The Red Acorn Part 21

"That looks like home, Jim," said one of the fever-wasted.

"That it does. Lord! she looks as fresh and sweet as the Johnny-jump-ups down by our old spring-house. I expect she's come down here to find somebody that belongs to her that's sick. Don't I wish it was me!"

"I wouldn't mind being a brother, or a cousin, or a sweetheart to her myself. That'd be better luck than to be given a sutler-shop. Just see her move! She's got a purtier gait than our thoroughbred colt."

"IT does one's eyes good to look at her. It makes me feel better than a cart-load of the stuff that old Pillbags forces down our throats."

"You're a-talking. She's a lady--every inch of her--genuine, simon-pure, fast colors, all-wool, a yard wide, as fine as silk, and bright a a May morning."

"And as wholesome as Spring sunshine."

All unconscious that her appearance was to the invalids who looked upon her like a sweet, health-giving breeze bursting through a tainted atmosphere, Rachel pa.s.sed wearily along the burning walks toward the Surgeon's office, with a growing heart-sickness at the unwelcome appearance of the task she had elected for herself.

The journey had been full of irritating discomforts. Heat, dust, and soiled linen are only annoyances to a man; they are real miseries to a woman. The marvel is not that Joan of Arc dared the perils of battle, but that she endured the continued wretchedness of camp uncleanliness, to the triumphant end.

With her throat parched, garments "sticky," hair, eyes, ears and nostrils filled with irritating dust, and a feeling that collar and cuffs were, as ladies phrase it, "a sight to behold," Rachel's heroic enthusiasm ebbed to the bottom. Ushered into the Surgeon's office she was presented to a red-faced, harsh-eyed man, past the middle age, who neither rose nor apologized to her for being discovered in the undress of a hot day. He motioned her to a seat with the wave of the fan he was vigorously using, and taking her letter of introduction, adjusted eye-gla.s.ses upon a ripe-colored nose, and read it with a scowl that rippled his face with furrows.

"So you're the first of the women nurses that's to be a.s.signed to me,"

he said ungraciously, after finishing the letter, and scanning her severely for a moment over the top of his gla.s.ses. "I suppose I have to have 'em."

The manner hurt Rachel even more than the words. Before she could frame a reply he continued:

"I don't take much stock in this idea of women nurses, especially when they're young and pretty." He scowled at Rachel as if she had committed a crime in being young and beautiful. "But the country's full of women with a Quixotic notion of being Florence Nightingales, and they've badgered the Government into accepting their services. I suppose I'll have to take my share of them. Ever nursed?"

"No, sir," responded Rachel, compressing as much haughtiness as possible into the answer.

"Of course not. Girls at your age are not at all likely to know anything that is useful, and least of all how to nurse a sick man. I hardly know which is the worst, a young one who don't know anything, or a middle-aged one who thinks she knows it all, and continually interferes with the management of a case. I believe though, I'd rather have had the middle-aged one to start with. She'd be more likely to tend to her business, and not have her head turned by the attentions of the good-looking young officers who swarm around her. Mind, I'll not allow any flirting here."

Rachel's face crimsoned. "You forget yourself," she said, cuttingly; "or perhaps you have nothing to forget. At least, man an effort to remember that I'm a lady."

The bristly eyebrows straightened down to a level line over the small blue eyes, and unpleasant furrows drew themselves around the corners of his mouth. "YOU forget," he said, "that if you enter upon these duties you are in the military service and subject to your superior officers.

You forget the necessity of the most rigid discipline, and that it is my duty to explain and enforce this."

"I certainly expect to obey orders," said Rachel, a little overawed.

"You may rightly expect to," he answered with a slight sneer; "because it will be a matter of necessity--you will have to. We must have instant and unquestioning obedience to orders here, as well as everywhere else in the Army, or it would be like a rope of sand--of no strength whatever--no strength, whatever."

"I know it," answered Rachel, depressed even more by the apparition of martial law than she had been by the heat.

"And what I have been telling you is only the beginning," continued the Surgeon, noting the effect of his words, and exulting in their humbling power. "The cornerstone of everything military is obedience--prompt, unfailing obedience, by everybody, soldier or officer, to his superiors.

Without it----"

"Major Moxon," said an officer, entering and saluting, "the General presents his compliments, and desires to know why his repeated orders in regard to the furloughing of men have been so persistently disregarded."

"Because," said the Surgeon, getting purplish-red about the cheeks and nose, "because the matter's one which I consider outside of his province--beyond his control, sir. I am Chief of the Medical Department, as you are perhaps aware, sir."

"We presumed that you were taking that view of the matter, from your course," answered the Aide calmly. "I am not here to argue the matter with you, but simply to direct you to consider yourself under arrest. Charges are being prepared against you, to which I will add specifications based on this interview. Good afternoon, sir." The Aide saluted stiffly and moved away, leaving the Surgeon in a state of collapse at the prospect of what he had brought upon himself by his injudicious contumacy. Mis Rachel was in that state of wonderment that comes to pupils at seeing their teachers rebel agains their own precepts. The Surgeon was too much engrossed in his own affairs to pay farther heed to her. He tapped a bell.

"Orderly," he said, to the soldier who responded, "conduct this young woman to Dr. Denslow. Inform him that she is to be with us as a nurse, and ask him to be kind enough to a.s.sign her suitable quarters. Good afternoon, ma'am."

In another office, much smaller and far less luxuriously furnished, she found Dr. Denslow, a hazel-eyed, brown-bearded man of thirty, whose shoulder-straps bore the modest bars of Captain. The reader has already made his acquaintance. He received her with the pleasant, manly sympathy for her s.e.x, which had already made him one of the most popular of family physicians in the city where he was practicing at the outbreak of the war.

