When their examination was over she was frightened. You could not go
over any human being that thoroughly without finding something wrong,
and her nurse’s disdain for a person who allowed herself to get sick
disturbed her considerably. Suppose they really did find something and
kept her in bed here a month? A lot more than she had bargained for ...
that!
Mrs. Witherspoon laid down her crocheting and peered at the little
nurse’s pale face.
“They did you up kinda bad, dearie. All them blood tests and things.
Severe I calls it. A body can’t even keep her corns nowadays!”
Rose Standish laughed in spite of herself.
“Oh, I didn’t mind. A nurse gets used to things.”
“I reckin’ you right. I reckin’ you right. It’s pow’ful sad the amount a
body can put up with, whin you is used to it. Take me, dearie. I had
eleven children. Four breeches presentations, three feet, three dry, and
one nat’rul. And would you believe it, the nat’rul was the wors’! It
lef’ me kinda flat fo’ months. A body gits prepared to put up wid things
... thet hurts ... now things like this sugar business ... no pain, nor
nuthin’ ... you can’t get resisted fur.”
“Relaxation, Mrs. Witherspoon, is the best weapon with which to fight
disease. I’m tired. I think I’ll take a nap.”
“Do you good, dearie. Excitement and all, and then puttin’ you in thet
bed, too. Death-beds is weakenin’. It takes a sunnin’ every day and a
good six months to make a mattress lose a death struggle.”
Rose Standish turned her face to the window and closed her eyes, and
shivered. “Lose your heart, lose your appendix, lose anything, but don’t
lose your nerves,” was what Tony always said.
Ridiculous to be feeling like this. Crazy. Perhaps if she tried to think
about something else, then her feet would quit perspiring. Think about
the way Dr. MacArthur had looked when she offered to come ... Galsworthy
said that your mouth was what you had become but your eyes were what you
were.... Dr. MacArthur’s eyes were like wave crests against a blue, blue
sky. Clean and deep and clear, when he had turned them into her, stood
up, and said:
“You have done more for me in fifteen minutes than anybody in the
hospital has ever done. You have picked me out of despair.”
She began to tremble again and then she realized that it was the way he
had looked when he said it that made her tremble. That look was the
grandest thing that had happened to her since Tony kissed her the day he
died.
Of course she must expect to be jumpy, to feel fidgetty, to get dry in
the throat; good heavens, all of that was perfectly natural under the
circumstances! Dr. MacArthur had even told her to expect it, and he had
said:
“If you get scared, shift your mind to something else. You are like a
doctor observing an operation, you are like an important actress
watching a play of which she knows all of the lines being enacted by
amateurs. Remember what you used to do as a student nurse and see,” and
then he smiled wryly, “if the routine has changed one second’s worth. I
bet it hasn’t.”
She opened her eyes and felt better. She looked at her watch and found
it was four forty-five. Time to bring the patients in off the porch and
prepare for supper. Behind her she heard a voice and turned over. The
woman, whose bed stood next to Mrs. Witherspoon’s, had been rolled into
place already!
She was as insignificant as a dried corn stalk. Heart case probably.
That queer revived look a wilted flower has when you stick the stem in
hot aspirin water. She was saying:
“The air was swell! It’s comin’ on cool and ’pears like we may get a
thunder shower by bed-time.”
Across from Rose Standish’s bed had been rolled that of a tremendously
fat woman. Some sort of thyroid insufficiency. The outlines of her obese
legs were visible under the sheets. Rose shivered. Nice job bathing a
hog like that. She had seen one in the accident room last winter with
secondary burns. Fat, layers and layers and layers. Awful to operate
upon!
The woman smiled at her and began speaking:
“New?”
“Yes. Miss Standish,” Mrs. Witherspoon supplied.
Rose bowed politely.
The fat woman whispered loudly:
“I seen her, Mrs. With’spoon!”
“Seen who?”
“Seen ... Her...!”
“Y’did!”
“Who is ‘Her’?” Rose asked.
The fat woman toppled with knowledge. Mrs. Witherspoon snatched the
words from her parting lips.
“The patient in Room Two. They say she was hurt in a bus acci-dent. But
thet was Thursday, an’ she ain’t daid yit. The windie shade is always
drawed and the nurses acts like she ain’t no sicker then the rest....”
“She’s awful prutty,” the fat woman tried to interrupt.
Mrs. Witherspoon continued:
“Callin’ thim dyin’ patient rooms an’ puttin’ thim ’tween the ward an’
the porch! I ain’t no hosbittle fixer, but it ’pears to me, I’d a put
’em closen onto the nurse’s dest....”
