Considering that he could not get out anyhow, Twenty-two took the
news of the quarantine calmly. He reflected that, if he was shut in,
Jane Brown was shut in also. He had a wicked hope, at the beginning,
that the Senior Surgical Interne had been shut out, but at nine
o'clock that evening that young gentleman showed up at the door of
his room, said "Cheer-o," came in, helped himself to a cigarette,
gave a professional glance at Twenty-two's toes, which were all that
was un-plastered of the leg, and departing threw back over his
shoulder his sole conversational effort:
"Hell of a mess, isn't it?"
Twenty-two took up again gloomily the book he was reading, which was
on Diseases of the Horse, from the hospital library. He was in the
midst of Glanders.
He had, during most of that day, been making up his mind to let his
family know where he was. He did not think they cared, particularly.
He had no illusions about that. But there was something about Jane
Brown which made him feel like doing the decent thing. It annoyed
him frightfully, but there it was. She was so eminently the sort of
person who believed in doing the decent thing.
So, about seven o'clock, he had sent the orderly out for stamps and
paper. He imagined that Jane Brown would not think writing home on
hospital stationery a good way to break bad news. But the orderly
had stopped for a chat at the engine house, and had ended by playing
a game of dominoes. When, at ten o'clock, he had returned to the
hospital entrance, the richer by a quarter and a glass of beer, he
had found a strange policeman on the hospital steps, and the doors
locked.
The quarantine was on.
Now there are different sorts of quarantines. There is the sort
where a trained nurse and the patient are shut up in a room and
bath, and the family only opens the door and peers in. And there is
the sort where the front door has a placard on it, and the family
goes in and out the back way, and takes a street-car to the office,
the same as usual. And there is the hospital quarantine, which is
the real thing, because hospitals are expected to do things
thoroughly.
So our hospital was closed up as tight as a jar of preserves. There
were policemen at all the doors, quite suddenly. They locked the
doors and put the keys in their pockets, and from that time on they
opened them only to pass things in, such as newspapers or milk or
groceries or the braver members of the Staff. But not to let
anything out--except the Staff. Supposedly Staffs do not carry
germs.
And, indeed, even the Staff was not keen about entering. It thought
of a lot of things it ought to do about visiting time, and
prescribed considerably over the telephone.
At first there was a great deal of confusion, because quite a number
of people had been out on various errands when it happened. And they
came back, and protested to the office that they had only their
uniforms on under their coats, and three dollars; or their slippers
and no hats. Or that they would sue the city. One or two of them got
quite desperate and tried to crawl up the fire-escape, but failed.
This is of interest chiefly because it profoundly affected Jane
Brown. Miss McAdoo, her ward nurse, had debated whether to wash her
hair that evening, or to take a walk. She had decided on the walk,
and was therefore shut out, along with the Junior Medical, the
kitchen cat, the Superintendent's mother-in-law and six other
nurses.
The next morning the First Assistant gave Jane Brown charge of H
ward.
"It's very irregular," she said. "I don't exactly know--you have
only one bad case, haven't you?"
"Only Johnny."
The First Assistant absent-mindedly ran a finger over the top of a
table, and examined it for dust.
"Of course," she said, "it's a great chance for you. Show that you
can handle this ward, and you are practically safe."
Jane Brown drew a long breath and stood up very straight. Then she
ran her eye over the ward. There was something vaguely reminiscent
of Miss McAdoo in her glance.
Twenty-two made three brief excursions back along the corridor
that first day of the quarantine. But Jane Brown was extremely
professional and very busy. There was an air of discipline over the
ward. Let a man but so much as turn over in bed and show an inch of
blanket, and she pounced on the bed and reduced it to the most
horrible neatness. All the beds looked as if they had been made up
with a carpenter's square.
On the third trip, however, Jane Brown was writing at the table.
Twenty-two wheeled himself into the doorway and eyed her with
disapproval.
"What do you mean by sitting down?" he demanded sarcastically.
"Don't you know that now you are in charge you ought to keep
moving?"
To which she replied, absently:
"Three buttered toasts, two dry toasts, six soft boiled eggs, and
twelve soups." She was working on the diet slips.
Then she smiled at him. They were quite old friends already. It is
curious about love and friendship and all those kindred emotions.
They do not grow nearly so fast when people are together as when
they are apart. It is an actual fact that the growth of many an
intimacy is checked by meetings. Because when people are apart it is
what they _are_ that counts, and when they are together it is what
they do and say and look like. Many a beautiful affair has been
ruined because, just as it was going along well, the principals met
again.
However, all this merely means that Twenty-two and Jane Brown were
infinitely closer friends than four or five meetings really
indicates.
The ward was very quiet on this late afternoon call of his save for
Johnny's heavy breathing. There is a quiet hour in a hospital,
between afternoon temperatures and the ringing of the bell which
means that the suppers for the wards are on their way--a quiet hour
when over the long rows of beds broods the peace of the ending day.
It is a melancholy hour, too, because from the streets comes faintly
the echo of feet hurrying home, the eager trot of a horse bound
stableward. To those in the eddy that is the ward comes at this time
a certain heaviness of spirit. Poor thing though home may have been,
they long for it.
In H ward that late afternoon there was a wave of homesickness in
the air, and on the part of those men who were up and about, who
shuffled up and down the ward in flapping carpet slippers, an
inclination to mutiny.
"How did they take it?" Twenty-two inquired. She puckered her
eyebrows.
"They don't like it," she confessed. "Some of them were about ready
to go home and it--_Tony!_" she called sharply.
For Tony, who had been cunningly standing by the window leading to a
fire-escape, had flung the window up and was giving unmistakable
signs of climbing out and returning to the other man's wife.
"Tony!" she called, and ran. Tony scrambled up on the sill. A sort
of titter ran over the ward and Tony, now on the platform outside,
waved a derisive hand through the window.
"Good-bye, mees!" he said, and--disappeared.
It was not a very dramatic thing, after all. It is chiefly
significant for its effect on Twenty-two, who was obliged to sit
frozen with horror and cursing his broken leg, while Jane Brown
raced a brown little Italian down the fire-escape and caught him at
the foot of it. Tony took a look around. The courtyard gates were
closed and a policeman sat outside on a camp-stool reading the
newspaper. Tony smiled sheepishly and surrendered.
