HOW POLLY WENT HOME
"We'll have to move poor Polly, if she lives thro' the night," the
nurse said to the house doctor in the hospital that night. "She is
making all the patients homesick. To hear her calling for her mother or
for 'someone from 'ome' is hard on the sick and well."
"What are her chances do you think?" the doctor asked gravely.
He was a wiry little man with a face like leather, but his touch
brought healing and his presence, hope.
"She is dying of homesickness as well as typhoid," the nurse said
sadly, "and she seems so anxious to get better, poor thing! She often
says 'I can't die miss, for what'll happen mother.' But for the last
two days, in her delirium, she seems to be worrying more about her work
and her flowers. I think they were pretty hard people she lived with.
'Surely she'll praise me this time,' she often says, 'I've tried my
'ardest.' The strenuous life has been too much for poor Polly. Listen
to her now!"
Polly was singing. Clear and steady and sweet, her voice rang over the
quiet ward, and many a fevered face was raised to listen. Polly's mind
was wandering in the shadows, but she still sang the songs of home in a
strange land:
Down by the biller there grew a green willer
A weeping all night with the bank for a piller.
And over and over again she sang with a wavering cadence, incoherently
sometimes, but always with tender pleading, something about "where the
stream was a-flowin', the gentle kine lowin', and over my grave keep
the green willers growin'."
"It is pathetic to hear her," the nurse said, "and now listen to her
asking about her poppies."
"In the box, miss; I brought the seed hacross the hocean, and they wuz
beauties, they wuz wot came hup. They'll be noddin' and wavin' now red
and 'andsome, if she hasn't cut them. She wouldn't cut them, would she,
miss? She couldn't 'ave the 'eart, I think."
"No indeed, she hasn't cut them," the nurse declared with decision,
taking Polly's burning hand tenderly in hers. "No one could cut down
such beauties. What nonsense to think of such a thing, Polly. They're
blooming, I tell you, red and handsome, almost as tall as you are,
Polly."
The office-boy touched the nurse's arm.
"A gentleman who gave no name left this box for one of the typhoid
patients," he said, handing her the box.
The nurse read the address and the box trembled in her hands as she
nervously opened it and took out the contents.
"Polly, Polly!" she cried, excitedly, "didn't I tell you they were
blooming, red and handsome."
But Polly's eyes were burning with delirium and her lips babbled
meaninglessly.
The nurse held the poppies over her.
Her arms reached out caressingly.
"Oh, miss!" she cried, her mind coming back from the shadows. "They
have come at last, the darlin's, the sweethearts, the loves, the
beauties." She held them in a close embrace. "They're from 'ome,
they're from 'ome!" she gasped painfully, for her breath came with
difficulty now. "I can't just see them, miss, the lights is movin' so
much, and the way the bed 'eaves, but, tell me, miss, is there a little
silky one, hedged with w'ite? It was mother's favourite one of hall.
I'd like to 'ave it in my 'and, miss."
The nurse put it in her hand. She was only a young nurse and her face
was wet with tears.
"It's like 'avin' my mother's 'and, miss, it is," she murmured softly.
"Ye wouldn't mind the dark if ye 'ad yer mother's 'and, would ye, miss?"
And then the nurse took Polly's throbbing head in her strong young
arms, and soothed its restless tossing with her cool soft touch, and
told her through her tears of that other Friend, who would go with her
all the way.
"I'm that 'appy, miss," Polly murmured faintly. "It's like I was goin'
'ome. Say that again about the valley," and the nurse repeated tenderly
that promise of incomparable sweetness:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me,
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
"It's just like 'avin' mother's 'and to 'old the little silky one,"
Polly murmured sleepily.
The nurse put the poppies beside Polly's face on the pillow, and
drawing a screen around her went on to the next patient. A case of
urgent need detained her at the other end of the ward, and it was not
until the dawn was shining blue in the windows that she came back on
her rounds.
Polly lay just as she had left her. The crimson petals lay thick upon
her face and hair. The homesickness and redness of weeping had gone
forever from her eyes, for they were looking now upon the King in his
beauty! In her hand, now cold and waxen, she held one little silky
poppy, red with edges of white. Polly had gone home.
There was a whisper among the poppies that grew behind the cookhouse
that morning as the first gleam of the sun came yellow and wan over the
fields; there was a whisper and a shivering among the poppies as the
morning breezes, cold and chill, rippled over them, and a shower of
crystal drops mingled with the crimson petals that fluttered to the
ground. It was not until Pearl came out and picked a handful of them
for her dingy little room that they held up their heads once more and
waved and nodded, red and handsome.