Rose Standish laughed softly.
“For a dying patient, Mrs. Witherspoon, the Head Nursing Office sends a
general duty nurse to do ‘special charting’. So dying patients have
private nurses. It doesn’t matter where the rooms are.”
“She ain’t got no privett nurse!” the heavy woman hissed.
“Perhaps the hospital was full and they put her there when she came in
and can’t risk moving her. Have you been here long?” Rose said.
The woman lifted her pendulous breasts and swung them out from the body.
“Whew! Hot today! Three weeks goin’ on Monday, mam. Long enough to know
thet I wouldn’t sleep in thet bed, you is in, not for a million
dollars.”
“What’s the matter with it?” Rose inquired demurely.
“It’s ... it’s ...” her breasts rested upon her bed as she leaned
forward, “It’s a death....”
But Miss Kexter’s appearance on the ward brought her speech to a sudden
halt. She flopped her body back upon the pillows and smiled weakly.
“When I think of all the clothes I got to wash whin I get outa here. I
prides myself my chillun is the cleanest goin’, and the teachers always
seys so, too. In all the health campaigns at School 17, Willie is always
chose....”
But Rose Standish heard no more. Miss Kexter was standing beside her bed
and saying, “When did you decide to be sick?” Miss Standish caught the
sarcastic banter in her voice and replied lightly, “I haven’t. And I
hope I aren’t.”
Miss Kexter stood perplexedly by for a moment, pondering that phrase. “I
aren’t, I am not, I aren’t,” she kept saying it over and over to
herself. Rose Standish had been to college. She couldn’t be wrong, yet
that didn’t sound right, somehow ... “I aren’t.”
“Sorry this happened to you when the infirmary was closed. You must hate
it on a ward. Hard as we work, I must say in spite of the depression, I
think the nurses ought to be allowed to be sick in private, don’t you?”
“Don’t know,” Rose’s voice had taken on its accident room clip, but the
tone was conversational. “Came so suddenly hadn’t thought about it.
Awful jolt in a way. Glad to be put anywhere, just so it’s the Elijah
Wilson.”
“How did you find it out?” Miss Kexter’s voice had lost the skepticism.
“Oh, I don’t know. Been running an afternoon temperature, and then
yesterday I spit a little blood, so I went to Dr. Cub Sterling.” She
shrugged her shoulders despairingly.
“That’s a shame.” Miss Kexter’s voice, like her face, was shallow and
flat. “You don’t mind that bed, do you?”
Rose’s “No. Why?” was casual.
“Oh, nothing. Just that three patients went out in it this week and they
put us on the spot about it.” She had leaned forward and her whisper was
flat, also. “There’s been holy hell around here. They were all patients
of Father and Son.”
“Anybody know what killed them?” Rose’s voice was curiously inquiring.
“The Angels, darling. How the hell should I know? Even ‘Foots’ hasn’t
seen their charts since autopsy and is she mad? ’Bout to bust a
brassiere!”
Rose Standish laughed in spite of herself. The thought of Miss Roenna
Kerr bursting a brassiere fitted in perfectly with her own suppressed
hysteria.
Her laugh was high and thin and flutelike. It saved her tears. It
cleared her system. All of her accumulating fear escaped into it.
Miss Kexter’s common face expanded into a grin.
“Shut up, Standish,” she begged, “or _you’ll_ bust a lung.”
Rose didn’t wait to simmer down. She hushed immediately. She had, for
the moment, forgotten she was ill.
The woman with the pendulous breasts swayed forward and said, “Let a
fellow in on the joke, sister.”
But Mrs. Witherspoon’s raucous voice demanded, “Tend to me, Miss Kexter.
A pan, quick!” And as she ran from the ward Miss Kexter turned and
ordered, “Don’t talk to Miss Standish, now. She’s got to be quiet.”
Rose turned upon her side and looked out of the window. She put her thin
little face against her flattened hands and lay completely still. That
laugh had made her realize how tired she really was, and how silly she
had been to let the superstitions of these women frighten her. What she
needed was a nap and then she’d be all right. She closed her lovely eyes
and snuggled into the pillows.
It wasn’t coming to the ward that had made her so awfully tired, but
remembering all ... all everything ... about Tony again. For two years,
now, she had taught her mind to close up as suddenly as a four-o’clock
when she began to remember. Remembering was no good, it only made you
ache in your back and sting behind your eyes.