Some seconds later Tony and Jane Brown appeared on the platform
outside. Jane Brown had Tony by the ear, and she stopped long enough
outside to exchange the ear for his shoulder, by which she shook
him, vigorously.
Twenty-two turned his chair around and wheeled himself back to his
room. He was filled with a cold rage--because she might have fallen
on the fire-escape and been killed; because he had not been able to
help her; because she was there, looking after the derelicts of
life, when the world was beautiful outside, and she was young;
because to her he was just Twenty-two and nothing more.
He had seen her exactly six times.
Jane Brown gave the ward a little talk that night before the night
nurse reported. She stood in the centre of the long room, beside the
tulips, and said that she was going to be alone there, and that she
would have to put the situation up to their sense of honour. If they
tried to escape, they would hurt her. Also they would surely be
caught and brought back. And, because she believed in a combination
of faith and deeds, she took three nails and the linen-room
flatiron, and nailed shut the window onto the fire-escape.
After that, she brushed crumbs out of the beds with a whiskbroom and
rubbed a few backs with alcohol, and smoothed the counterpanes, and
hung over Johnny's unconscious figure for a little while, giving
motherly pats to his flat pillow and worrying considerably because
there was so little about him to remind her of the Johnny she knew
at home.
After that she sat down and made up her records for the night nurse.
The ward understood, and was perfectly good, trying hard not to muss
its pillows or wrinkle the covers. And struggling, too, with a new
idea. They were prisoners. No more release cards would brighten the
days. For an indefinite period the old Frenchman would moan at
night, and Bader the German would snore, and the Chinaman would
cough. Indefinitely they would eat soft-boiled eggs and rice and
beef-tea and cornstarch.
The ward felt extremely low in its mind.
* * * * *
That night the Senior Surgical Interne went in to play cribbage with
Twenty-two, and received a lecture on leaving a young girl alone in
H with a lot of desperate men. They both grew rather heated over the
discussion and forgot to play cribbage at all. Twenty-two lay awake
half the night, because he had seen clearly that the Senior Surgical
Interne was interested in Jane Brown also, and would probably loaf
around H most of the time since there would be no new cases now. It
was a crowning humiliation to have the night nurse apply to the
Senior Surgical Interne for a sleeping powder for him!
Toward morning he remembered that he had promised to write out from
memory one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese for the First
Assistant, and he turned on the light and jotted down two lines of
it. He wrote:
"_For we two look two ways, and cannot shine
With the same sunlight on our brow and hair._"--
And then sat up in bed for half an hour looking at it because he was
so awfully afraid it was true of Jane Brown and himself. Not, of
course, that he wanted to shine at all. It was the looking two ways
that hurt.
The next evening the nurses took their airing on the roof, which was
a sooty place with a parapet, and in the courtyard, which was an
equally sooty place with a wispy fountain. And because the whole
situation was new, they formed in little groups on the wooden
benches and sang, hands folded on white aprons, heads lifted, eyes
upturned to where, above the dimly lighted windows, the stars peered
palely through the smoke.
The S.S.I. sauntered out. He had thought he saw the Probationer from
his window, and in the new relaxation of discipline he saw a chance
to join her. But the figure he had thought he recognised proved to
be some one else, and he fell to wandering alone up and down the
courtyard.
He was trying to work out this problem: would the advantage of
marrying early and thus being considered eligible for certain
cases, offset the disadvantage of the extra expense?
He decided to marry early and hang the expense.
The days went by, three, then four, and a little line of tension
deepened around Jane Brown's mouth. Perhaps it has not been
mentioned that she had a fighting nose, short and straight, and a
wistful mouth. For Johnny Fraser was still lying in a stupor.
Jane Brown felt that something was wrong. Doctor Willie came in once
or twice, making the long trip without complaint and without hope of
payment. All his busy life he had worked for the sake of work, and
not for reward. He called her "Nellie," to the delight of the ward,
which began to love him, and he spent a long hour each time by
Johnny's bed. But the Probationer was quick to realise that the
Senior Surgical Interne disapproved of him.
That young man had developed a tendency to wander into H at odd
hours, and sit on the edge of a table, leaving Jane Brown divided
between proper respect for an _interne_ and fury over the wrinkling
of her table covers. It was during one of these visits that she
spoke of Doctor Willie.
"Because he is a country practitioner," she said, "you--you
patronise him."
"Not at all," said the Senior Surgical Interne. "Personally I like
him immensely."
"Personally!"
The Senior Surgical Interne waved a hand toward Johnny's bed.
"Look there," he said. "You don't think that chap's getting any
better, do you?"
"If," said Jane Brown, with suspicious quiet, "if you think you know
more than a man who has practised for forty years, and saved more
people than you ever saw, why don't you tell him so?"
There is really no defence for this conversation. Discourse between
a probationer and an _interne_ is supposed to be limited to yea,
yea, and nay, nay. But the circumstances were unusual.
"Tell him!" exclaimed the Senior Surgical Interne, "and be called
before the Executive Committee and fired! Dear girl, I am
inexpressibly flattered, but the voice of an _interne_ in a hospital
is the voice of one crying in the wilderness."
Twenty-two, who was out on crutches that day for the first time, and
was looking very big and extremely awkward, Twenty-two looked back
from the elevator shaft and scowled. He seemed always to see a flash
of white duck near the door of H ward.
To add to his chagrin, the Senior Surgical Interne clapped him on
the back in congratulation a moment later, and nearly upset him. He
had intended to go back to the ward and discuss a plan he had, but
he was very morose those days and really not a companionable person.
He stumped back to his room and resolutely went to bed.
There he lay for a long time looking at the ceiling, and saying, out
of his misery, things not necessary to repeat.
So Twenty-two went to bed and sulked, refusing supper, and having
the word "Vicious" marked on his record by the nurse, who hoped he
would see it some time. And Jane Brown went and sat beside a
strangely silent Johnny, and worried. And the Senior Surgical
Interne went down to the pharmacy and thereby altered a number of
things.
