
“What,” said the hospital nurse tenderly, “would you do for a bed-sore?”
The little old lady began to twitter and flutter:
“I would first wash the place with warm water, and--oh, dear me, dear
me, I _did_ know, I knew quite well a minute ago--with, with something
to disinfect.”
“It is something to disinfect, quite right,” approved the nurse.
“A salt, I think--I’m sure it was. I could get it at the chemist----”
“Certainly,” said the nurse, as if she were speaking to a child of two
years old, “the chemist would be sure to keep it. It’s quite a simple
thing. But you would have to know what to ask for, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, dear me, yes. P--p-- or did it begin with an I?”
“Perchloride of mercury,” said the nurse, smothering a yawn.
“Oh yes,” cried the little old lady, delighted, “that’s it.”
“Well, now you know it, don’t you,” said the nurse brightly, wrote
“Passed” in her notebook, and turned to the next.
“How much liquid nourishment would you give a typhoid patient at a
time?”
This to a village girl, who looked blank, not to say terrified, and
wrung her hands in her lap.
“I mean,” helped the questioner, “if the patient were put on milk--a
milk diet, very usual in typhoid cases--how much milk would you give at
a time?”
The girl’s face lit up.
“Two quarts, miss,” she said with alacrity.
“Not at a time, I think,” corrected the examiner, quite unruffled. “Two
quarts, perhaps, in the twenty-four hours, if you could get the patient
to take it--that would be splendid. Typhoid is a very weakening malady.
It’s a good thing to keep the strength up--if you _can_, you know.”
The Signorina heard this optimist make her report a little later to the
charming daughter of the charming family, who had herself studied to
good purpose, but was too modest to undertake the instructions.
“They’ve all answered beautifully. Look at my notebook----”
It was “Passed,” “Passed,” to every name.
“That _is_ good,” said the gratified organizer. “We _have_ done well
to-day.”
* * * * *
No doubt one occasionally comes across odd specimens even among
professionals. Certainly, during a long illness with which the Signora
was afflicted a couple of years ago, three of the five nurses who
succeeded each other in attendance upon her cannot be said to have
lightened the burthen.
The first, sent for at eleven o’clock at night, distinguished herself
by instantly upsetting a basin of hot water into the patient’s bed.
As she repeated the process next night, and greeted the accident with
shrieks of laughter, it could scarcely be regarded as the exceptional
breach which proves the rule of excellence.
The Signora, who was not supposed to be moved at all, has, fortunately,
the sense of humour which helps one along the troublesome way of
life, in sickness as in health. She laughed too. The nurse, who was
an Irishwoman, immediately thought herself rather a wag. She was a
little, vivacious creature, ugly, but bright-eyed. She was extremely
talkative, and perhaps the most callous person the Signora has ever
come across. It is our experience that all nurses are talkative. If the
patient wants to make life endurable at all, the talk must be guided
into the least disagreeable channels.
The Signora’s dread is the tale of operations--“of practice in the
theatre,” which one of the nurses of her youth told her she considered
“an agreeable little change.”--This particular Dorcas’s favourite topic
was deathbeds. The patient was quite aware that the supreme experience
was a not at all impossible event for herself in the near future,
so she had a certain personal interest in the matter. Anyhow, she
permitted the discourse.
She heard at full length the narration of Nurse MacDermott’s first
deathbed in private nursing. It was a horrible anecdote, which might
have formed a chapter in a realistic novel. “A gentleman at Wimbledon
it was,” evidently of the well-to-do merchant class, and he seemed,
poor man! to have been the unhappy father of a family as cold-blooded
and heartless as the wife in Tolstoi’s painful story of death. But
here there was no one to care, not even a poor servant lad--not even
the nurse whose vocation it was to help him through the final agony.
She arrived at ten o’clock, and at eleven the doctor warned the family
that the patient would not pass the night. Thereupon everyone--the
wife, two daughters, and a son--retired to bed, and left the dying
man in charge of the newly arrived attendant, who sat down to watch,
reading a novel. About two o’clock the moribund began to make painful
efforts to speak.
“Charlie, Charlie,” he kept saying.