Still if she was afraid again, it wouldn’t hurt to make believe. Make
believe, as she used to do when she first knew Tony and wished she could
get sick and nearly die and have pneumonia, and heart trouble and ...
and then she smiled to herself at the funny child she had been. If she
had ever come down with a combination of any two of the diseases she had
desired in trios and quartettes, she would have never recovered ... and
the object of those imaginary illnesses had always been to get well and
marry Tony!
She was aroused from her reverie by a student nurse saying, “Miss
Standish, are you ready to wash? Here’s your basin.”
She looked at her watch and smiled at the child.
“Right on time, aren’t you?”
The girl laughed merrily.
Rose threw her head to one side and inquired, “And supper will be along
in a minute?”
“Yes, mam. I’m going to begin bringing it in, right now.”
Rose sat erect and wrung her wash cloth out and ran it over her small
face. The water felt good. She wrung it again and laid it behind her
ears. That felt good, too. She took a small comb from her hand bag and
slid it through her short black hair. Then she wrung the cloth out
carefully, folded it as she had been taught to do when a pupil nurse,
and brushed her teeth into the basin.
This was nice. It was fun being in bed in a ward of perfectly strange
women, rather than in a stuffy infirmary with six or seven nurses
talking shop and telling jokes all the time. She looked down the ward at
the rows of beds, and the glass partition which separated them from the
other fourteen beds; at the place where the partition stopped in the
center of the ward to create an aisle and then at the white beds beyond.
Through the far windows was a perfectly glorious sunset, and out of her
own window just the feathery beginning of new leaves upon an old tree.
She had never seen the ward from this angle. It was really a very pretty
sight, when viewed from bed and with nothing to do. Perhaps it was
because she had been through so much emotionally today that it looked
especially pretty. Things did, after such days.
Or perhaps it was because she wasn’t rushing to get everything in order
before the duty changes, rushing to remember this and do that. For once
her day was ending with the sun’s setting.
It was a good feeling. She stretched her toes and the covers swelled
with her rising breasts. And now in a few minutes supper would be along.
The ward was full of chatter, but she didn’t hear it. A voluptuous
relaxation was upon her. In bed. At sunset. Awaiting supper, and
watching the ugly faces of old women bloom, with the softening light ...
and the new leaves on the tree taking on that clear green which hurt.
“You are the last in line, so I’m a half minute late in bringing it to
you,” the student nurse apologized, poising her tray. “Want to sit up?”
“Please, nurse,” Rose responded in a very helpless voice.
The nurse wound up her bed, took away the wash basin and Rose began her
supper.
It fitted in exactly with her mood, and seemed, at the moment, much
nicer than the meals she had in the nurses’ dining room.
Cream of tomato soup, and batter-bread and liver with bacon and lots of
gravy, and lettuce salad with thousand island dressing, and then for
dessert stewed pears ... the only stewed fruit she liked. How utterly
lucky!
She began “tasting” and discovered that her milk had real cream in it,
too. That was sumptuous!
She ate with a dainty grace which captivated Mrs. Witherspoon, who put
down her soup bowl from which she had been drinking, and announced
“Birdlike! That’s what you are! Set a body wondering soon as I seen you.
Lift your fork as refined as a canary does his foot. Pleasure to watch
you at your victuals, dearie.”
Rose laughed and blushed simultaneously.
Ward women made you feel so nice, somehow....
At seven Miss Kexter and the student nurse went off duty. They had both
come to her and asked if there was anything she specially wanted before
they left. But, of course, there wasn’t, and Miss Kexter had said,
“Please be alive in the morning, Standish.”
And they had both laughed.
After Miss Kexter had gone Mrs. Witherspoon looked over her spectacles
and announced:
“I hearn what she said, dearie. Guess you feel like the clown who was
sick and the doc said, ‘See you in the morning,’ and the clown seys,
‘Sure you will, doc, but will I see you?’ Brave, them circus people. An’
loyal, my soul! They are paying for you, ain’t they, Woodsie?”
She turned to the shrivelled woman with the bad heart. The woman’s face
outshone the sunset.
“Payin’ my pension like I done for many a trouper before me. Circus
folks never let each other down. Never!”
“Who did you travel with?” Rose, who had been “letting her supper down,”
a new and delightful experience, turned and asked.
“I done the back somersault in Barnum and Bailey’s up to 1906. Then I
fell ... I ain’t ever known how, but the ringmaster seys the horse
slipped ... in Minneapolis that August ... and I ain’t ever been right
since.”
“You must have had a wonderful sense of balance and courage.” Rose’s
voice carried awe.
“If you ain’t got guts you’d better stay outa circuses, and nursing,
too, I guess.” The woman’s voice had a note of admiration.
