by Sheila Burns
If it turned to brain fever, as Tenny seemed to think it might, then he would never get through. He wasn’t a happy man, and the will to make others live was not his own will to live. For the past few months I recognized the fact that he had been fighting against desperate odds. Unless something happened to make his home life happier, he would not want to go on living.
I did not care where I came in in all this, but I did care for him. I would have done anything in the world to help him now, only with my hands tied by the routine of this place it looked as if I could do nothing. Things were badly on my nerves.
Tea-time came, and there were the patients’ tea-trays in the lift and the usual sorting out of the visitors. The afternoons are generally slack in the home, and the slackness made it worse for me, for it meant that I had more time to think, which was just what I did not want to do.
I sat on in the nurses’ little sitting-room, waiting for the patients’ bells to tell me that they had done with their tea or were sick of their visitors, and I felt utterly done.
‘If this goes on much longer I shall pass out,’ I told myself.
I’d got absolutely on edge.
I did not see Tenny until after tea, when I was beginning the work which ends in coming off duty. I saw her then for a moment in the corridor.
‘Tenny, how is he?’
‘He is doing a great deal better than I should have expected.’
‘I must see him.’
‘Katy, don’t be so silly. It can’t be done; besides, it isn’t any of your business. His wife is coming, and she will be here any time now.’
It was all very well of Tenny being so hard about it all, and I caught at her arm. ‘You really must help me ‒ one little peep is all I want.’
‘Yes, and have Vaughan, or Sister, or someone catch us.’
‘I don’t care if they do; it is worth it.’
In that moment I realized that she was melting a little. I saw that she was inclined to help me, but frightened in case there were any consequences of doing it.
‘I’ll see what I can do. The surgeon is there now, and Miss Vaughan and that Sister Duke. You can’t go in for a little while, but I’ll let you know if there is a hope,’ and she bustled off again with the late tea-tray for number forty-one.
Well, I’d won her round, anyway, and that was one good thing, though it was dreadful waiting to see him. And all the time there was the horrid uncertainty that Miss Vaughan might be going her rounds and getting Tenny scared, so that she was too frightened to let me in at the last minute.
A girl came out of a patient’s room across the landing. Her sister was in for an operation the next morning, and they had got very frightened about it. I could see that her face was white and drawn as she came to the lift and pressed the bell. Seeing me, she hesitated.
‘Oh, could I speak to you for a moment, Nurse?’ she asked.
That was when I remembered the training and the old teaching of my first matron (God bless her), that I was a nurse first. I think that was when I realized that all my feelings for Ray were selfish ones, and that I had a duty to fulfil to my other patients, and to this girl who was so dreadfully anxious about her sister. The routine which went on and which drove me frantic at times, so that I chafed against it and wanted to break free, was something of which I was very definitely part. It was not any use trying to draw back. This routine had got me wholly, and I was a cog in the wheel.
‘Is my sister going to be all right? I mean, is it a very dangerous operation?’
She told me all about it; they were everything to one another, and the need for this operation had suddenly parted them, when they had never before been away from one another for a single night of their lives. I tried to comfort her as best I could, and suddenly she turned impulsively and took my hand.
‘You’re different from the other nurses. They just leave me scared. They seem like machines, but you seem to be human. You must have suffered yourself to know how dreadfully worried I am about this.’
‘She is going to be all right. Somehow I feel that, and I am generally right when I get a hunch about the patients. She’ll do finely, so don’t get too worried about it.’
She was quite cheerful as the lift took her down the stairs. So she thought I had suffered, and I hadn’t. Not until recently. Oh, yes, I’d been lonely and unhappy at times ‒ who isn’t? ‒ but I had never felt quite so desperate, quite so hopeless as I had done since I had met Ray Harper. And it wasn’t right.
I remembered what I had thought the very first time that I had seen him. Just as though somebody pulled aside a curtain, some unseen showman giving a display of life. Up with the curtain. Lady! this is love!
I pulled myself together with a jerk. I mustn’t be crazy.
I saw Tenny standing at the bottom of the stairs, and she was calling to me.
‘Katy.’
I ran to her, because I knew that she had come to tell me I might have a peep at her patient. Miss Vaughan had rustled away into the distance. She was having her anxious moments over a hernia on the second floor, which would possibly keep her busy for a bit. Day Sister had trailed down in her wake, very important, very full of the cases.
‘The door is open.’ Tenny had caught hold of my arm. ‘Take a peep inside and see how he looks. I left it like that for you.’
‘You’re a dear!’
I went across the landing. On the right was the blanket cupboard built into the wall, and by the side of it his door flung wide open. It was a plain room, as all our rooms were, but this one had no flowers in it. The other patients had them by the thousand, stacks of them ‒ weren’t we always carrying them up the stairs and arranging them? But this room had nothing in it to break the prim whiteness of the walls. He was lying on his side and breathing comfortably. I knew at once by the way that he lay that he was not terribly ill. You can tell these things when you are trained. I took note of all the different points about him ‒ his colour, the way his head sank into the pillow, his attitude and breathing. It was a reassuring glance. He was not in a serious condition at all; it was more weakness than anything, sheer collapse.