“Ah, the poor fellow!” said the little nurse, as she recounted
the story, “he had a son who was a scapegrace, it seems, off away
somewhere, and he wanted to send him a message. I ran and called the
wife out of her bed--what do you think? She’d put her hair in crimpers!
Upon my word, she had; they were bristling all round the head of her.
Well, I didn’t want to have him die on me while I was out of the room,
so I rushed back. And he made signs to me. The power of speech was
gone from him. He wanted to write. I had a bit of pencil, but there
wasn’t a scrap of paper that I could see, so there was nothing I could
give him but the fly-leaf of the book I was reading; and ah! the poor
fellow, it was only scrawls he could make after all. And sure, he was
dead before his wife came in. And she just gave one look at him, and,
‘I’m going back to bed,’ says she, and back to bed she went. But it was
the hair-curlers that did for me. I never can forget them.”
She was sitting at the end of the Signora’s bed, and doubled herself up
with laughter as she spoke. We have no doubt but that she went back to
her novel, scrawled with the dying father’s last futile effort.
We never knew anyone quite so frankly unmoved by the awful scenes it
was her trade to witness. She found vast amusement in the wanderings
of delirious patients. Whenever she wanted to cheer the other nurses
up, she informed us, in the Home where they dwelt together, she could
always make them laugh with little anecdotes from the typhoid ward; and
the “wanderings” from the different beds.
She tried to cheer the Signora up on these lines; and the Signora,
on wakeful nights, has to force her mind away from the “humorous”
memories. She infinitely preferred the story of Nurse McDermott’s
love affairs. Like many ugly people, the young woman believed herself
irresistible, and paid a great deal of attention to the conservation
of her charms. Once, having settled her patient for the night, she
reappeared unexpectedly _en robe de chambre_.
“I have just come to tell you how many creams I have put on myself,”
she cried to the bewildered lady. “I know it will amuse you! There’s
the pomade for my hair, and Valaze for my face, and the lanoline for my
neck. I do hate the mark of the collar--for evening dress, you know--it
gives one away so! And there’s the salve for my lips, and the cold
cream for my hands, and the polish for my nails----”
She went away in a hurry to a bad case at Liphurst, jubilating because
we were paying her journey, and she would get it out of the other lady
also, and the doctor had offered to send her in his car.
Of quite another type was Nurse Vischet. No one could say that she was
unaffected by her patient’s symptoms. They had the power of flinging
her into frenzy. Capable enough when things were going fairly well with
her charge, the first shadow of a change for the worse produced in her
what can only be described as fury. Her face would become convulsed,
her eyes would flame, she would knock the furniture about as she moved,
and could barely restrain herself from insulting the sufferer.
At first the Signora, who was very ill and weaker than it is possible
to describe, could not at all understand these outbursts. “What can
have annoyed Nurse?” she would wonder feebly to herself. But presently
she understood. It was really a mixed terror of, and repulsion from,
the sight of suffering. Why such a woman should have become a nurse,
and how she could continue in the service of the sick, feeling as she
did, remains a mystery. The key to her extraordinary behaviour was
given one day by a little dog, who happened to be seized with a very
common or garden fit of choking through the nose; such as affects
little dogs with slight colds in their heads. Nurse Vischet started
screaming.
“He’s all right,” said the Signora. “He only wants his nose rubbed.
Carry him over to me if you won’t do it yourself.”
“Ugh!” shrieked Nurse Vischet. “I think it’s dying. I wouldn’t touch it
for the world!”
One of the symptoms of the human patient’s illness were agonizing
headaches, during which she could scarcely bear a ray of light in
the room. In spite of frequent requests, Nurse Vischet always seized
the occasion to turn the ceiling electric light full on the bed, and
when at last forbidden to do so, she declined to enter a room in
which she could not see her way. The Signora gave her the name of
her “ministering devil.” She was a rabid Socialist, and had peculiar
theories, one of which we remember was that condemned criminals should
be handed over to the laboratories for vivisection.