The two student nurses who had the seven to nine duty began preparing
the ward for the night. One brought around the bed-pans and tooth-mugs.
Mrs. Witherspoon, and the woman who had been a bareback rider, extracted
their teeth and placed them in their mugs.
The other nurse came around with the thermometers and started counting
pulses.
The conversation ceased.
Rose Standish put forward her wrist for the child to count her pulse.
How young this pupil nurse looked. How young and frightened!
She was trying to think of something to say to her when the negroes on
the floor above began singing. Through the melody of their voices ...
she had been in the accident room so long, she had forgotten about their
singing after supper, she lost touch with the student nurse. A high
soprano fluted: “Swing lo ... o ... Sweet Char ... ee ... ot.”
And suddenly she knew their plaintive harmony, the admiration of the
patients, the sense of work ceasing with the day, had left her
tremendously happy and glad to be here. Glad she was part of the Elijah
Wilson! And she was part of it! Dr. MacArthur had said:
“We are planning to enlarge the accident room. You are the first person
I have told about it. And while you are lying in that bed, I want you to
decide what changes you think it would be wise to make. You can be a
great help to me, if you will.”
A great help ... and every head nurse in the hospital would give her
eyebrows to have him say that to her! As soon as the ward quieted down,
she’d have to begin to think about it ... or perhaps it might be best to
wait until tomorrow and let the singing of the negroes lull her to
sleep.
She wasn’t afraid any more. And anyhow Dr. MacArthur had said, so far as
evidence was concerned, she had nothing to be afraid of, except
hypodermics, and she would like to see the person who could give her a
hypo now! She would like to see two people try to give her....
Down the corridor she caught a glimpse of Dr. Ethridge Sterling, Senior,
and Dr. Sterling. Was Dr. Bear shrinking or did he just look so little
and chubby because he was walking beside Dr. Cub? They both looked
worried; when they entered the ward, they were smiling.
Their arrival created a nervous tension just the same. A sense of dread
filled the air. Dr. Sterling began doing his rounds and talking briskly
to his father about each patient. But Dr. Bear put his famous hands
firmly across his back and looked solid. Rose Standish frowned. He
looked just that way when a bad accident came in. Like it hurt him ...
all over ... too.
Finally they reached her bed and Dr. Sterling barked, “Good evening,
Miss Standish. Want Father to look you over. This condition sometimes
comes from effusion and is operative.”
The student nurse hovering in the background ran for the instrument
basket, and Dr. Sterling began drawing the bed curtains.
Dr. Bear was already leaning over and looking straight into her eyes
with his measuring ones.
“All right?”
Her bloodless lips turned a pinkish red. They accentuated the ivory
pallor of her peaked face.
“Perfectly, thank you. But if I get examined many more times, you are
bound to find something wrong, somewhere. How are you, sir?”
It was fun to be talking to Dr. Bear this way. He was accepting her as
an equal, sort of....
“I’m tired. Did two bad carcinomas this morning. Breasts. Two ruptured
appendices, and a gall-bladder, and I’ve a cold.”
“Then why not wait and go over me in the morning, sir?”
“Because I’m the parent of an electric dynamo,” he growled and the nurse
and Dr. Sterling, Junior, reappeared.
“What are you waiting for?” Dr. Bear frowned at the pupil nurse.
“To hand you what you want, sir.” she replied woodenly.
“You can’t. What I want is rest. My son will hand me what I need. You go
back to the ward.”
The nurse backed out hesitantly. Miss Kerr had said every nurse in the
building must permit no doctor to approach any patient without being
present all of the time ... but ... but....
Mrs. Witherspoon’s, “Nurse! Tend to me....” and then “Hurry, nurse!”
sent the girl running.
Dr. Bear put his stethoscope carefully to his ears and listened to Rose
Standish’s chest.
“Do everything you ought to. Don’t make me ask you,” he ordered.
She inflated, deflated, said “A ... A ... A....” held her breath, turned
so that he could listen through her back. Repeated it all for Dr.
Sterling, Junior, who listened carefully to her heart.
“Mmmmm.”
Dr. Bear winked at her.
“‘Two physicians at the oar will row you to the Stygian shore,’” he
quoted.
Miss Standish laughed, and Dr. Cub Sterling gave both of them a harassed
stare. They sobered obediently.
The examination was thorough, painstaking and consumed almost half an
hour. At its conclusion Dr. Sterling, Junior, said a very clipped,
“Thank you, Miss Standish,” and vanished. And Rose knew how deeply
grateful he was, really.