Rachel's depressed spirits rose again at his cordial reception.

"I am so busy," he said, after a brief exchange of commonplaces, "that I'll not have the time to give you much information this afternoon as to your duties, and I know that you are so fatigued with your journey and the heat that you will not care to do anything but rest and refresh yourself. I will therefore show you immediately to your quarters."

"This will be your field of labor," he said, as he led her down the long aisle between rows of cots toward her room. "It's not a cheerful one to contemplate at first. Human suffering is always a depressing spectacle, and you will see here more of it and more varied agony than you can find anywhere outside of an army hospital's walls. But as the deed is so is the duty, and the glory of doing it. To one who wants to serve G.o.d and his fellow-creatures--which I take it is the highest form of religion--here is an opportunity that he may bless G.o.d for giving him.

Here he can earn a brighter crown than is given them who die at the stake for opinion's sake."

So earnest was his enthusiasm that Rachel felt herself lifted up by it, in spite of her discomforts. But then she turned her eyes away from his impa.s.sioned face, and looked over the array of white beds, each with its pale and haggard occupant, his eyes blazing with the delirium of fever, or closed in the langor of exhaustion, with limbs tossing as the febrile fire seethed the blood, or quivering with the last agonies. Groans, prayers, and not a few oaths fell on her ears. The repulsive smell of the disinfectants, the nauseating odor of the sick room where hundreds of invalids were lying, the horrible effluvia of the typhus rose on the hot air, and seemed part of the misery which so strongly a.s.sailed her other senses.

She was sick at heart, and with every feeling in active revolt, but without a word she turned and followed Dr. Denslow to a hot, close, little room which had been cut off one end of the hospital, though not so separated from it but that the sounds and odors from the sick wards continually filtered in through the wide cracks in its plank sides.

An iron bedstead, of the same pattern as that upon which the sick lay, stood in one corner, and in another was a rudely-fashioned stand, upon which was a tin-basin, a cake of yellow bar-soap, and a bucket of water for washing. This was all the furniture.

As the door closed behind the Doctor, Rachel threw herself upon the cot, in a fit of despair at the wreck of all her fancies, and the repulsiveness of the career upon which she had embarked.

"I can not--I will not--live here a week," she said to herself, over and over again. "I will die for the lack of comforts--of the decencies of life, even--to say nothing of being poisoned by these horrible smells, or driven distracted by the raving sick and that boor of a Surgeon. But I can not draw back; I would rather die than go back to Sardis with a confession of failure at the very outset of my attempt to play the heroine."

Then she remembered her last words to Harry Glen: "I only know that you have failed where a number of commonplace men have succeeded, and that is sufficient."

Would she subject herself to having him throw these words in her teeth?

No. Any shape of trial and death, rather.

Chapter XV. Making an Acquaintance with Duty.

And with light in her looks she entered the chamber of sickness.

Noiselessly moved about the a.s.siduous, careful attendants, Moistening the feverish lip, and teh aching brow, and in silence Closing the sightless eyes of the dead, and concealing their faces, Where on their pallets they lay like drifts of snow by the roadside.

Many a languid head upraised as Evangeline entered, Turned on its pillow of pain to gaze while she pa.s.sed for her presence Fell on their hearts like a ray of sun on the walls of a prison, And as she looked around she saw how Death the Consoler, Laying his hand on many a heart hade healed it forever.--Evangaline.

Nervously bolting the rude door after Dr. Denslow's departure, Rachel tossed her hat into one corner, and without farther undressing flung herself down upon the coa.r.s.e blankets of the cot, in utter exhaustion of mind and body. Nature, beneficent ever to Youth and Health, at once drew the kindly curtains of Sleep, and the world and its woes became oblivion.

Early the next morning the shrill REVEILLE called for a resumption of the day's activities. She was awakened by the fifes screaming a strenuously cheeful jig, but lay for some minutes without opening her eyes. She was so perfectly healthful in every way that the tribulations of the previous day had left no other traces than a slight wariness. But every sense began informing her that yesterday's experience was not a nightmare of her sleep, but a waking reality. The morning sun was already pouring hot beams upon the thin roof over her head. Through the wide cracks in the part.i.tion came the groans and the nauseating odors which had depressed her so on the day before. Mingled with these was the smell of spoiled coffee and ill-cooked food floating in from the kitchen, where a detail of slovenly and untaught cooks were preparing breakfast.

She shuddered and opened her eyes.

The rude garniture of her room, thickly covered with coa.r.s.e dust, and dest.i.tute of everything to make life comfortable, looked even more repugnant than it had the evening before.

The attack of sickness at heart at the position in which she found herself came on with renewed intensity, for the hatefulness of everything connected with the lot she had chosen seemed to have augmented during the pa.s.sing hours. She tried to gain a little respite by throwing one white arm over her eyes, so as to shut out all sight, that she might imagine for a moment at least that she was back under the old apple tree at Sardis, before all this sorrow had come into her life.

"It is not possible," she murmured to herself, "that Florence Nightingale, and those who a.s.sisted her found their work and its surroundings as unlovely as it is here. I won't believe it. In Europe things are different, and the hospitals are made fitting places for women to visit and dwell in."

It would have helped her much if she could have known that the Crimean hospitals, in which Florence Nightingale won world-wide fame, lacked immeasurably of the conveniences and comforts with which American ingenuity and lavish generosity mitigated somewhat the wretchedness of army hospitals.