IN HOSPITAL
After the first twenty-four hours with Gregory nothing seemed real to
Freda outside of the hospital. She had found for herself a hotel room, a
shabby little room in a second rate hotel, a room with scarred brown
maple bureau and iron bed from which the paint had peeled. It looked out
on a fire escape and a narrow court, helplessly trapped between tall
brick walls.
To that room she went for her periods of rest, for the hospital had no
vacant room or even bed, where she might relax. After she had gone to
the hotel from the hospital several times the way seemed curiously
familiar. Two blocks to the east, across the street car line, past the
drug store with its structure of Tanlac in the window--one block to the
north and there was the entrance of the hotel with seven or eight broad
cement steps leading up to it. There was not one thing which she passed
which impressed itself in the least on her imagination--not one image
that was vivid enough to penetrate. Night and day it was the same--like
moving blindfolded through still air. It was only when she went back to
the hospital that her mind seemed to stir from its lethargy.
The hardest moments were those of Gregory’s lucidity--when the sight of
her made him flame with a passion which leapt through his restricted and
suffering body, when phrases came to his hot lips which made her quiver
with the sense of him. She would kneel beside his bed and tell him
softly reassuring things and with his head turned on his pillow he would
regard her from the depths of those eyes, always haggardly set, but now
far sunken.
She had no faintest doubts as to her past or present actions. That was
Freda’s great triumph over most of the women she knew. She did not
doubt; she did not worry. Most of them had carried over into their new
self-confidence and their new chances a habit of worry born of ingrowing
responsibilities in the past and now fostered by general
self-consciousness. It was unnatural to Freda to mope over her actions
or to analyze them. She knew how to go ahead and there always was
absence of self-consciousness about what she did, simplicity of manner,
dignity of step. It was as if she had somehow stepped over the phase of
altercation, doubt and experiment into a manner which did the unusual
easily, but only if the unusual came in her path, which accepted new
rules, new customs without a flush, and most of all was able to merge
the best of feminism into a fine yet unchristened ease of sex. She did
not need either the little fears or defenses of her mother or the larger
ones of Margaret Duffield. It did not occur to her that she was very
complete in herself and satisfying to herself. She bothered with no
altercations or analysis.
It was not a wholly sad time for all the deepening anxiety and
danger--it was not a time for depression. Freda knew that she had come
to grips with life and she was glad to feel her full strength called to
battle.
While they wondered about her in St. Pierre, while her name ran like a
little germ of gossip spreading contagion from lip to lip in St. Pierre,
she sat most of the time in the hospital, in the chair beside Gregory’s
bed, touching his hot, tense wrist with the coolness of her fingers--she
sat outside his room in the recess of the bay windows on a curved window
seat and watched people come and go--and once in a while she slipped
into the hospital library and got hold of a book on pregnancy which
fascinated her. Skillfully manipulated conversation with the nurse had
given her enough information so that she had been able to control a
great part of her own present liability to sickness and she felt better
than she had for several weeks.
Three days after her arrival Gregory came successfully through the first
crisis of his illness. Freda walked on air the next day. The doctor was
cheerful and jocose.
“We’ll have that young Irishman of yours out of the woods in ten days,”
he said to Freda, and she had no doubt of it.
The difficulty was not in the progress of the disease but in Gregory’s
own debility. He was not so well a few days later. The doctor talked
gravely of exhaustion and Freda picked up from the reluctant nurse that
exhaustion during the third week was dangerous--that one might die
because of it.
For the first time she was fearful. Here was nothing you could combat
for him. Here was a slow slipping away. He did not often talk now.
Almost all the time he lay, incredibly thin, mournfully haggard against
his pillow, too tired even for Freda to call back.
She thought about death. One day she passed a room in which a man was
dying. She heard the raucous gasp from the filling lungs and trembled.