She had also to an acute degree the hospital nurse’s capacity for
upsetting the household. Our butler, a hot-tempered man, happened to
drop a stray “damn” in the hearing of the under-housemaid, and Vischet,
hanging on the landing over the kitchen regions, as she was fond of
doing, overheard the dread word. The whole establishment was turned
upside down. Maggie was told that she “owed it to her womanhood” not to
allow foul language in her presence. Maggie gave notice, but being,
after all, an Irish girl with a sense of humour, was as easily soothed
down as she had been worked up. Certainly, however, if we had kept
Nurse Vischet, we should have lost, one by one, our excellent staff of
servants. Besides playing on their feelings against each other, she had
a horrible trick of telling them they were at the last gasp upon the
smallest ailment. She did not like her patient to have symptoms; but
she encouraged the domestics to fly to her with theirs.
Irish Maggie had an indigestion. Vischet declared her condition to be
of extreme gravity. She rushed to the Signora with her tale. Maggie was
ordered to bed. Vischet produced an immense tin of antiphlogistine with
which to arrest “the mischief.”
The daughter of the house went up to visit the sick girl, and came down
laughing to console her mother.
“You needn’t worry about Maggie,” she said, and gave a pleasant little
description of the scene and the invalid’s remarks.
“Ah, sure I’m all right, miss. It’s all along of a bit of green apple.
Sure, Mrs. MacComfort has just given me a drop of ginger, and it’s
done me a lot of good already. Do you see what Nurse is after bringing
me? God bless us all, wouldn’t I rather die itself than be spreading
that putty on me! I’ll be up for tea, miss.”
“She looks as rosy as possible,” went on the comforter, “and ever so
nice with her hair in a great thick plait tied with ribbons, grass
green, for Ireland.”
Through one recollection Vischet will always remain endeared to the
mind of her victim; and that was for her singular pronunciation. There
was a story to which the Signora was fond of leading up relating to
por-poises, (pronounced to rhyme with noises), and another connected
with a tor-toise, which happened to be the pet of a recent “case.”
There was also a little tale of a dog: “I was out walking on the
embankment,” said Vischet, “and I saw a man coming along leading
two dogs--one was a great bulldog, and the other was one of those
queer creatures you call a dashun” (the Signora prides herself on
her intelligence for instantly discovering that the narrator meant a
dachshund). “And there was running about loose the queerest animal ever
I saw,” went on the nurse; “it had the head of a bulldog and the legs
of a dashun.”
The third nurse was very different. The daughter of an officer, who was
seeking the most genteel way to make her living, she frankly handed
over the chief of the attendance to the Signora’s own devoted maid;
which, on the Signora becoming aware of her incapacity, she was on the
whole glad that she should do. Nurse Fraser was a tall, handsome girl,
who was fond of sitting on the sofa at the foot of the patient’s bed,
her hands clasped round her knees, staring into space. She was by no
means unamiable, but she was bored; and the Signora, who rather liked
her, was not averse to screening her deficiencies. When the doctor
inquired after the temperature that had never been taken, she herself
would declare it had been normal; and she was amused when Nurse Fraser
would next vouch for a “splendid breakfast.” She not having appeared in
her patient’s room till noon.
She made no attempt to conceal her complete inefficiency in the
treatment of the case.
“Oh, _do_ tell me what I’m to do,” she had cried on arrival to the
district nurse who had come in as a stopgap. “I’m sure if I ever knew
anything about the illness I’ve quite forgotten.”
One day--she, too, was garrulous--she informed her patient that her
mother had shares in Kentish Mines. “If ever they work out, we may get
a lot of money, and then,” she cried, quite unconscious of offence, “no
more beastly sick people for me!”
She left us in tears. She had enjoyed herself very much.
It would seem as if our experience had been unfortunate, and yet it is
not so; for surely to have known two perfect nurses one after another
is sufficient to re-establish the balance. Chief of these, first and
dearest, was Nurse Dove. She was the district nurse, called in, as we
have said, in a moment of emergency. How Miss Nightingale would have
loved her! Blessed little creature, it was enough to restore anybody’s
heart to see her come into the sick-room, quiet, capable, tender, her
eyes shining with compassion for the sufferer and eagerness to relieve.
She was as gentle as she was skilful: to anyone who did not know her
it would be impossible to convey the extent of the virtue contained
in this phrase. The Signora would have placed herself, or, what
means a great deal more, her nearest and dearest, with the completest
confidence in her hands alone, in any dangerous illness.
