FullReads

The Avenue Girl lay alone most of the time. The friendly offices of the ward were not for her. Private curiosity and possible kindliness were over-shadowed by a general arrogance of goodness. The ward flung its virtue at her like a weapon and she raised no defence. In the first days things were not so bad. She lay in shock for a time, and there were not wanting hands during the bad hours to lift a cup of water to her lips; but after that came the tedious time when death no longer hovered overhead and life was there for the asking.

The curious thing was that the Avenue Girl did not ask. She lay for hours without moving, with eyes that seemed tired with looking into the dregs of life. The Probationer was in despair.

“She could get better if she would,” she said to the interne one day. The Senior was off duty and they had done the dressing together. “She just won’t try.”

“Perhaps she thinks it isn’t worth while,” replied the interne, who was drying his hands carefully while the Probationer waited for the towel.

She was a very pretty Probationer.

“She hasn’t much to look forward to, you know.”

The Probationer was not accustomed to discussing certain things with young men, but she had the Avenue Girl on her mind.

“She has a home–she admits it.” She coloured bravely. “Why–why cannot she go back to it, even now?”

The interne poured a little rosewater and glycerine into the palm of one hand and gave the Probationer the bottle. If his fingers touched hers, she never knew it.

“Perhaps they’d not want her after–well, they’d never feel the same, likely. They’d probably prefer to think of her as dead and let it go at that. There–there doesn’t seem to be any way back, you know.”

He was exceedingly self-conscious.

“Then life is very cruel,” said the Probationer with rather shaky lips.

And going back to the Avenue Girl’s bed she filled her cup with ice and straightened her pillows. It was her only way of showing defiance to a world that mutilated its children and turned them out to die. The interne watched her as she worked. It rather galled him to see her touching this patient. He had no particular sympathy for the Avenue Girl. He was a man, and ruthless, as men are apt to be in such things.

The Avenue Girl had no visitors. She had had one or two at first–pretty girls with tired eyes and apologetic glances; a negress who got by the hall porter with a box of cigarettes, which the Senior promptly confiscated; and–the Dummy. Morning and evening came the Dummy and stood by her bed and worshipped. Morning and evening he brought tribute–a flower from the masses that came in daily; an orange, got by no one knows what trickery from the kitchen; a leadpencil; a box of cheap candies. At first the girl had been embarrassed by his visits. Later, as the unfriendliness of the ward grew more pronounced, she greeted him with a faint smile. The first time she smiled he grew quite pale and shuffled out. Late that night they found him sitting in the chapel looking at the window, which was only a blur.

For certain small services in the ward the Senior depended on the convalescents–filling drinking cups; passing milk at eleven and three; keeping the white bedspreads in geometrical order. But the Avenue Girl was taboo. The boycott had been instituted by Old Maggie. The rampant respectability of the ward even went so far as to refuse to wash her in those early morning hours when the night nurse, flying about with her cap on one ear, was carrying tin basins about like a blue-and-white cyclone. The Dummy knew nothing of the washing; the early morning was the time when he polished the brass doorplate which said: Hospital and Free Dispensary. But he knew about the drinking cup and after a time that became his self-appointed task.