I was going to cross the threshold when Tenny came up behind me and caught my arm.
‘Come away, they’re here.’
‘Who are here?’
‘I thought old Vaughan had gone down to that hernia case, and half-way she must have got the message. It’s his wife. She is bringing his wife up to see him.’
At that very moment I could hear the lift rising to our floor and knew that there was no time to make my get-away. Miss Vaughan had realized from the first that I wanted to see Ray, and she would know what I was doing on this floor. Besides, there was Iris. I knew then that I simply could not meet Iris like this.
‘I can’t!’ I gasped, though what that would convey to Tenny I didn’t know. Then I acted on a sudden impulse.
Tenny had only time to say ‘I told you not to come’ when I opened the door of the blanket cupboard and stepped inside. There was warmth, the strong, steamy warmth of hot pipes, and that queer woolly smell of blankets that are airing. I thought for a moment that the fluff would choke me. Then I realized that I could see through the chink of the door everything that was happening on the landing, and that for the time being I was safe. Miss Vaughan was far too busy to think of coming to the blanket cupboard; besides, it was not the time of day when more blankets were wanted.
I could see Tenny standing on the threshold of the room with the open door, smoothing down her apron and setting her cap pertly to rights. Then the lift doors opened, and Miss Vaughan came out first; she always walked with dignity, as though she were entering a church. All the same, as I saw her coming towards the room I felt that something was wrong. She was not so complacent as usual; she was anxious, and I had the feeling that she did not approve of Iris.
Behind her walked Iris herself.
She looked radiant. I suppose it was because I had never seen her in robust health before that I was so st
ruck with her beauty. She wore a soft green velvet frock and a close-fitting little hat under which her hair curled luxuriously. Iris was delicately made up; her green velvet coat was collared in chinchilla, diamonds blazed on her fingers. She was a lovely girl, and she had exquisite taste and knew how to emphasize that loveliness of hers. As she passed the cupboard where I was hiding, and by this time quaking in every limb, because it would be too dreadful if Miss Vaughan found me, and so undignified, I smelt the fragrance of the deep purple violets which Iris wore pinned into her collar. It was a destroying beauty, this loveliness of hers, something which demanded and sucked everything up into itself.
They went into the bedroom and the door closed on them. Tenny shut it swiftly and silently, and on that same instant opened the cupboard where I was hiding.
‘Quick, Katy! Oh, I knew something would happen. What a fright you gave me!’
I did not answer.
I had seen him for an instant; he had not seen me. Now his wife was in the room with him, his wife and Miss Vaughan, and there was nothing for me to do but to go away and try to forget them.
As it happened, it was that night that I got a letter which surprised me quite a lot. I had had the literature from the Crown Agents, and had written to them again saying that I might consider a post abroad, but had supposed that it would end there. I had had a note from them saying that there was a shortage of trained nurses, but never thought that it would lead to more. Going off duty and downstairs to dinner, I found an important-looking note pigeon-holed in my rack, and opening it saw that it was an offer of a post abroad. There was a job going in Sydney, Australia, where they wanted nurses. There was some literature with the mention of this post, and I saw pictures of a place so different and so remote that it rather attracted my attention, with the offer of escape that came with it.
One could forget there.
Tenny was sitting in the little room afterwards, and I dropped the booklet into her lap.
‘What do you think of that?’ I asked.
She thought such a lot of it that she could not stop talking about it. Why, it would be too utterly marvellous, said she. Let us write and accept it at once. In Australia it did not rain as it did here in London. Tenny had gone out for a couple of hours that afternoon and had ruined a new hat, so she felt a bit sore on this subject. There would be sun there, and a carefree life. She had always heard of it as being one of the brightest spots where one could really have fun. What a piece of luck, said she.
I was not so sure. I wanted to know more, and it took me three or four days before I got the information that I required.
During those days I made no attempt to see Ray, and I knew that Iris was visiting him. I tried to absorb myself in some really hard work. The girl whose sister had been so anxious on her account went through a bad time. The operation was more involved than we had expected, and when she was opened up there were complications. It was a long and difficult operation, and the man doing it had not got Ray’s methods, nor his swiftness. When I handed her over to Birdie for the night I was worried about her, because I felt that there was the chance of her slipping through our hands.
All the next day we fought for her life. Her sister pretended that I had saved her, but I think that it was she herself who did it. They had not much money, those two, and the actual cost of being in the home was a big strain on their slender finances. But they had pluck. They had grit. They had love, too, a splendid and shining love which had brought them through all their troubles.
I can tell you that they taught me a lot in the way that they weathered the storm between them.
Sometimes when you are a hard-up nurse, moving from patient to patient, you get so sick of the extravagance of it all. Women who have nothing to grumble about, yet who make such a fuss. The satin nighties and the masses of flowers. I had grown to hate orchids. Yet these two girls had none of the trimmings of life; they went through a dreadful time of pain and bewilderment and fear and had no flowers. They made do. They had love, though, and it was a love bright enough to last them through their trouble; they had the full appreciation of life; they had one another.