The pharmacy clerk had been shaving--his own bedroom was dark--and
he saw the Senior Surgical Interne in the little mirror hung on the
window frame.
"Hello," he said, over the soap. "Shut the door."
The Senior Surgical Interne shut the door, and then sniffed. "Smells
like a bar-room," he commented.
The pharmacy clerk shaved the left angle of his jaw, and then turned
around.
"Little experiment of mine," he explained. "Simple syrup, grain
alcohol, a dash of cochineal for colouring, and some flavouring
extract. It's an imitation cordial. Try it."
The Senior Surgical Interne was not a drinker, but he was willing
to try anything once. So he secured a two-ounce medicine glass, and
filled it.
"Looks nice," he commented, and tasted it. "It's not bad."
"Not bad!" said the pharmacy clerk. "You'd pay four dollars a bottle
for that stuff in a hotel. Actual cost here, about forty cents."
The Senior Surgical Interne sat down and stretched out his legs. He
had the glass in his hand.
"It's rather sweet," he said. "But it looks pretty." He took another
sip.
After he had finished it, he got to thinking things over. He felt
about seven feet tall and very important, and not at all like a
voice crying in the wilderness. He had a strong inclination to go
into the Superintendent's office and tell him where he went wrong in
running the institution--which he restrained. And another to go up
to H and tell Jane Brown the truth about Johnny Fraser--which he
yielded to.
On the way up he gave the elevator man a cigar.
He was very explicit with Jane Brown.
"Your man's wrong, that's all there is about it," he said. "I can't
say anything and you can't. But he's wrong. That's an operative
case. The Staff knows it."
"Then, why doesn't the Staff do it?"
The Senior Surgical Interne was still feeling very tall. He looked
down at her from a great distance.
"Because, dear child," he said, "it's your man's case. You ought to
know enough about professional ethics for that."
He went away, then, and had a violent headache, which he blamed on
confinement and lack of exercise. But he had sowed something in the
Probationer's mind.
For she knew, suddenly, that he had been right. The Staff had meant
that, then, when they looked at Johnny and shook their heads. The
Staff knew, the hospital knew. Every one knew but Doctor Willie. But
Doctor Willie had the case. Back in her little town Johnny's mother
was looking to Doctor Willie, believing in him, hoping through him.
That night Twenty-two slept, and Jane Brown lay awake. And down in H
ward Johnny Fraser had a bad spell at that hour toward dawn when the
vitality is low, and men die. He did not die, however. But the night
nurse recorded, "Pulse very thin and iregular," at four o'clock.
She, too, was not a famous speller.
During the next morning, while the ward rolled bandages, having
carefully scrubbed its hands first, Jane Brown wrote records--she
did it rather well now--and then arranged the pins in the ward
pincushion. She made concentric circles of safety-pins outside and
common pins inside, with a large H in the centre. But her mind was
not on this artistic bit of creation. It was on Johnny Fraser.
She made up her mind to speak to Doctor Willie.
Twenty-two had got over his sulking or his jealousy, or whatever it
was, and during the early hours, those hours when Johnny was hardly
breathing, he had planned something. He thought that he did it to
interest the patients and make them contented, but somewhere in the
back of his mind he knew it was to see more of Jane Brown. He
planned a concert in the chapel.
So that morning he took Elizabeth, the plaster cast, back to H ward,
where Jane Brown was fixing the pincushion, and had a good minute of
feasting his eyes on her while she was sucking a jabbed finger. She
knew she should have dipped the finger in a solution, but habit is
strong in most of us.
Twenty-two had a wild desire to offer to kiss the finger and make it
well. This, however, was not habit. It was insanity. He recognised
this himself, and felt more than a trifle worried about it, because
he had been in love quite a number of times before, but he had never
had this sort of feeling.
He put the concert up to her with a certain amount of anxiety. If
she could sing, or play, or recite--although he hoped she would not
recite--all would be well. But if she refused to take any part, he
did not intend to have a concert. That was flat.
"I can play," she said, making a neat period after the H on the
pincushion.
He was awfully relieved.
"Good," he said. "You know, I like the way you say that. It's
so--well, it's so competent." He got out a notebook and wrote "Miss
Brown, piano selections."
It was while he was writing that Jane Brown had a sort of mental
picture--the shabby piano at home, kicked below by many childish
feet, but mellow and sweet, like an old violin, and herself sitting
practising, over and over, that part of Paderewski's Minuet where,
as every one knows, the fingering is rather difficult, and outside
the open window, leaning on his broom, worthless Johnny Fraser,
staring in with friendly eyes and an extremely dirty face. To
Twenty-two's unbounded amazement she flung down the cushion and made
for the little ward linen room.
He found her there a moment later, her arms outstretched on the
table and her face buried in them. Some one had been boiling a
rubber tube and had let the pan go dry. Ever afterward Twenty-two
was to associate the smell of burning rubber with Jane Brown, and
with his first real knowledge that he was in love with her.
He stumped in after her and closed the door, and might have ruined
everything then and there by taking her in his arms, crutch and
all. But the smell of burning rubber is a singularly permeating one,
and he was kept from one indiscretion by being discovered in
another.
It was somewhat later that Jane Brown was reprimanded for being
found in the linen room with a private patient. She made no excuse,
but something a little defiant began to grow in her eyes. It was not
that she loved her work less. She was learning, day by day, the
endless sacrifices of this profession she had chosen, its
unselfishness, its grinding hard work, the payment that may lie in a
smile of gratitude, the agony of pain that cannot be relieved. She
went through her days with hands held out for service, and at night,
in the chapel, she whispered soundless little prayers to be
accepted, and to be always gentle and kind. She did not want to
become a machine. She knew, although she had no words for it, the
difference between duty and service.
But--a little spirit of rebellion was growing in her breast. She did
not understand about Johnny Fraser, for one thing. And the matter of
the linen room hurt. There seemed to be too many rules.