Among the poor she was an apostle. It seemed to have been her fate
that, during her brief stay in our village, several young mothers found
themselves in mortal extremity. She never lost a life. We think now
with longing of what she would have been among the wounded. Alas! we
were not destined to keep such perfection with us. It was Cupid, not
death, that robbed us of this treasure--if Cupid, indeed, it can be
called, the dingy, doubtful imp that took her away from her wonderful
work among us. Alas! charming, devoted, exquisite being as she was, she
had a very human side. We fear there was a touch of “pike,” as the old
gardener had it, in the business, but in spite of all our efforts a
“coloured gentleman,” an invalid to boot, a shifty elderly fellow with
an Oriental glibness of tongue, carried her off away with him back to
India. She has since written to us describing her palatial abode on the
borders of a lake with a horde of servants and a private steam-launch,
but we strongly suspect that if the pen was the pen of Nurse Dove, the
words were the words of the coloured gentleman.
The individual was a Baboo, a clerk in the Madras Post Office, and had
already been invalided out of the service before he left England. We
cannot believe that the pension of an underling in the Indian Civil
Service runs to these Rajah-like splendours. Moreover, there was a
tragic little postcard, sent to a humble friend, which did not at all
correspond with the highflown letter above-mentioned: “The world is a
very sad place; we must all be prepared for disappointments.”
There is one thing quite certain--wherever she goes she will be doing
good.
Curiously enough, the second perfect nurse resembled her in dark pallor
of skin, splendour of raven tresses, and thoughtful brilliance of brown
eyes; but she was younger and more timid. She will want a few more
years of experience and self-reliance before she can develop into a
Nurse Dove.
But nevertheless, resembling her in countenance, she had the same
deep womanly heart for her patients. Suffering in their sufferings,
she would spare no pains to relieve them. And she had the touch of
imaginative genius and the courage to act on her own responsibility
which made her presence in a house of sickness a comfort and a
strength. In fact, the life was to her a vocation. She nursed to help
others, not herself. She had not grown callous through the sight of
agonies, only more urgent to be of use.
God send many such to our men in their need to-day!
IV
“CONSIDER THE LILIES”
“For the first time the Lamb shall be dyed red....”
_Brother Johannes’ Prophecy._
“Consider the lilies, how they grow....”
The sad thing is that with us they decline to grow. When we bought the
small, high-perched house and grounds on the Surrey hills there is
no doubt that the thought of lilies in those terraced gardens was no
unimportant part of the programme. Oddly, the little house had from the
first an Italian look, which we have not been slow to cultivate.
Now we were haunted by a picture of an Italian garden: a
pergola--vine-covered, it was--with two serried ranks of Madonna
lilies growing inside the arches; flagged as to pathway, with probably
fragrant tufts of mint and thyme between the stones. In the land of its
conception this vision of shadowy green and exquisite white, cool yet
shining, as if snow-fashioned, must have given upon some stretch of
quivering, heat-baked country.
Without being able to provide such an antithesis, the
garden-plotter--she means the dreadful quip--otherwise the mistress of
the English Villino, with a vivid and charming picture in her mind’s
eye, fondly imaged a very effective outlook upon the great shouldering
moors that rise startlingly across the narrow valley at the bottom of
her garden. But the lilies refused to grow.
She tried them in border after border. She set clumps of Auratums under
the dining-room between the heliotrope and the Nicotianas, which swing
such gushes of fragrance into the little house all the hot summer days.
She got monster bulbs of Madonnas from the first specialist in the
kingdom, and put them singly between the red and white roses against
the upper terrace wall. She ran amok upon luscious spotted darlings;
Pardelinum and Monadelphum, Polyphyllum and Parryi, and had them placed
in a cool, shady walk against a background of delphiniums. She thrust
Harrisi under the drawing-room bow; and the glorious scarlet-trumpeted
Thunbergianum where they would flame in the middle distance. They
showed many varied forms of disapproval, but were unanimous in
declining to remain with us. Some were a little more polite than
the others. The great trumpets blew fiercely for one season, almost
as with a sound of glorious brass, in their dim nook; and a single
exquisite, perfect stem of Krameri rose intact amid a dying sisterhood,
and swayed, delicately proud, faintly flushed, a very princess among
flowers, one long, golden September fortnight. But such meteors only
make our persistent gloom, where lilies are concerned, the more signal.
