Love Stories | Page 8

given a hang
whether he turned up or not.
"Is he going to live?" he inquired. He could see that the ward nurse had
an eye on him, and was preparing for retreat.
"O yes," said Jane Brown. "I think so now. The interne says they have
had a message from Doctor Willie. He is coming." There was a
beautiful confidence in her tone.
Things moved very fast with the Probationer for the next twenty-four
hours. Doctor Willie came, looking weary but smiling benevolently.
Jane Brown met him in a corridor and kissed him, as, indeed, she had
been in the habit of doing since her babyhood.
"Where is the young rascal?" said Doctor Willie. "Up to his old tricks,
Nellie, and struck by a train." He put a hand under her chin, which is
never done to the members of the training school in a hospital, and
searched her face with his kind old eyes. "Well, how does it go,
Nellie?"
Jane Brown swallowed hard.
"All right," she managed. "They want to operate, Doctor Willie."
"Tut!" he said. "Always in a hurry, these hospitals. We'll wait a while, I
think."
"Is everybody well at home?"
It had come to her, you see, what comes to every nurse once in her

training--the thinness of the veil, the terror of calamity, the fear of
death.
"All well. And----" he glanced around. Only the Senior Surgical Interne
was in sight, and he was out of hearing. "Look here, Nellie," he said,
"I've got a dozen fresh eggs for you in my satchel. Your mother sent
them."
She nearly lost her professional manner again then. But she only asked
him to warn the boys about automobiles and riding on the backs of
wagons.
Had any one said Twenty-two to her, she would not have known what
was meant. Not just then, anyhow.
In the doctors' room that night the Senior Surgical Interne lighted a
cigarette and telephoned to the operating room.
"That trephining's off," he said, briefly.
Then he fell to conversation with the Senior Medical, who was rather
worried about a case listed on the books as Augustus Baird, coloured.
Twenty-two did not sleep very well that night. He needed exercise, he
felt. But there was something else. Miss Brown had been just a shade
too ready to accept his explanation about Mabel, he felt, so ready that
he feared she had been more polite than sincere. Probably she still
believed there was a Mabel. Not that it mattered, except that he hated to
make a fool of himself. He roused once in the night and was quite sure
he heard her voice down the corridor. He knew this must be wrong,
because they would not make her work all day and all night, too.
But, as it happened, it was Jane Brown. The hospital provided plenty of
sleeping time, but now and then there was a slip-up and somebody paid.
There had been a night operation, following on a busy day, and the
operating-room nurses needed help. Out of a sound sleep the night
Assistant had summoned Jane Brown to clean instruments.

At five o'clock that morning she was still sitting on a stool beside a
glass table, polishing instruments which made her shiver. All around
were things that were spattered with blood. But she looked anything but
fluttery. She was a very grim and determined young person just then,
and professional beyond belief. The other things, like washing
window-sills and cutting toe-nails, had had no significance. But here
she was at last on the edge of mercy. Some one who might have died
had lived that night because of this room, and these instruments, and
willing hands.
She hoped she would always have willing hands.
She looked very pale at breakfast the next morning, and rather older.
Also she had a new note of authority in her voice when she telephoned
the kitchen and demanded H ward's soft-boiled eggs. She washed
window-sills that morning again, but no longer was there rebellion in
her soul. She was seeing suddenly how the hospital required all these
menial services, which were not menial at all but only preparation; that
there were little tasks and big ones, and one graduated from the one to
the other.
She took some flowers from the ward bouquet and put them beside
Johnny's bed--Johnny, who was still lying quiet, with closed eyes.
The Senior Surgical Interne did a dressing in the ward that morning. He
had been in to see Augustus Baird, and he felt uneasy. He vented it on
Tony, the Italian, with a stiletto thrust in his neck, by jerking at the
adhesive. Tony wailed, and Jane Brown, who was the "dirty"
nurse--which does not mean what it appears to mean, but is the person
who receives the