Then, too, she began to learn that hospitals had limitations. Jane
Brown's hospital had no social worker. Much as she loved the work,
the part that the hospital could not do began to hurt her. Before
the quarantine women with new babies had gone out, without an idea
of where to spend the night. Ailing children had gone home to such
places as she could see from the dormitory windows, where the work
the hospital had begun could not be finished.
From the roof of the building at night she looked out over a city
that terrified her. The call of a playing child in the street began
to sound to her like the shriek of accident. The very grinding of
the trolley cars, the smoke of the mills, began to mean the
operating room. She thought a great deal, those days, about the
little town she had come from, with its peace and quiet streets. The
city seemed cruel. But now and then she learned that if cities are
cruel, men are kind.
Thus, on the very day of the concert, the quarantine was broken for
a few minutes. It was broken forcibly, and by an officer of the law.
A little newsie, standing by a fire at the next corner, for the
spring day was cold, had caught fire. The big corner man had seen it
all. He stripped off his overcoat, rolled the boy in it, and ran to
the hospital. Here he was confronted by a brother officer, who was
forbidden to admit him. The corner man did the thing that seemed
quickest. He laid the newsie on the ground, knocked out the
quarantine officer in two blows, broke the glass of the door with a
third, slipped a bolt, and then, his burden in his arms, stalked in.
It did not lessen the majesty of that entrance that he was crying
all the time.
The Probationer pondered that story when she heard it. After all,
laws were right and good, but there were higher things than laws.
She went and stood by Johnny's bed for a long time, thinking.
In the meantime, unexpected talent for the concert had developed.
The piano in the chapel proving out of order, the elevator man
proved to have been a piano tuner. He tuned it with a bone forceps.
Strange places, hospitals, into which drift men from every walk of
life, to find a haven and peace within their quiet walls. Old Tony
had sung, in his youth, in the opera at Milan. A pretty young nurse
went around the corridors muttering bits of "Orphant Annie" to
herself. The Senior Surgical Interne was to sing the "Rosary," and
went about practising to himself. He came into H ward and sang it
through for Jane Brown, with his heart in his clear young eyes. He
sang about the hours he had spent with her being strings of pearls,
and all that, but he was really asking her if she would be willing
to begin life with him in a little house, where she would have to
answer the door-bell and watch telephone calls while he was out.
Jane Brown felt something of this, too. For she said: "You sing it
beautifully," although he had flatted at least three times.
He wrote his name on a medicine label and glued it to her hand. It
looked alarmingly possessive.
Twenty-two presided at the concert that night. He was extravagantly
funny, and the sort of creaking solemnity with which things began
turned to uproarious laughter very soon.
Everything went off wonderfully. Tony started his selection too
high, and was obliged to stop and begin over again. And the two
Silversteins, from the children's ward, who were to dance a Highland
fling together, had a violent quarrel at the last moment and had to
be scratched. But everything else went well. The ambulance driver
gave a bass solo, and kept a bar or two ahead of the accompaniment,
dodging chords as he did wagons on the street, and fetching up with
a sort of garrison finish much as he brought in the ambulance.
But the real musical event of the evening was Jane Brown's playing.
She played Schubert without any notes, because she had been taught
to play Schubert that way.
And when they called her back, she played little folk songs of the
far places of Europe. Standing around the walls, in wheeled chairs,
on crutches, pale with the hospital pallor, these aliens in their
eddy listened and thrilled. Some of them wept, but they smiled also.
At the end she played the Minuet, with a sort of flaming look in
her eyes that puzzled Twenty-two. He could not know that she was
playing it to Johnny Fraser, lying with closed eyes in the ward
upstairs. He did not realise that there was a passion of sacrifice
throbbing behind the dignity of the music.
Doctor Willie had stayed over for the concert. He sat, beaming
benevolently, in the front row, and toward the end he got up and
told some stories. After all, it was Doctor Willie who was the real
hit of the evening. The convalescents rocked with joy in their
roller chairs. Crutches came down in loud applause. When he sat down
he slipped a big hand over Jane Brown's and gave hers a hearty
squeeze.
"How d'you like me as a parlour entertainer, Nellie?" he whispered.
She put her other hand over his. Somehow she could not speak.
The First Assistant called to the Probationer that night as she went
past her door. Lights were out, so the First Assistant had a candle,
and she was rubbing her feet with witch hazel.
"Come in," she called. "I have been looking for you. I have some
news for you."
The exaltation of the concert had died away. Jane Brown, in the
candle light, looked small and tired and very, very young.
"We have watched you carefully," said the First Assistant, who had
her night garments on but had forgotten to take off her cap.
"Although you are young, you have shown ability, and--you are to be
accepted."
"Thank you, very much," replied Jane Brown, in a strangled tone.
"At first," said the First Assistant, "we were not sure. You were
very young, and you had such odd ideas. You know that yourself now."
She leaned down and pressed a sore little toe with her forefinger.
Then she sighed. The mention of Jane Brown's youth had hurt her,
because she was no longer very young. And there were times when she
was tired, when it seemed to her that only youth counted. She felt
that way to-night.
When Jane Brown had gone on, she blew out her candle and went to
bed, still in her cap.
Hospitals do not really sleep at night. The elevator man dozes in
his cage, and the night watchman may nap in the engineer's room in
the basement. But the night nurses are always making their sleepless
rounds, and in the wards, dark and quiet, restless figures turn and
sigh.
Before she went to bed that night, Jane Brown, by devious ways,
slipped back to her ward. It looked strange to her, this cavernous
place, filled with the unlovely noises of sleeping men. By the one
low light near the doorway she went back to Johnny's bed, and sat
down beside him. She felt that this was the place to think things
out. In her room other things pressed in on her; the necessity of
making good for the sake of those at home, her love of the work, and
cowardice. But here she saw things right.
The night nurse found her there some time later, asleep, her
hunting-case watch open on Johnny's bed and her fingers still on his
quiet wrist. She made no report of it.
Twenty-two had another sleepless night written in on his record that
night. He sat up and worried. He worried about the way the Senior
Surgical Interne had sung to Jane Brown that night. And he worried
about things he had done and shouldn't have, and things he should
have done and hadn't. Mostly the first. At five in the morning he
wrote a letter to his family telling them where he was, and that he
had been vaccinated and that the letter would be fumigated. He also
wrote a check for an artificial leg for the boy in the children's
ward, and then went to bed and put himself to sleep by reciting the
"Rosary" over and over. His last conscious thought was that the
hours he had spent with a certain person would not make much of a
string of pearls.
