the corridor.
Sounds take on much significance in a hospital, and probationers study
them, especially footsteps. It gives them a moment sometimes to think
what to do next.
Internes, for instance, frequently wear rubber soles on their white shoes
and have a way of slipping up on one. And the engineer goes on a half
run, generally accompanied by the clanking of a tool or two. And the
elevator man runs, too, because generally the bell is ringing. And ward
patients shuffle about in carpet slippers, and the pharmacy clerk has a
brisk young step, inclined to be jaunty.
But it is the Staff which is always unmistakable. It comes along the
corridor deliberately, inexorably. It plants its feet firmly and with
authority. It moves with the inevitability of fate, with the pride of
royalty, with the ease of the best made-to-order boots. The ring of a
Staff member's heel on a hospital corridor is the most authoritative
sound on earth. He may be the gentlest soul in the world, but he will
tread like royalty.
But this was not Staff. Jane Brown knew this sound, and it filled her
with terror. It was the scuffling of four pairs of feet, carefully instructed
not to keep step. It meant, in other words, a stretcher. But perhaps it
was not coming to her. Ah, but it was!
Panic seized Jane Brown. She knew there were certain things to do, but
they went out of her mind like a cat out of a cellar window. However,
the ward was watching. It had itself, generally speaking, come in feet
first. It knew the procedure. So, instructed by low voices from the beds
around, Jane Brown feverishly tore the spread off the emergency bed
and drew it somewhat apart from its fellows. Then she stood back and
waited.
Came in four officers from the police patrol. Came in the Senior
Surgical Interne. Came two convalescents from the next ward to stare
in at the door. Came the stretcher, containing a quiet figure under a
grey blanket.
Twenty-two, at that exact moment, was putting a queen on a ten spot
and pretending there is nothing wrong about cheating oneself.
In a very short time the quiet figure was on the bed, and the Senior
Surgical Interne was writing in the order book: "Prepare for operation."
Jane Brown read it over his shoulder, which is not etiquette.
"But--I can't," she quavered. "I don't know how. I won't touch him.
He's--he's bloody!"
Then she took another look at the bed and she saw--Johnny Fraser.
Now Johnny had, in his small way, played a part in the Probationer's
life, such as occasionally scrubbing porches or borrowing a half dollar
or being suspected of stealing the eggs from the henhouse. But that
Johnny Fraser had been a wicked, smiling imp, much given to sitting in
the sun.
Here lay another Johnny Fraser, a quiet one, who might never again
feel the warm earth through his worthless clothes on his worthless
young body. A Johnny of closed eyes and slow, noisy breathing.
"Why, Johnny!" said the Probationer, in a strangled voice.
The Senior Surgical Interne was interested.
"Know him?" he said.
"He is a boy from home." She was still staring at this quiet,
un-impudent figure.
The Senior Surgical Interne eyed her with an eye that was only partially
professional. Then he went to the medicine closet and poured a bit of
aromatic ammonia into a glass.
"Sit down and drink this," he said, in a very masculine voice. He liked
to feel that he could do something for her. Indeed, there was something
almost proprietary in the way he took her pulse.
Some time after the early hospital supper that evening Twenty-two,
having oiled his chair with some olive oil from his tray, made a
clandestine trip through the twilight of the corridor back of the elevator
shaft. To avoid scandal he pretended interest in other wards, but he
gravitated, as a needle to the pole, to H. And there he found the
Probationer, looking rather strained, and mothering a quiet figure on a
bed.
He was a trifle puzzled at her distress, for she made no secret of
Johnny's status in the community. What he did not grasp was that
Johnny Fraser was a link between this new and rather terrible world of
the hospital and home. It was not Johnny alone, it was Johnny
scrubbing a home porch and doing it badly, it was Johnny in her
father's old clothes, it was Johnny fishing for catfish in the creek, or
lending his pole to one of the little brothers whose pictures were on her
table in the dormitory.
Twenty-two felt a certain depression. He reflected rather grimly that he
had been ten days missing and that no one had apparently
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