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Page 10
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 soiled dressings--Jane Brown gritted her
teeth.
"Keep quiet," said the S.S.I., who was a good fellow, but had never
been stabbed in the neck for running away with somebody else's wife.
"Eet hurt," said Tony. "Ow."
Jane Brown turned very pink.
"Why don't you let me cut it off properly?" she said, in a strangled
tone.
The total result of this was that Jane Brown was reprimanded by the
First Assistant, and learned some things about ethics.
"But," she protested, "it was both stupid and cruel. And if I know I
am right----"
"How are you to know you are right?" demanded the First Assistant,
crossly. Her feet were stinging. "'A little knowledge is a dangerous
thing.'" This was a favorite quotation of hers, although not
Browning. "Nurses in hospitals are there to carry out the doctor's
orders. Not to think or to say what they think unless they are
asked. To be intelligent, but----"
"But not too intelligent!" said the Probationer. "I see."
This was duly reported to the Head, who observed that it was merely
what she had expected and extremely pert. Her cold was hardly any
better.
It was taking the Probationer quite a time to realise her own total
lack of significance in all this. She had been accustomed to men who
rose when a woman entered a room and remained standing as long as
she stood. And now she was in a new world, where she had to rise and
remain standing while a cocky youth in ducks, just out of medical
college, sauntered in with his hands in his pockets and took a
_boutonni�re_ from the ward bouquet.
It was probably extremely good for her.
She was frightfully tired that day, and toward evening the little
glow of service began to fade. There seemed to be nothing to do for
Johnny but to wait. Doctor Willie had seemed to think that nature
would clear matters up there, and had requested no operation. She
smoothed beds and carried cups of water and broke another
thermometer. And she put the eggs from home in the ward pantry and
made egg-nogs of them for Stanislas Krzykolski, who was
unaccountably upset as to stomach.
She had entirely forgotten Twenty-two. He had stayed away all that
day, in a sort of faint hope that she would miss him. But she had
not. She was feeling rather worried, to tell the truth. For a Staff
surgeon going through the ward, had stopped by Johnny's bed and
examined the pupils of his eyes, and had then exchanged a glance
with the Senior Surgical Interne that had perplexed her.
In the chapel at prayers that evening all around her the nurses sat
and rested, their tired hands folded in their laps. They talked a
little among themselves, but it was only a buzzing that reached the
Probationer faintly. Some one near was talking about something that
was missing.
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