The Probationer went to Doctor Willie the next day. Some of the
exuberance of the concert still bubbled in him, although he shook
his head over Johnny's record.
"A little slow, Nellie," he said. "A little slow."
Jane Brown took a long breath.
"Doctor Willie," she said, "won't you have him operated on?"
He looked up at her over his spectacles.
"Operated on? What for?"
"Well, he's not getting any better," she managed desperately.
"I'm--sometimes I think he'll die while we're waiting for him to get
better."
He was surprised, but he was not angry.
"There's no fracture, child," he said gently. "If there is a clot
there, nature is probably better at removing it than we are. The
trouble with you," he said indulgently, "is that you have come here,
where they operate first and regret afterward. Nature is the best
surgeon, child."
She cast about her despairingly for some way to tell him the truth.
But even when she spoke she knew she was foredoomed to failure.
"But--suppose the Staff thinks that he should be?"
Doctor Willie's kindly mouth set itself into grim lines.
"The Staff!" he said, and looked at her searchingly. Then his jaws
set at an obstinate angle.
"Well, Nellie," he said, "I guess one opinion's as good as another
in these cases. And I don't suppose they'll do any cutting and
hacking without my consent." He looked at Johnny's unconscious
figure. "He never amounted to much," he added, "but it's surprising
the way money's been coming in to pay his board here. Your mother
sent five dollars. A good lot of people are interested in him. I
can't see myself going home and telling them he died on the
operating table."
He patted her on the arm as he went out.
"Don't get an old head on those young shoulders yet, Nellie," he
said as he was going. "Leave the worrying to me. I'm used to it."
She saw then that to him she was still a little girl. She probably
would always be just a little girl to him. He did not take her
seriously, and no one else would speak to him. She was quite
despairing.
The ward loved Doctor Willie since the night before. It watched him
out with affectionate eyes. Jane Brown watched him, too, his fine
old head, the sturdy step that had brought healing and peace to a
whole county. She had hurt him, she knew that. She ached at the
thought of it. And she had done no good.
That afternoon Jane Brown broke another rule. She went to Twenty-two
on her off duty, and caused a mild furore there. He had been drawing
a sketch of her from memory, an extremely poor sketch, with one eye
larger than the other. He hid it immediately, although she could not
possibly have recognised it, and talked very fast to cover his
excitement.
"Well, well!" he said. "I knew I was going to have some luck to-day.
My right hand has been itching--or is that a sign of money?" Then he
saw her face, and reduced his speech to normality, if not his heart.
"Come and sit down," he said. "And tell me about it."
But she would not sit down. She went to the window and looked out
for a moment. It was from there she said:
"I have been accepted."
"Good." But he did not, apparently, think it such good news. He drew
a long breath. "Well, I suppose your friends should be glad for
you."
"I didn't come to talk about being accepted," she announced.
"I don't suppose, by any chance, you came to see how I am getting
along?" he inquired humbly.
"I can see that."
"You can't see how lonely I am." When she offered nothing to this
speech, he enlarged on it. "When it gets unbearable," he said, "I
sit in front of the mirror and keep myself company. If that doesn't
make your heart ache, nothing will."
"I'm afraid I have a heart-ache, but it is not that." For a
terrible moment he thought of that theory of his which referred to a
disappointment in love. Was she going to have the unbelievable
cruelty to tell him about it?
"I have to talk to somebody," she said simply. "And I came to you,
because you've worked on a newspaper, and you have had a lot of
experience. It's--a matter of ethics. But really it's a matter of
life and death."
He felt most horribly humble before her, and he hated the lie,
except that it had brought her to him. There was something so direct
and childlike about her. The very way she drew a chair in front of
him, and proceeded, talking rather fast, to lay the matter before
him, touched him profoundly. He felt, somehow, incredibly old and
experienced.
And then, after all that, to fail her!
"You see how it is," she finished. "I can't go to the Staff, and
they wouldn't do anything if I did--except possibly put me out.
Because a nurse really only follows orders. And--I've got to stay,
if I can. And Doctor Willie doesn't believe in an operation and
won't see that he's dying. And everybody at home thinks he is right,
because--well," she added hastily, "he's been right a good many
times."
He listened attentively. His record, you remember, was his own way
some ninety-seven per cent of the time, and at first he would not
believe that this was going to be the three per cent, or a part of
it.
"Well," he said at last, "we'll just make the Staff turn in and do
it. That's easy."
"But they won't. They can't."
"We can't let Johnny die, either, can we?"
But when at last she was gone, and the room was incredibly empty
without her,--when, to confess a fact that he was exceedingly
shame-faced about, he had wheeled over to the chair she had sat in
and put his cheek against the arm where her hand had rested, when he
was somewhat his own man again and had got over the feeling that his
arms were empty of something they had never held--then it was that
Twenty-two found himself up against the three per cent.
The hospital's attitude was firm. It could not interfere. It was an
outside patient and an outside doctor. Its responsibility ended with
providing for the care of the patient, under his physician's orders.
It was regretful--but, of course, unless the case was turned over to
the Staff----
He went back to the ward to tell her, after it had all been
explained to him. But she was not surprised. He saw that, after all,
she had really known he was going to fail her.
"It's hopeless," was all she said. "Everybody is right, and
everybody is wrong."
It was the next day that, going to the courtyard for a breath of
air, she saw a woman outside the iron gate waving to her. It was
Johnny's mother, a forlorn old soul in what Jane Brown recognised as
an old suit of her mother's.
"Doctor Willie bought my ticket, Miss Nellie," she said nervously.
"It seems like I had to come, even if I couldn't get in. I've been
waiting around most all afternoon. How is he?"
"He is resting quietly," said Jane Brown, holding herself very
tense, because she wanted to scream. "He isn't suffering at all."
"Could you tell me which window he's near, Miss Nellie?"