They brought a priest. She wondered. If Gregory should die, would he too
have a priest to guide him out? She supposed that usually you sent for a
minister or priest. A month before the mere suggestion that a soul
needed ushering into immortality would have seemed absurd to her healthy
pagan young mind, but now, with the severing of the thread so possible,
with the limits of the unknown receding even while they grew close she
wondered. Gregory was not formally religious but in his poems he had
seemed so conscious of God.
“Most poets write of women--but you write only of God and Ireland.” So
she had said to him, she remembered, and he had answered.
“I shall write of woman now, dear heart.”
She went softly to his door. No change. Well, she should go to the hotel
for an hour--But the nurse stopped her.
“Mrs. Macmillan, he is not so well. The doctor thinks these next twelve
hours will be the worst. If you wish to leave I think it will be all
right. If not, I can see that you get a supper tray and if he is better
in the night you can take my cot.”
Freda felt a strange chill rushing over her.
“I’ll stay.” She looked at Gregory. “Worse? He looks just the same.”
“He is weaker--”
The stillness of the phrase--the helplessness. She sat down in the chair
by him again. It seemed so absurd not to call him back--so impotent. He
looked unguarded. If--if he should die he would go--wherever it
was--there must be a future for a soul like Gregory’s somewhere--he
would go alone. Cruel. She thought of the child growing within her. How
much more gentle was birth than death. Gentle and gradual and kind. It
was shared, but this horrible singleness of dying--
She had supper in the nurse’s kitchen. The nurses were kind to her,
faintly curious, preoccupied, full of that gayety so characteristic of
nurses when for an hour they can slip out of the technique of the manner
which they affect and become informal, unrestrained. The shadow of
Gregory’s crisis rested on them not at all, Freda thought. She was not
resentful. But she ate to please the nurse who had managed to get the
supper for her and then went quickly back to Gregory. If it should
happen when she was away! It must not. She must go there to keep it
from happening. Surely she could. Surely she could.
She did not sleep. The nurse watched on one side, she on the other, the
nurse nodding a little and Freda shaking off the fearful drowsiness that
came over her too. She did not want to sleep. She was afraid that if she
slept, it might happen. It was like sentry duty. As long as she was
awake such a thing would not happen. She did not name death in her
thoughts. It was like invoking a presence. She understood trite phrases
as she thought--the triteness of “he has left us,” “passed on,” “was
called.” How those phrases irked her in the newspapers sometimes. But
they were true. It was like that. She heard the soft rise and fall of
the nurse’s breathing. She was asleep--no, not quite.
Now and then he moved a little. His troubled breathing seemed to sigh,
slight, weary sighs. Freda bent close over him. Here we are, she
thought, he and I and him within me. We must stay close, closer than
death can come.
Three hours later, with the gray light coming so early into the room,
the nurse, who had slept a little, roused herself, busy immediately with
the routine of temperature taking, her cap a little askew, her face
puffed with uncompleted sleep.
“Well, we got through that night all right,” she said cheerfully,
softly. “And our patient looks better, Mrs. Macmillan. Look at
him--doesn’t he?”
Freda looked shakily at him. It seemed almost true. He seemed to be
sleeping almost naturally.
“Then you think he’s come through?” she ventured.
The nurse straightened her cap professionally.
“Well, I should say that bad turn he took last night would be the last.
He’ll be coming along now. We’ll get some nourishment into him pretty
soon. You go over to the hotel and get some sleep--no, lie down here on
my cot. You look weak.”
* * * * *
And now it was a new atmosphere--an atmosphere of convalescence, of
Gregory coming slowly back to life, visibly changing for the better,
smiling, joking feebly, watching her wonderingly and devotedly, talking
when he was allowed.
“It’s such a ridiculous way to begin housekeeping,” Freda would tease
him, gently.
“It’s a maddening way and a marvelous way--to have all day to watch you
and adore you and not to dare to pull you into my arms for fear a nurse
will pop out on me.”
“You may be sure one would.”
“How long do I have to stay here?”
“A wheeled chair next week if you are good and don’t get excited.”