His father lingered long enough to say:
“He’ll explode some day. Thank you, my dear. Thank you very much.”
He took her thin little hand in his capable one and growled:
“You are nervous, aren’t you? I’m going to tell Mattus to give you a
bromide, if you need it.” And then he squeezed her hand gratefully and
uttered, for the edification of the ward, a very professional, “Good
night, Miss Standish.”
“Good night, Doctor.”
Her reply was professional, but she put her hand under the cover and
squeezed it herself.
Dr. Bear was a darling. It had been sweet the way he had explained Dr.
Sterling’s attitude and then thanked her himself.
When this was all over, how many real friends she would have gained. But
she mustn’t forget that she was here for a purpose. Perhaps if she took
a short nap now, she would be in better trim for the real thing ... if
it came....
She turned over and tried to sleep, but the tension on the ward was so
overpowering that she thought perhaps if she entered the conversation
she might discover ... or maybe she was just imagining things and the
thunderstorm which was brewing was causing that feeling.
If only they would all begin to talk of something they were interested
in and not to cover up what they were thinking.
There came a lull and she asked Mrs. Witherspoon:
“Do you think the flavor is better when you cook pork with sauerkraut,
or without it?”
“Without it!” chimed in the woman with the enormous legs. “I give it to
my children since they was babies and I always cooks it thorough ...
four to five hours ... and then....”
“You do?” Mrs. Witherspoon laid down her crocheting, inserted her teeth
and became emphatic.
“Thet saps all the taste. Mr. Witherspoon likes hisn so ez the pork and
kraut is mixed flavored, if you know what I mean. Ain’t it awful
leathery, yo’ way?”
“It ain’t the cookin’ time, as I was about to say,” the fat woman drew
up her chins, “it’s the _cookin’_ way.”
“I got one of them steamer cookeths. It doz gran’,” lisped the ex-circus
woman.
Mrs. Witherspoon gave her a frivolous glance, and replied positively:
“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout workin’ them new fangled things. But I’ve et
from them. Eddie May, Sammy’s wife,” both of her listeners nodded, “the
one what come to see me Satd’y has one. And Mr. Witherspoon seys after
we went to Sammy’s Easter dinner, ‘Jennie, the only way to cook victuals
is to cook ’em with the eye. Baste ’em, and taste ’em, and it’s jes’
like stokin’ an ingine,’ he seys, ‘you got to keep yo’ eye to it.’ If
you know what I mean....”
This precipitated a hot argument upon washing machines, with the fat
woman as the defendant. So Rose Standish shifted her attention to the
clouds. If the women kept up for fifteen minutes more ... and if she
knew wards they were good for hours ... the thunderstorm would be here,
and they would be quieted down for the night.
She looked at her watch. It was almost nine. Time for the night nurse to
be coming along, in just a few minutes. And while she was waiting for
her to come and bed the ward down, she might as well begin to think
about the accident room.
Those scrub-up basins should be moved across the room and as far away as
possible from the door in which the accidents were brought. And then,
too, some arrangement should be made to equalize the lighting over the
two tables. And also to give the nurse at the instrument table enough
light to see what she was handing. And in some of the badly mangled
cases, it would quicken things considerably if a passageway was built
directly into the elevator corridor, so that they might be hurried up to
the operating room.
Then, of course it was a little thing, but awfully important nervously:
the girl who took the doctors’ dictation onto the typewriter ought to
have a noiseless machine. And it would be terribly hard to convince the
Superintendent of Nurses, but she was going to tell Dr. MacArthur that
she needed another student nurse on duty there. After a football game or
a big race meet when the automobile accidents began to pour in, it was
frightful. There was nobody, except the girl at the typewriter who
couldn’t stop, whose hands were not all gory and spotted every paper
they touched.
She was distracted by a flash of lightning, Mrs. Witherspoon’s, “Lan’
sake, nurse, I’ve wet my bed,” and Miss Kerr’s niece, the night student
nurse leaning over her and purring:
“Miss Standish, are you better? Here’s your thermometer.”
Perhaps it was her voice coming so soon after the flash, but there
seemed something too saccharin in its tone to Rose Standish. She
shivered before she turned to take the extended thermometer.
Of course she knew Miss Kerr’s niece was the night student nurse they
were watching, but somehow she didn’t associate the name and the girl.
She had never liked this girl when she had been in the accident room. No
real heart, and stubborn and cattish ... and then her eyes were too
close together....
With barely a fleeting smile, Miss Kerr thrust the thermometer into Miss
Standish’s hand and ran to close the windows. It had begun to rain.