FullReads

“How d’you like me as a parlour entertainer, Nellie?” he whispered.

She put her other hand over his. Somehow she could not speak.

The First Assistant called to the Probationer that night as she went past her door. Lights were out, so the First Assistant had a candle, and she was rubbing her feet with witch hazel.

“Come in,” she called. “I have been looking for you. I have some news for you.”

The exaltation of the concert had died away. Jane Brown, in the candle light, looked small and tired and very, very young.

“We have watched you carefully,” said the First Assistant, who had her night garments on but had forgotten to take off her cap. “Although you are young, you have shown ability, and–you are to be accepted.”

“Thank you, very much,” replied Jane Brown, in a strangled tone.

“At first,” said the First Assistant, “we were not sure. You were very young, and you had such odd ideas. You know that yourself now.”

She leaned down and pressed a sore little toe with her forefinger. Then she sighed. The mention of Jane Brown’s youth had hurt her, because she was no longer very young. And there were times when she was tired, when it seemed to her that only youth counted. She felt that way to-night.

When Jane Brown had gone on, she blew out her candle and went to bed, still in her cap.

Hospitals do not really sleep at night. The elevator man dozes in his cage, and the night watchman may nap in the engineer’s room in the basement. But the night nurses are always making their sleepless rounds, and in the wards, dark and quiet, restless figures turn and sigh.

Before she went to bed that night, Jane Brown, by devious ways, slipped back to her ward. It looked strange to her, this cavernous place, filled with the unlovely noises of sleeping men. By the one low light near the doorway she went back to Johnny’s bed, and sat down beside him. She felt that this was the place to think things out. In her room other things pressed in on her; the necessity of making good for the sake of those at home, her love of the work, and cowardice. But here she saw things right.

The night nurse found her there some time later, asleep, her hunting-case watch open on Johnny’s bed and her fingers still on his quiet wrist. She made no report of it.

Twenty-two had another sleepless night written in on his record that night. He sat up and worried. He worried about the way the Senior Surgical Interne had sung to Jane Brown that night. And he worried about things he had done and shouldn’t have, and things he should have done and hadn’t. Mostly the first. At five in the morning he wrote a letter to his family telling them where he was, and that he had been vaccinated and that the letter would be fumigated. He also wrote a check for an artificial leg for the boy in the children’s ward, and then went to bed and put himself to sleep by reciting the “Rosary” over and over. His last conscious thought was that the hours he had spent with a certain person would not make much of a string of pearls.

The Probationer went to Doctor Willie the next day. Some of the exuberance of the concert still bubbled in him, although he shook his head over Johnny’s record.

“A little slow, Nellie,” he said. “A little slow.”

Jane Brown took a long breath.

“Doctor Willie,” she said, “won’t you have him operated on?”

He looked up at her over his spectacles.

“Operated on? What for?”

“Well, he’s not getting any better,” she managed desperately. “I’m–sometimes I think he’ll die while we’re waiting for him to get better.”

He was surprised, but he was not angry.

“There’s no fracture, child,” he said gently. “If there is a clot there, nature is probably better at removing it than we are. The trouble with you,” he said indulgently, “is that you have come here, where they operate first and regret afterward. Nature is the best surgeon, child.”