The pergola had to go the way of so many cherished dreams. Yet there is
an exception. With just an occasional threat of disease, there is one
border favoured by the tiger-lily. She is not a very choice creature,
of course; she has neither the fragrance nor the mystic grace of her
cousins; but such as she is, she is welcome in our midst. On our third
terrace there is a stretch of turf, curved outwards like a half-moon,
against a new yew hedge: we call it the Hemicycle. In spring it is a
jocund pleasaunce for crocus and scylla and flowering trees--almond,
_Pyrus floribunda_, and peach; in summer the weeping standards hold
the field, set between the pots of climbing geraniums. That is on the
outward curve. A rough wall, overhung with Dorothy Perkins, clothed
from the base with Rêve d’Or, runs straightly on the inner side. It is
in the border underneath this wall that the tiger-ladies condescend to
us.
Last year, by a somewhat accidental development of seeds, we had a
marvellous post-impressionist effect along the line, for all the stocks
there planted, between the Tigrinum, turned out to be purple and mauve.
They grew tall, with immense heads of bloom: drawn up by the wall, we
think. Over the orange and violet row the Dorothy Perkins showered
masses of vivid pink. A narrow ribbon of bright pale yellow violas ran
between the border and the turf. To connect this mass of startling
colour, an intermediate regiment of lavender-bushes and the cream hues
of the Rêve d’Or roses against their grey-green foliage acted very
successfully. It is not a scheme that one would perhaps have tried
deliberately, but we could not regret it. It does one good sometimes to
steep the senses in such a fine tangle of elementary colour. The shock
is bracing, as of a sea wave; like the march of a military band, we
could enjoy it, in the open air and sunshine, just where it was placed;
away from the house, with its distant background of fir-trees and moors.
Yet it is a mistake to use the word “post-impressionist” in connection
with our border; for that movement, with all its pretended revival of
the old pagan spirit of joy, was only an effort to conceal fundamental
misery. The tango is no dance of gods and nymphs, but a dreadful
merry-go-round of lost souls. The post-impressionist painting is not
a flag of radiant defiance--youth challenging the unbelieved gloom of
life--but a kind of outbreak as of disease: something spotty, fungoid,
shaped like germs under the microscope.
Let us come back to the lilies. Come out of the fever-room into the
garden.
We once tried to make a field of lilies. Our lowest garden has a
different kind of soil fortunately from the greensand which makes the
upper terrace beds such rapacious devourers of manure and fertilizers,
and all the other necessary and unfragrant riches. The Signora took
thought with herself and made a kind of nursery plantation at one end
of the vegetable garden, to the meek despair of our gardener, who,
like all other gardeners, cherishes a cabbage-patch with a passionate
preference. She invested in a good three thousand bulbs, among others,
hundreds of Candidums. Was it a punishment for her extravagance? Many
years of life and experience have taught her that where we sin we are
punished, by as inevitable a law as that of cause and effect. Or was it
just the cursed spite of those wandering devils who, Indian and Irish
folk alike believe, are always hovering ready to pounce upon success?
Whether justice or malice, it is immaterial; the result was disaster.
They had sent up straight spikes of vivid green, untouched by a trace
of the horrible bilious complexion that bespeaks the prevalent disease,
when the May frost came and laid them flat and seared.
After all, they would hardly have been much use in that especial spot,
as far as garden perspective is concerned; and except for the hall and
staircase lilies are not indoor flowers. The Signora loves the warm
fragrance to gush up diffused through the house, but in any room it
becomes overwhelming, almost gross. She does not even care for them
pictorially at close quarters, meaning here the larger kind, including
Candidum. They are essentially open-air flowers; they need the sun and
the wind about them, background and space. It seems almost blasphemous
to say so, but on the nearer sight their appearance becomes like their
scent, a little coarse.
On an altar, once again, they assume their proper proportions; and,
carved in stone, they are decorative and satisfying. But the Arum
lily, which is not a lily at all, long-stemmed, in a vase, with its
own gorgeous leaves about it, is something to sit and gaze at with
ever-increasing content!