“A wheeled chair--when I want a highway with you beside me--”
“If you’re impatient--” she stopped to smile at him.
“Listen, Freda--we go straight off together, don’t we?”
“Off where?”
“Back home.”
“We should stop to see my father and my mother. Do you know, Gregory, I
didn’t even tell any one where I was going. I just came. I suppose
they’re all mystified and probably worried. Though I wrote them not to
be.”
“Well, we’ll stop to tell your parents. And then off for Ireland.”
“Have we enough money?” asked Freda.
“Plenty. I have it somewhere. Let me see. It was a black bill
case--maybe you could find it for me. Black bill case with an elastic
band around it. There’s about five hundred. They paid me in
notes--(bills, you say)--at these last places and I meant to get post
office orders. Much safer. Hunt it up, will you, darling? And you might
be looking up passage.”
“Passage for weeks from now,” she said sternly. But she was as eager as
he and they smiled at each other, doubled, trebled in happiness now that
their storm had come and they had been able to weather it together.
She went on the trail of the black bill case and found it easily enough.
It was, with Gregory’s few valuables, in the possession of the hospital
office. In it were some papers, some letters and twenty-three dollars.
Her heart fell with a thump.
“Is this all there was?”
“His watch too--we never leave valuables with sick patients who have no
relatives about. They might get picked up and the hospital be considered
responsible.”
“I mean all the money?”
The nurse in charge of the office wrinkled her forehead and looked at
the note regarding Gregory on her record.
“Black bill case--letters--papers--twenty-three dollars in currency.
That’s what he brought here. Is that correct? We’ve kept the bill case
in our safe, of course.”
She looked questioningly at Freda.
“That’s what is here,” said Freda, “but you see my husband thought there
was more--quite a lot more. I wonder was he sick in the hotel long?”
But the hotel was a blind trail and a suspicious one. The chambermaid
who had called the doctor for Gregory had left the town--strangely
enough two days after he was taken sick. She had never been a competent
girl--The hotel courteously disclaimed all responsibility and hoped the
loss was not great. There was a safe in the office--guests were
requested and so forth--.
“Of course,” said Freda, “I quite understand.” She did. She understood
that the money had vanished and that it was not coming back to her or to
Gregory. She went back to her hotel room and counted what money she had.
With Gregory’s present resources they had fifty dollars between them.
And there was an unpaid nurse at five dollars a day--hospital bills,
doctor bills, doubtless bills for all the medicines. All those things
and no money to meet them, she pondered. Besides she must not tell
Gregory. She must not worry him just now or disappoint him. The nurse
wanted him kept calm and cheerful. But in the meantime, what was she to
do?
It was hard going back to the hospital and facing the nurse. The nurse
was so good to her and Freda felt miserably that to let her be so good
when there was no money to pay her was deceiving. She herself was hot
and troubled. Her clothes were an annoyance. She had only three blouses
and one of those was torn at the neck irremediably. It was hard to keep
cheerful when you needed fresh clothes so badly and had hardly enough
money to pay the hotel bill mounting up against you. But she forgot all
that in the presence of Gregory. He was feeling better this afternoon
than he had up to that time, his convalescence taking one of those quick
strides so encouraging to those who watch. The nurse had propped him up
on his pillows and he wanted Freda beside him.
So she let the matter drift and when he asked if she had found the bill
case she told him “yes.”
“Then that’s all right,” he said gaily, and saved her the lie she had
ready. Nor did he waste more time on money. He wanted to talk of other
things, to ask her questions and it was that afternoon that she dared to
tell him that she expected their child, and to let herself relax a
little in the companionship of his happiness and the comfort of his
reverence.
But when she went back to the hotel she could not bring herself to order
supper. The menu stared at her--with ducklings and roasts and table
d’hotes. Figure as she would, she could not order a supper for less than
a dollar. So she pleaded a headache to the waiter and left the table to
go supperless to her room and then to bed, for the nurse had said
Gregory must be quiet that evening.