Love Stories Part 19

IV

She was quite cheerful the next day and entirely composed. Neither of them referred to the episode of the night before, but Billy Grant thought of little else. Early in the morning he asked her to bring him a hand mirror and, surveying his face, tortured and disfigured by the orderly's shaving, suffered an acute wound in his vanity. He was glad it had been dark or she probably would not have---- He borrowed a razor from the interne and proceeded to enjoy himself.

Propped up in his chair, he rioted in lather, sliced a piece out of his right ear, and shaved the back of his neck by touch, in lieu of better treatment. This done, and the ragged and unkempt hair over his ears having been trimmed in scallops, due to the work being done with curved surgical scissors, he was his own man again.

That afternoon, however, he was nervous and restless. The Nurse was troubled. He avoided the subject that had so obsessed him the day before, was absent and irritable, could not eat, and sat in his chair by the window, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands.

The Nurse was puzzled, but the Staff Doctor, making rounds that day, enlightened her.

"He has pulled through--G.o.d and you alone know how," he said. "But as soon as he begins to get his strength he's going to yell for liquor again. When a man has been soaking up alcohol for years---- Drat this hospital cooking anyhow! Have you got any essence of pepsin?"

The Nurse brought the pepsin and a medicine gla.s.s and the Staff Doctor swallowed and grimaced.

"You were saying," said the Nurse timidly--for, the stress being over, he was Staff again and she was a Junior and not even ent.i.tled to a Senior's privileges, such as returning occasional badinage.

"Every atom of him is going to crave it. He's wanting it now. He has been used to it for years." The Nurse was white to the lips, but steady. "He is not to have it?"

"Not a drop while he is here. When he gets out it is his own affair again, but while he's here--by-the-way, you'll have to watch the orderly. He'll bribe him."

"I don't think so, doctor. He is a gentleman."

"Pooh! Of course he is. I dare say he's a gentleman when he's drunk too; but he's a drinker--a habitual drinker."

The Nurse went back into the room and found Billy Grant sitting in a chair, with the book he had been reading on the floor and his face buried in his hands.

"I'm awfuly sorry!" he said, not looking up. "I heard what he said.

He's right, you know."

"I'm sorry. And I'm afraid this is a place where I cannot help."

She put her hand on his head, and he brought it down and held it between his.

"Two or three times," he said, "when things were very bad with me, you let me hold your hand, and we got past somehow--didn't we?"

She closed her eyes, remembering the dawn when, to soothe a dying man, in the presence of the mission preacher, she had put her hand in his. Billy Grant thought of it too.

"Now you know what you've married," he said bitterly. The bitterness was at himself of course. "If--if you'll sit tight I have a fighting chance to make a man of myself; and after it's over we'll fix this thing for you so you will forget it ever happened. And I---- Don't take your hand away. Please!"

"I was feeling for my handkerchief," she explained.

"Have I made you cry again?"

"Again?'

"I saw you last night in your room. I didn't intend to; but I was trying to stand, and----"

She was very dignified at this, with her eyes still wet, and tried unsuccessfully to take her hand away.

"If you are going to get up when it is forbidden I shall ask to be relieved."

"You wouldn't do that!"

"Let go of my hand."

"You wouldn't do that!!"

"Please! The head nurse is coming."

He freed her hand then and she wiped her eyes, remembering the "perfect, silent, reliable, fearless, emotionless machine."

The head of the training school came to the door of the pavilion, but did not enter. The reason for this was twofold: first, she had confidence in the Nurse; second, she was afraid of contagion--this latter, of course, quite _sub rosa_, in view of the above quotation.

The Head Nurse was a tall woman in white, and was so starchy that she rattled like a newspaper when she walked.

"Good morning," she said briskly. "Have you sent over the soiled clothes?" Head nurses are always bothering about soiled clothes; and what becomes of all the nailbrushes, and how can they use so many bandages.

"Yes, Miss Smith."

"Meals come over promptly?"

"Yes, Miss Smith."

"Getting any sleep?"

"Oh, yes, plenty--now."

Miss Smith peered into the hallway, which seemed tidy, looked at the Nurse with approval, and then from the doorstep into the patient's room, where Billy Grant sat. At the sight of him her eyebrows rose.

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "I thought he was older than that!"

"Twenty-nine," said the Nurse; "twenty-nine last Fourth of July."

"H'm!" commented the Head Nurse. "You evidently know! I had no idea you were taking care of a boy. It won't do. I'll send over Miss Hart."

The Nurse tried to visualise Billy Grant in his times of stress clutching at Miss Hart's hand, and failed.

"Jenks is here, of course," she said, Jenks being the orderly.

The idea of Jenks as a chaperon, however, did not appeal to the head nurse. She took another glance through the window at Billy Grant, looking uncommonly handsome and quite ten years younger since the shave, and she set her lips.

"I am astonished beyond measure," she said. "Miss Hart will relieve you at two o'clock. Take your antiseptic bath and you may have the afternoon to yourself. Report in L Ward in the morning."

Miss Smith rattled back across the courtyard and the Nurse stood watching her; then turned slowly and went into the house to tell Billy Grant.

Now the stories about what followed differ. They agree on one point: that Billy Grant had a heart-to-heart talk with the subst.i.tute at two o'clock that afternoon and told her politely but firmly that he would none of her. Here the divergence begins. Some say he got the superintendent over the house telephone and said he had intended to make a large gift to the hospital, but if his comfort was so little considered as to change nurses just when he had got used to one, he would have to alter his plans. Another and more likely story, because it sounds more like Billy Grant, is that at five o'clock a florist's boy delivered to Miss Smith a box of orchids such as never had been seen before in the house, and a card inside which said: "Please, dear Miss Smith, take back the Hart that thou gavest."

Whatever really happened--and only Billy Grant and the lady in question ever really knew--that night at eight o'clock, with Billy Grant sitting glumly in his room and Miss Hart studying typhoid fever in the hall, the Nurse came back again to the pavilion with her soft hair flying from its afternoon washing and her eyes shining. And things went on as before--not quite as before; for with the nurse question settled the craving got in its work again, and the next week was a bad one. There were good days, when he taught her double-dummy auction bridge, followed by terrible nights, when he walked the floor for hours and she sat by, unable to help. Then at dawn he would send her to bed remorsefully and take up the fight alone. And there were quiet nights when both slept and when he would waken to the craving again and fight all day.