She pointed out the window, and Johnny Fraser's mother stood,
holding to the bars, peering up at it. Her lips moved, and Jane
Brown knew that she was praying. At last she turned her eyes away.
"Folks have said a lot about him," she said, "but he was always a
good son to me. If only he'd had a chance--I'd be right worried,
Miss Nellie, if he didn't have Doctor Willie looking after him."
Jane Brown went into the building. There was just one thing clear in
her mind. Johnny Fraser must have his chance, somehow.
In the meantime things were not doing any too well in the hospital.
A second case, although mild, had extended the quarantine.
Discontent grew, and threatened to develop into mutiny. Six men
from one of the wards marched _en masse_ to the lower hall, and were
preparing to rush the guards when they were discovered. The Senior
Surgical Interne took two prisoners himself, and became an emergency
case for two stitches and arnica compresses.
Jane Brown helped to fix him up, and he took advantage of her
holding a dressing basin near his cut lip to kiss her hand, very
respectfully. She would have resented it under other circumstances,
but the Senior Surgical Interne was, even if temporarily, a patient,
and must be humoured. She forgot about the kiss immediately, anyhow,
although he did not.
Her three months of probation were drawing to a close now, and her
cap was already made and put away in a box, ready for the day she
should don it. But she did not look at it very often.
And all the time, fighting his battle with youth and vigour, but
with closed eyes, and losing it day by day, was Johnny Fraser.
Then, one night on the roof, Jane Brown had to refuse the Senior
Surgical Interne. He took it very hard.
"We'd have been such pals," he said, rather wistfully, after he saw
it was no use.
"We can be, anyhow."
"I suppose," he said with some bitterness, "that I'd have stood a
better chance if I'd done as you wanted me to about that fellow in
your ward, gone to the staff and raised hell."
"I wouldn't have married you," said Jane Brown, "but I'd have
thought you were pretty much of a man."
The more he thought about that the less he liked it. It almost kept
him awake that night.
It was the next day that Twenty-two had his idea. He ran true to
form, and carried it back to Jane Brown for her approval. But she
was not enthusiastic.
"It would help to amuse them, of course, but how can you publish a
newspaper without any news?" she asked, rather listlessly, for her.
"News! This building is full of news. I have some bits already.
Listen!" He took a notebook out of his pocket. "The stork breaks
quarantine. New baby in O ward. The chief engineer has developed a
boil on his neck. Elevator Man arrested for breaking speed limit.
Wanted, four square inches of cuticle for skin grafting in W. How's
that? And I'm only beginning."
Jane Brown listened. Somehow, behind Twenty-two's lightness of tone,
she felt something more earnest. She did not put it into words, even
to herself, but she divined something new, a desire to do his bit,
there in the hospital. It was, if she had only known it, a
milestone in a hitherto unmarked career. Twenty-two, who had always
been a man, was by way of becoming a person.
He explained about publishing it. He used to run a typewriter in
college, and the convalescents could mimeograph it and sell it.
There was a mimeographing machine in the office.
The Senior Surgical Interne came in just then. Refusing to marry him
had had much the effect of smacking a puppy. He came back, a trifle
timid, but friendly. So he came in just then, and elected himself to
the advertising and circulation department, and gave the Probationer
the society end, although it was not his paper or his idea, and sat
down at once at the table and started a limerick, commencing:
"_We're here in the city, marooned_"
However, he never got any further with it, because there are,
apparently, no rhymes for "marooned." He refused "tuned" which
several people offered him, with extreme scorn.
Up to this point Jane Brown had been rather too worried to think
about Twenty-two. She had grown accustomed to seeing him coming
slowly back toward her ward, his eyes travelling much faster than he
did. Not, of course, that she knew that. And to his being, in a way,
underfoot a part of every day, after the Head had made rounds and
was safely out of the road for a good two hours.
But two things happened that day to turn her mind in onto her heart.
One was when she heard about the artificial leg. The other was when
she passed the door of his room, where a large card now announced
"Office of the _Quarantine Sentinel_." She passed the door, and she
distinctly heard most un-hospital-like chatter within. Judging from
the shadows on the glass door, too, the room was full. It sounded
joyous and carefree.
Something in Jane Brown--her mind, probably--turned right around and
looked into her heart, and made an odd discovery. This was that Jane
Brown's heart had sunk about two inches, and was feeling very queer.
She went straight on, however, and put on a fresh collar in her
little bedroom, and listed her washing and changed her shoes,
because her feet still ached a lot of the time. But she was a brave
person and liked to look things in the face. So before she went back
to the ward, she stood in front of her mirror and said:
"You're a nice nurse, Nell Brown. To--to talk about duty and brag
about service, and then to act like a fool."
She went back to the ward and sat beside Johnny. But that night she
went up on the roof again, and sat on the parapet. She could see,
across the courtyard, the dim rectangles of her ward, and around a
corner in plain view, "room Twenty-two." Its occupant was sitting at
the typewriter, and working hard. Or he seemed to be. It was too far
away to be sure. Jane Brown slid down onto the roof, which was not
very clean, and putting her elbows on the parapet, watched him for a
long time. When he got up, at last, and came to the open window, she
hardly breathed. However, he only stood there, looking toward her
but not seeing her.
Jane Brown put her head on the parapet that night and cried. She
thought she was crying about Johnny Fraser. She might have felt
somewhat comforted had she known that Twenty-two, being tired with
his day's work, had at last given way to most horrible jealousy of
the Senior Surgical Interne, and that his misery was to hers as five
is to one.
The first number of the _Quarantine Sentinel_ was a great success.
It served in the wards much the same purpose as the magazines
published in the trenches. It relieved the monotony, brought the
different wards together, furnished laughter and gossip. Twenty-two
wrote the editorials, published the paper, with the aid of a couple
of convalescents, and in his leisure drew cartoons. He drew very
well, but all his girls looked like Jane Brown. It caused a ripple
of talk.
The children from the children's ward distributed them, and went
back from the private rooms bearing tribute of flowers and fruit.