Then I had news of Ray.
‘He is recovering marvellously,’ said Tenny when I popped into the nurses’ sitting-room, where she was having a cup of tea.
‘And he’s going to get right?’
‘Quite all right. You would not have thought that he had such a store of power of resistance on which he could draw, but he had.’
‘And Iris?’
Tenny shot me a doubtful look.
‘I think it is going to be all right about them. I’ve thought a lot, and he is so lovely; he is the kind of man who deserves everything, the very best of life. He ought to have had children.’
‘I can’t see that idea appealing to Iris.’
‘Well, frankly, I can’t, but I think he has the idea that he can. They’ve patched up their quarrels and they are like lovers now. You would never think that she had that affair with Bill.’
Tenny went on stirring her tea, and I thought how cruel it all sounded. But there was Australia. However I might hate the idea, it was the wise thing to go away, right away.
‘You know, Katy,’ said Tenny, ‘I’ve thought about you and the doctor a lot, and it won’t do you any good hanging round him. You may love him, but you have got to think of yourself, too, you know. He is attractive. Heaven knows I realize that. Bill was attractive to, but that didn’t help me any.’
I could not see any connection between her affair with Captain Dawson and mine with Ray, but I did not like to say so. Poor Tenny!
I said, ‘I’m going to accept that post in Australia, and when they send me the papers I’m signing. What about you?’
‘Katy, there is nothing I’d like better. We could go out there together.’
‘And start life all over again. No Bills, no handsome doctors,’ and I tried to laugh.
‘Do you really mean it? I mean are you pulling my leg, because I don’t think I could bear that.’
I shook my head. ‘No, I mean it. The papers ought to be here to-night. I shall sign and then give in my notice to Miss Vaughan.’
‘I’ll do the same.’
She was tremendously excited by the idea, and we both waited for the evening post to come in. When it arrived there was the very letter that I had reckoned on, and the intimation that the posts were still going. I filled my name in quite deliberately. I had to join up before six weeks were through. They gave particulars of where to get special uniform, and of ships that would be sailing. My notice to Miss Vaughan would take a month.
‘Her face will be a picture,’ said Tenny, scrawling her name with a flourish; ‘she will just fall through her chair with horror. She thinks her home is the place of places, the pearl of homes, and that anybody who has the chance to nurse one of her patients should not look any further.’
‘I shall tell her in the morning.’
‘I’ll ask for an interview just after you. I wish we could persuade Birdie to come too. It would be lovely if all the nurses resigned on the same day,’ and her imagination went wandering off into space.
Tenny was taking no risks, and she insisted that we should post the letter that night. I wanted to demur, but really I had no possible excuse for it. If I were going to burn my boats behind me, the sooner I got on with it the better, so I let Tenny run out to the postbox at the corner, and when she came back realized that now I really had done it.
‘That’s that,’ said Tenny joyously; ‘and now for seeing Miss Vaughan in the morning. She is going to have a fit.’
Tenny’s amusement over the horror that Miss Vaughan was going to suffer was a very childish affair. She had never got on well with the Matron, and disliked some of her methods and her fondness of routine, so that it amused her enormously to think that such a routine was going to be disturbed.
Miss Vaughan never thought that any nurse could resign for any reason save ill-health, and would know that both of us
were strong and fit, therefore she would be scandalized at the thought that we had given up because we did not care for the home and had found an appointment that we thought we should like better.
When we went to bed soon after nine (we were usually too exhausted to stay up later), Tenny was still chuckling to herself. ‘Dream of Australia,’ she told me. ‘We are going to have the most wonderful time there. I am quite sure that we have taken a step that we shall never regret.’
But I didn’t dream of Australia when eventually I got to sleep.
I asked to see Miss Vaughan immediately after breakfast. As I went down to keep the interview, I saw for a fleeting moment that Iris was in the lift. She was looking radiant in blue with a bunch of white violets pinned at her throat. Directly I saw those flowers I linked them up with memories of her visit to the home as a patient, and I thought, ‘I wonder if she is up to her old tricks and going on with that intrigue after all.’ Then I dismissed the idea.
I went on into the little sitting-room. There was Miss Vaughan seated in state at her desk, from which she always had her nurses on the mat.
‘Well, Nurse?’ said she.
If I stayed here a hundred years I should be Nurse, just Nurse always. I couldn’t bear it.
I explained that I wanted to tell her in a month’s time I should be starting out for an appointment abroad. Tenny had been quite right about this worrying her. She turned pink, and then said that she was grieved to hear that I was dissatisfied with the home, and much more grieved to think that I had gone entirely behind her back and had made arrangements to take on another appointment when a little talk might have put everything right between us. She asked why I had been dissatisfied here. That put me into a very awkward position, and I floundered a good deal, after which she stiffened.