always coming and going,
and it wasn't worth while learning their names until they were accepted.
And that, anyhow, probationers should never be sent to private patients,
who are paying a lot and want the best.
"Really," she added, "I don't know what the school is coming to. Since
this war in Europe every girl wants to wear a uniform and be ready to
go to the front if we have trouble. All sorts of silly children are
applying. We have one now, on this very floor, not a day over
nineteen."
"Who is she?" asked Middleton. He felt that this was the one. She was
so exactly the sort Miss Willoughby would object to.
"Jane Brown," snapped Miss Willoughby. "A little, namby-pamby,
mush-and-milk creature, afraid of her own shadow."
Now, Jane Brown, at that particular moment, was sitting in her little
room in the dormitory, with the old watch ticking on the stand so she
would not over-stay her off duty. She was aching with fatigue from her
head, with its smooth and shiny hair, to her feet, which were in a bowl
of witch hazel and hot water. And she was crying over a letter she was
writing.
Jane Brown had just come from her first death. It had taken place in H
ward, where she daily washed window-sills, and disinfected stands, and
carried dishes in and out. And it had not been what she had expected. In
the first place, the man had died for hours. She had never heard of this.
She had thought of death as coming quickly--a glance of farewell,
closing eyes, and--rest. But for hours and hours the struggle had gone
on, a fight for breath that all the ward could hear. And he had not
closed his eyes at all. They were turned up, and staring.
The Probationer had suffered horribly, and at last she had gone behind
the screen and folded her hands and closed her eyes, and said very low:
"Dear God--please take him quickly."
He had stopped breathing almost immediately. But that may have been
a coincidence.
However, she was not writing that home. Between gasps she was
telling the humours of visiting day in the ward, and of how kind every
one was to her, which, if not entirely true, was not entirely untrue. They
were kind enough when they had time to be, or when they remembered
her. Only they did not always remember her.
She ended by saying that she was quite sure they meant to accept her
when her three months was up. It was frightfully necessary that she be
accepted.
She sent messages to all the little town, which had seen her off almost
en masse. And she added that the probationers received the regular
first-year allowance of eight dollars a month, and she could make it do
nicely--which was quite true, unless she kept on breaking thermometers
when she shook them down.
At the end she sent her love to everybody, including even worthless
Johnny Fraser, who cut the grass and scrubbed the porches; and, of
course, to Doctor Willie. He was called Doctor Willie because his
father, who had taken him into partnership long ago, was Doctor Will.
It never had seemed odd, although Doctor Willie was now sixty-five,
and a saintly soul.
Curiously enough, her letter was dated April first. Under that very date,
and about that time of the day, a health officer in a near-by borough
was making an entry regarding certain coloured gentlemen shipped
north from Louisiana to work on a railroad. Opposite the name of one
Augustus Baird he put a cross. This indicated that Augustus Baird had
not been vaccinated.
By the sixth of April "Twenty-two" had progressed from splints to a
plaster cast, and was being most awfully bored. Jane Brown had not
returned, and there was a sort of relentless maturity about the nurses
who looked after him that annoyed him.
Lying there, he had a good deal of time to study them, and somehow
his recollection of the girl with the hunting-case watch did not seem to
fit her in with these kindly and efficient women. He could not, for
instance, imagine her patronising the Senior Surgical Interne in a
deferential but unmistakable manner, or good-naturedly bullying the
First Assistant, who was a nervous person in shoes too small for her, as
to their days off duty.
Twenty-two began to learn things about the hospital. For instance, the
day nurse, while changing his pillow slips, would observe that Nineteen
was going to be operated on that day, and close her lips over further
information. But when the afternoon relief, while giving him his
toothbrush after lunch, said there was a most interesting gall-stone case
in nineteen, and the night nurse, in reply to a direct
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