Time may be measured in different ways--by joys; by throbs of pain;
by instants; by centuries. In a hospital it is marked by night
nurses and day nurses; by rounds of the Staff; by visiting days; by
medicines and temperatures and milk diets and fever baths; by the
distant singing in the chapel on Sundays; by the shift of the
morning sun on the east beds to the evening sun on the beds along
the west windows.
The Avenue Girl lay alone most of the time. The friendly offices of
the ward were not for her. Private curiosity and possible kindliness
were over-shadowed by a general arrogance of goodness. The ward
flung its virtue at her like a weapon and she raised no defence. In
the first days things were not so bad. She lay in shock for a time,
and there were not wanting hands during the bad hours to lift a cup
of water to her lips; but after that came the tedious time when
death no longer hovered overhead and life was there for the asking.
The curious thing was that the Avenue Girl did not ask. She lay for
hours without moving, with eyes that seemed tired with looking into
the dregs of life. The Probationer was in despair.
"She could get better if she would," she said to the _interne_ one
day. The Senior was off duty and they had done the dressing
together. "She just won't try."
"Perhaps she thinks it isn't worth while," replied the _interne_,
who was drying his hands carefully while the Probationer waited for
the towel.
She was a very pretty Probationer.
"She hasn't much to look forward to, you know."
The Probationer was not accustomed to discussing certain things with
young men, but she had the Avenue Girl on her mind.
"She has a home--she admits it." She coloured bravely. "Why--why
cannot she go back to it, even now?"
The _interne_ poured a little rosewater and glycerine into the palm
of one hand and gave the Probationer the bottle. If his fingers
touched hers, she never knew it.
"Perhaps they'd not want her after--well, they'd never feel the
same, likely. They'd probably prefer to think of her as dead and let
it go at that. There--there doesn't seem to be any way back, you
know."
He was exceedingly self-conscious.
"Then life is very cruel," said the Probationer with rather shaky
lips.
And going back to the Avenue Girl's bed she filled her cup with ice
and straightened her pillows. It was her only way of showing
defiance to a world that mutilated its children and turned them out
to die. The _interne_ watched her as she worked. It rather galled
him to see her touching this patient. He had no particular sympathy
for the Avenue Girl. He was a man, and ruthless, as men are apt to
be in such things.
The Avenue Girl had no visitors. She had had one or two at
first--pretty girls with tired eyes and apologetic glances; a
negress who got by the hall porter with a box of cigarettes, which
the Senior promptly confiscated; and--the Dummy. Morning and evening
came the Dummy and stood by her bed and worshipped. Morning and
evening he brought tribute--a flower from the masses that came in
daily; an orange, got by no one knows what trickery from the
kitchen; a leadpencil; a box of cheap candies. At first the girl had
been embarrassed by his visits. Later, as the unfriendliness of the
ward grew more pronounced, she greeted him with a faint smile. The
first time she smiled he grew quite pale and shuffled out. Late that
night they found him sitting in the chapel looking at the window,
which was only a blur.
For certain small services in the ward the Senior depended on the
convalescents--filling drinking cups; passing milk at eleven and
three; keeping the white bedspreads in geometrical order. But the
Avenue Girl was taboo. The boycott had been instituted by Old
Maggie. The rampant respectability of the ward even went so far as
to refuse to wash her in those early morning hours when the night
nurse, flying about with her cap on one ear, was carrying tin basins
about like a blue-and-white cyclone. The Dummy knew nothing of the
washing; the early morning was the time when he polished the brass
doorplate which said: Hospital and Free Dispensary. But he knew
about the drinking cup and after a time that became his
self-appointed task.
On Sundays he put on his one white shirt and a frayed collar two
sizes too large and went to chapel. At those times he sat with his
prayer book upside down and watched the Probationer who cared for
his lady and who had no cap to hide her shining hair, and the
_interne_, who was glad there was no cap because of the hair. God's
fool he was, indeed, for he liked to look in the _interne's_ eyes,
and did not know an _interne_ cannot marry for years and years, and
that a probationer must not upset discipline by being engaged. God's
fool, indeed, who could see into the hearts of men, but not into
their thoughts or their lives; and who, seeing only thus, on two
dimensions of life and not the third, found the Avenue Girl holy and
worthy of all worship!
* * * * *
The Probationer worried a great deal.
"It must hurt her so!" she said to the Senior. "Did you see them
call that baby away on visiting day for fear she would touch it?"
"None are so good as the untempted," explained the Senior, who had
been beautiful and was now placid and full of good works. "You
cannot remake the world, child. Bodies are our business here--not
souls." But the next moment she called Old Maggie to her.
"I've been pretty patient, Maggie," she said. "You know what I mean.
You're the ringleader. Now things are going to change, or--you'll go
back on codliver oil to-night."
"Yes'm," said Old Maggie meekly, with hate in her heart. She loathed
the codliver oil.