Twenty-two himself developed a most reprehensible habit of
concealing candy in the _Sentinel_ office and smuggling it to his
carriers. Altogether a new and neighbourly feeling seemed to
follow in the wake of the little paper. People who had sulked
in side-by-side rooms began, in the relaxed discipline of
convalescence, to pay little calls about. Crotchety dowagers knitted
socks for new babies. A wave of friendliness swept over every one,
and engulfed particularly Twenty-two.
In the glow of it he changed perceptibly. This was the first
popularity he had ever earned, and the first he had ever cared a
fi-penny bit about. And, because he valued it, he felt more and more
unworthy of it.
But it kept him from seeing Jane Brown. He was too busy for many
excursions to the ward, and when he went he was immediately the
centre of an animated group. He hardly ever saw her alone, and when
he did he began to suspect that she pretended duties that might have
waited.
One day he happened to go back while Doctor Willie was there, and
after that he understood her problem better.
Through it all Johnny lived. His thin, young body was now hardly an
outline under the smooth, white covering of his bed. He swallowed,
faintly, such bits of liquid as were placed between his lips, but
there were times when Jane Brown's fingers, more expert now, could
find no pulse at all. And still she had found no way to give him his
chance.
She made a last appeal to Doctor Willie that day, but he only shook
his head gravely.
"Even if there was an operation now, Nellie," said Doctor Willie
that day, "he could not stand it."
It was the first time that Twenty-two had known her name was Nellie.
That was the last day of Jane Brown's probation. On the next day she
was to don her cap. The _Sentinel_ came out with a congratulatory
editorial, and at nine o'clock that night the First Assistant
brought an announcement, in the Head's own writing, for the paper.
"The Head of the Training School announces with much pleasure the
acceptance of Miss N. Jane Brown as a pupil nurse."
Twenty-two sat and stared at it for quite a long time.
That night Jane Brown fought her battle and won. She went to her
room immediately after chapel, and took the family pictures off her
little stand and got out ink and paper. She put the photographs out
of sight, because she knew that they were counting on her, and she
could not bear her mother's eyes. And then she counted her money,
because she had broken another thermometer, and the ticket home was
rather expensive. She had enough, but very little more.
After that she went to work.
It took her rather a long time, because she had a great deal to
explain. She had to put her case, in fact. And she was not strong on
either ethics or logic. She said so, indeed, at the beginning. She
said also that she had talked to a lot of people, but that no one
understood how she felt--that there ought to be no professional
ethics, or etiquette, or anything else, where it was life or death.
That she felt hospitals were to save lives and not to save feelings.
It seemed necessary, after that, to defend Doctor Willie--without
naming him, of course. How much good he had done, and how he came to
rely on himself and his own opinion because in the country there was
no one to consult with.
However, she was not so gentle with the Staff. She said that it was
standing by and letting a patient die, because it was too polite to
interfere, although they had all agreed among themselves that an
operation was necessary. And that if they felt that way, would they
refuse to pull a child from in front of a locomotive because it was
its mother's business, and she didn't know how to do it?
_Then she signed it._
She turned it in at the _Sentinel_ office the next morning while
the editor was shaving. She had to pass it through a crack in the
door. Even that, however, was enough for the editor in question to
see that she wore no cap.
"But--see here," he said, in a rather lathery voice, "you're
accepted, you know. Where's the--the visible sign?"
Jane Brown was not quite sure she could speak. However, she managed.
"After you read that," she said, "you'll understand."
He read it immediately, of course, growing more and more grave, and
the soap drying on his chin. Its sheer courage made him gasp.
"Good girl," he said to himself. "Brave little girl. But it finishes
her here, and she knows it."
He was pretty well cut up about it, too, because while he was
getting it ready he felt as if he was sharpening a knife to stab her
with. Her own knife, too. But he had to be as brave as she was.
The paper came out at two o'clock. At three the First Assistant,
looking extremely white, relieved Jane Brown of the care of H ward
and sent her to her room.
Jane Brown eyed her wistfully.
"I'm not to come back, I suppose?"
The First Assistant avoided her eyes.
"I'm afraid not," she said.
Jane Brown went up the ward and looked down at Johnny Fraser. Then
she gathered up her bandage scissors and her little dressing forceps
and went out.
The First Assistant took a step after her, but stopped. There were
tears in her eyes.
Things moved very rapidly in the hospital that day, while the guards
sat outside on their camp-stools and ate apples or read the
newspapers, and while Jane Brown sat alone in her room.
First of all the Staff met and summoned Twenty-two. He went down in
the elevator--he had lost Elizabeth a few days before, and was using
a cane--ready for trouble. He had always met a fight more than
halfway. It was the same instinct that had taken him to the fire.
But no one wanted to fight. The Staff was waiting, grave and
perplexed, but rather anxious to put its case than otherwise. It
felt misunderstood, aggrieved, and horribly afraid it was going to
get in the newspapers. But it was not angry. On the contrary, it was
trying its extremely intelligent best to see things from a new
angle.
The Senior Surgical Interne was waiting outside. He had smoked
eighteen cigarettes since he received his copy of the _Sentinel_,
and was as unhappy as an _interne_ can be.
"What the devil made you publish it?" he demanded.
Twenty-two smiled.
"Because," he said, "I have always had a sneaking desire to publish
an honest paper, one where public questions can be discussed. If
this isn't a public question, I don't know one when I see it."
But he was not smiling when he went in.
An hour later Doctor Willie came in. He had brought some flowers for
the children's ward, and his arms were bulging. To his surprise,
accustomed as he was to the somewhat cavalier treatment of the
country practitioner in a big city hospital, he was invited to the
Staff room.
To the eternal credit of the Staff Jane Brown's part in that painful
half hour was never known. The Staff was careful, too, of Doctor
Willie. They knew they were being irregular, and were most
wretchedly uncomfortable. Also, there being six of them against one,
it looked rather like force, particularly since, after the first two
minutes, every one of them liked Doctor Willie.
He took it so awfully well. He sat there, with his elbows on a table
beside a withering mass of spring flowers, and faced the
white-coated Staff, and said that he hoped he was man enough to
acknowledge a mistake, and six opinions against one left him nothing
else to do. The Senior Surgical Interne, who had been hating him
for weeks, offered him a cigar.
