A Diary Without Dates Part 15

"But if one cannot get them life might as well stop.

"The wonder to me is how they stood me!

"I was always cheerful--I thought it a merit; I find instead it is an exasperation.

"I make a hundred reflections since my eyes are too bad to read. I stare at the ceiling, and if a moth comes on it--and just now that happened, or I would not have thought of mentioning it--I watch the pair of them, the moth and its leaping shadow, as they whirl from square to square of the smoke-ripened ceiling. This keeps my thoughts quiet.

"Then in the daytime there is the garden, the dog that crosses the lawn, the gardener talking to himself, the girl who goes to feed the hens....

"I don't say that in any of these things I find a subst.i.tute for reading, but since I can't and mayn't read....

"I am thinking, you know, of the beds down the right-hand side of the ward.

"There's Mr. Wicks, now: he has his back to the road with the trams on it.

"Do you see anything in that?

"I do. But then I have the advantage of you; my position is horizontal.

"Mr. Wicks's position is also ... strictly ... horizontal. It seems to me that if he could see those trams, mark Sat.u.r.days and Sundays by the increase of pa.s.sengers, make little games to himself involving the number of persons to get on and off (for the stopping-place is within view: I know, for I looked) it might be possible to draw him back from that apathy which I too, as well as you, was ceasing to notice.

"Mr. Wicks, Sister, not only has his back to the road with trams on it, but for eleven months he has had his eyes on the yellow stone of the wall of the German ward; that is, when they are not on his own bedrail....

"But if his bed were turned round to range alongside the window...? For he is a man with two eyes; not one who can write upon a stone wall with his thoughts.

"And yet ... it would be impossible! There's not a ward in the hospital whose symmetry is so spoilt.

"And that, you know, is a difficulty for you to weigh. How far are you a dictator?

"I have been thinking of my role and yours.

"In the long run, however 'capable' I become, my soul should be given to the smoothing of pillows.

"You are barred from so many kinds of sympathy: you must not sympathize over the deficiencies of the hospital, over the food, over the M.O.'s lack of imagination, over the intolerable habits of the man in the next bed; you must not sigh 'I know ...' to any of these plaints.

"Yours is the running of the ward. Yours the isolation of a crowned head.

"One day you said a penetrating thing to me:

"'He's not very ill, but he's feeling wretched. Run along and do the sympathetic V.A.D. touch!'

"For a moment I, just able to do a poultice or a fomentation, resented it.

"But you were right.... One has one's _metier_."

III

"THE BOYS ..."

So now one steps down from chintz covers and lemonade to the Main Army and lemon-water.

And to show how little one has one's eye upon the larger issues, the thing that upset me most on coming into a "Tommies'" ward was the fact that instead of twenty-six lemons twice a day for the making of lemonade I now squeeze two into an old jug and hope for the best about the sugar.

Smiff said to-day, "Give us a drop of lemon, nurse...." And the Sister: "Go on with you! I won't have the new nurse making a pet of you...."

I suppose I'm new to it, and one can't carry on the work that way, but, G.o.d knows, the water one can add to a lemon is cheap enough!

Smiff had a flash of temper to-night. He said: "Keepin' me here starin'

at green walls this way! Nothing but green, nine blessed months!"

His foot is off, and to-night for the first time the doctor had promised that he should be wheeled into the corridor. But it was forgotten, and I am too new to jog the memory of the G.o.ds.

It's a queer place, a "Tommies'" ward. It makes me nervous. I'm not simple enough; they make me shy. I can't think of them like the others do, as "the boys"; they seem to me full-grown men.

I suffer awfully from my language in this ward. I seem to be the only V.A.D. of whom they continually ask, "What's say, nurse?" It isn't that I use long words, but my sentences seem to be inverted.

An opportunity for learning to speak simple Saxon....

"An ant.i.tetanic injection for Corrigan," said Sister. And I went to the dispensary to fetch the syringe and the needles.

"But has he any symptoms?" I asked. (In a Tommies' ward one dare ask anything; there isn't that mystery which used to surround the officers'

illnesses.)

"Oh no," she said, "it's just that he hasn't had his full amount in France."

So I hunted up the spirit-lamp and we prepared it, talking of it.

But we forgot to talk of it to Corrigan. The needle was into his shoulder before he knew why his shirt was held up.

His wrath came like an avalanche; the discipline of two years was forgotten, his Irish tongue was loosened. Sister shrugged her shoulders and laughed; I listened to him as I cleaned the syringe.

I gathered that it was the indignity that had shocked his sense of individual pride. "Treating me like a cow...." I heard him say to Smiff--who laughed, since it wasn't his shoulder that carried the serum.

Smiff laughed: he has been in hospital nine months, and his theory is that a Sister may do anything at any moment; his theory is that nothing does any good--that if you don't fuss you don't get worse.

Corrigan was angry all day; the idea that "a bloomin' woman should come an' shove something into me systim" was too much for him. But he forgets himself: there are no individualists now; his "system" belongs to us.

Sister said, laughing, to Smiff the other day, "Your leg is mine."

"Wrong again; it's the Governmint's!" said Smiff. But Corrigan is Irish and doesn't like that joke.