"Go back and straighten her bed!" commanded the Senior sternly.
"Now?"
"Now!"
"It hurts my back to stoop over," whined Old Maggie, with the ward
watching. "The doctor said that I----"
The Senior made a move for the medicine closet and the bottles
labelled C.
"I'm going," whimpered Old Maggie. "Can't you give a body time?"
And she went down to defeat, with the laughter of the ward in her
ears--down to defeat, for the Avenue Girl would have none of her.
"You get out of here!" she said fiercely as Old Maggie set to work
at the draw sheet. "Get out quick--or I'll throw this cup in your
face!"
The Senior was watching. Old Maggie put on an air of benevolence and
called the Avenue Girl an unlovely name under her breath while she
smoothed her pillow. She did not get the cup, but the water out of
it, in her hard old face, and matters were as they had been.
The Girl did not improve as she should. The _interne_ did the
dressing day after day, while the Probationer helped him--the Senior
disliked burned cases--and talked of skin grafting if a new powder
he had discovered did no good. _Internes_ are always trying out new
things, looking for the great discovery.
The powder did no good. The day came when, the dressing over and the
white coverings drawn up smoothly again over her slender body, the
Avenue Girl voiced the question that her eyes had asked each time.
"Am I going to lie in this hole all my life?" she demanded.
The _interne_ considered.
"It isn't healing--not very fast anyhow," he said. "If we could get
a little skin to graft on you'd be all right in a jiffy. Can't you
get some friends to come in? It isn't painful and it's over in a
minute."
"Friends? Where would I get friends of that sort?"
"Well, relatives then--some of your own people?"
The Avenue Girl shut her eyes as she did when the dressing hurt her.
"None that I'd care to see," she said. And the Probationer knew she
lied. The _interne_ shrugged his shoulders.
"If you think of any let me know. We'll get them here," he said
briskly, and turned to see the Probationer rolling up her sleeve.
"Please!" she said, and held out a bare white arm. The _interne_
stared at it stupefied. It was very lovely.
"I am not at all afraid," urged the Probationer, "and my blood is
good. It would grow--I know it would."
The _interne_ had hard work not to stoop and kiss the blue veins
that rose to the surface in the inner curve of her elbow. The
dressing screens were up and the three were quite alone. To keep his
voice steady he became stern.
"Put your sleeve down and don't be a foolish girl!" he, commanded.
"Put your sleeve down!" His eyes said: "You wonder! You beauty! You
brave little girl!"
Because the Probationer seemed to take her responsibilities rather
to heart, however, and because, when he should have been thinking of
other things, such as calling up the staff and making reports, he
kept seeing that white arm and the resolute face above it, the
_interne_ worked out a plan.
"I've fixed it, I think," he said, meeting her in a hallway where
he had no business to be, and trying to look as if he had not known
she was coming. "Father Feeny was in this morning and I tackled him.
He's got a lot of students--fellows studying for the priesthood--and
he says any daughter of the church shall have skin if he has to flay
'em alive."
"But--is she a daughter of the church?" asked the Probationer. "And
even if she were, under the circumstances----"
"What circumstances?" demanded the _interne_. "Here's a poor girl
burned and suffering. The father is not going to ask whether she's
of the anointed."
The Probationer was not sure. She liked doing things in the open and
with nothing to happen later to make one uncomfortable; but she
spoke to the Senior and the Senior was willing. Her chief trouble,
after all, was with the Avenue Girl herself.
"I don't want to get well," she said wearily when the thing was put
up to her. "What's the use? I'd just go back to the same old thing;
and when it got too strong for me I'd end up here again or in the
morgue."
"Tell me where your people live, then, and let me send for them."
"Why? To have them read in my face what I've been, and go back home
to die of shame?"
The Probationer looked at the Avenue Girl's face.
"There--there is nothing in your face to hurt them," she said,
flushing--because there were some things the Probationer had never
discussed, even with herself. "You--look sad. Honestly, that's all."
The Avenue Girl held up her thin right hand. The forefinger was
still yellow from cigarettes.
"What about that?" she sneered.
"If I bleach it will you let me send for your people?"
"I'll--perhaps," was the most the Probationer could get.
Many people would have been discouraged. Even the Senior was a bit
cynical. It took a Probationer still heartsick for home to read in
the Avenue Girl's eyes the terrible longing for the things she had
given up--for home and home folks; for a clean slate again. The
Probationer bleached and scrubbed the finger, and gradually a little
of her hopeful spirit touched the other girl.
"What day is it?" the Avenue Girl asked once.
"Friday."
"That's baking day at home. We bake in an out-oven. Did you ever
smell bread as it comes from an out-oven?" Or: "That's a pretty
shade of blue you nurses wear. It would be nice for working in the
dairy, wouldn't it?"
"Fine!" said the Probationer, and scrubbed away to hide the triumph
in her eyes.