He had only one request to make. There was a little girl in the
training school who believed in him, and he would like to go to the
ward and write the order for the operation himself.
Which he did. But Jane Brown was not there.
Late that evening the First Assistant, passing along the corridor in
the dormitory, was accosted by a quiet figure in a blue uniform,
without a cap.
"How is he?"
The First Assistant was feeling more cheerful than usual. The
operating surgeon had congratulated her on the way things had moved
that day, and she was feeling, as she often did, that, after all,
work was a solace for many troubles.
"Of course, it is very soon, but he stood it well." She looked up at
Jane Brown, who was taller than she was, but who always, somehow,
looked rather little. There are girls like that. "Look here," she
said, "you must not sit in that room and worry. Run up to the
operating-room and help to clear away."
She was very wise, the First Assistant. For Jane Brown went, and
washed away some of the ache with the stains of Johnny's operation.
Here, all about her, were the tangible evidences of her triumph,
which was also a defeat. A little glow of service revived in her.
If Johnny lived, it was a small price to pay for a life. If he died,
she had given him his chance. The operating-room nurses were very
kind. They liked her courage, but they were frightened, too. She,
like the others, had been right, but also she was wrong.
They paid her tribute of little kindnesses, but they knew she must
go.
It was the night nurse who told Twenty-two that Jane Brown was in
the operating-room. He was still up and dressed at midnight, but the
sheets of to-morrow's editorial lay blank on his table.
The night nurse glanced at her watch to see if it was time for the
twelve o'clock medicines.
"There's a rumour going about," she said, "that the quarantine's to
be lifted to-morrow. I'll be rather sorry. It has been a change."
"To-morrow," said Twenty-two, in a startled voice.
"I suppose you'll be going out at once?"
There was a wistful note in her voice. She liked him. He had been an
oasis of cheer in the dreary rounds of the night. A very little
more, and she might have forgotten her rule, which was never to be
sentimentally interested in a patient.
"I wonder," said Twenty-two, in a curious tone, "if you will give me
my cane?"
He was clad, at that time, in a hideous bathrobe, purchased by the
orderly, over his night clothing, and he had the expression of a
person who intends to take no chances.
"Thanks," said Twenty-two. "And--will you send the night watchman
here?"
The night nurse went out. She had a distinct feeling that something
was about to happen. At least she claimed it later. But she found
the night watchman making coffee in a back pantry, and gave him her
message.
Some time later Jane Brown stood in the doorway of the
operating-room and gave it a farewell look. Its white floor and
walls were spotless. Shining rows of instruments on clean towels
were ready to put away in the cabinets. The sterilisers glowed in
warm rectangles of gleaming copper. Over all brooded the peace of
order, the quiet of the night.
Outside the operating-room door she drew a long breath, and faced
the night watchman. She had left something in Twenty-two. Would she
go and get it?
"It's very late," said Jane Brown. "And it isn't allowed, I'm sure."
However, what was one more rule to her who had defied them all? A
spirit of recklessness seized her. After all, why not? She would
never see him again. Like the operating-room, she would stand in the
doorway and say a mute little farewell.
Twenty-two's door was wide open, and he was standing in the centre
of the room, looking out. He had heard her long before she came in
sight, for he, too, had learned the hospital habit of classifying
footsteps.
He was horribly excited. He had never been so nervous before. He had
made up a small speech, a sort of beginning, but he forgot it the
moment he heard her, and she surprised him in the midst of trying,
agonisingly, to remember it.
There was a sort of dreadful calm, however, about Jane Brown.
"The watchman says I have left something here."
It was clear to him at once that he meant nothing to her. It was in
her voice.
"You did," he said. And tried to smile.
"Then--if I may have it----"
"I wish to heaven you could have it," he said, very rapidly. "I
don't want it. It's darned miserable."
"It's--what?"
"It's an ache," he went on, still rather incoherent. "A pain. A
misery." Then, seeing her beginning to put on a professional look:
"No, not that. It's a feeling. Look here," he said, rather more
slowly, "do you mind coming in and closing the door? There's a man
across who's always listening."
She went in, but she did not close the door. She went slowly,
looking rather pale.
"What I sent for you for is this," said Twenty-two, "are you going
away? Because I've got to know."
"I'm being sent away as soon as the quarantine is over. It's--it's
perfectly right. I expected it. Things would soon go to pieces if
the nurses took to--took to doing what I did."
Suddenly Twenty-two limped across the room and slammed the door
shut, a proceeding immediately followed by an irritated ringing of
bells at the night nurse's desk. Then he turned, his back against
the door.
"Because I'm going when you do," he said, in a terrible voice. "I'm
going when you go, and wherever you go. I've stood all the waiting
around for a glimpse of you that I'm going to stand." He glared at
her. "For weeks," he said, "I've sat here in this room and listened
for you, and hated to go to sleep for fear you would pass and I
wouldn't be looking through that damned door. And now I've reached
the limit."
A sort of band which had seemed to be fastened around Jane Brown's
head for days suddenly removed itself to her heart, which became
extremely irregular.
"And I want to say this," went on Twenty-two, still in a savage
tone. He was horribly frightened, so he blustered. "I don't care
whether you want me or not, you've got to have me. I'm so much in
love with you that it hurts."
Suddenly Jane Brown's heart settled down into a soft rhythmic
beating that was like a song. After all, life was made up of love
and work, and love came first.
She faced Twenty-two with brave eyes.
"I love you, too--so much that it hurts."
The gentleman across the hall, sitting up in bed, with an angry
thumb on the bell, was electrified to see, on the glass door across,
the silhouette of a young lady without a cap go into the arms of a
very large, masculine silhouette in a dressing-gown. He heard, too,
the thump of a falling cane.
Late that night Jane Brown, by devious ways, made her way back to H
ward. Johnny was there, a strange Johnny with a bandaged head, but
with open eyes.
At dawn, the dawn of the day when Jane Brown was to leave the little
world of the hospital for a little world of two, consisting of a man
and a woman, the night nurse found her there, asleep, her fingers
still on Johnny's thin wrist.
She did not report it.