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Page 13
In H ward that late afternoon there was a wave of homesickness in
the air, and on the part of those men who were up and about, who
shuffled up and down the ward in flapping carpet slippers, an
inclination to mutiny.
"How did they take it?" Twenty-two inquired. She puckered her
eyebrows.
"They don't like it," she confessed. "Some of them were about ready
to go home and it--_Tony!_" she called sharply.
For Tony, who had been cunningly standing by the window leading to a
fire-escape, had flung the window up and was giving unmistakable
signs of climbing out and returning to the other man's wife.
"Tony!" she called, and ran. Tony scrambled up on the sill. A sort
of titter ran over the ward and Tony, now on the platform outside,
waved a derisive hand through the window.
"Good-bye, mees!" he said, and--disappeared.
It was not a very dramatic thing, after all. It is chiefly
significant for its effect on Twenty-two, who was obliged to sit
frozen with horror and cursing his broken leg, while Jane Brown
raced a brown little Italian down the fire-escape and caught him at
the foot of it. Tony took a look around. The courtyard gates were
closed and a policeman sat outside on a camp-stool reading the
newspaper. Tony smiled sheepishly and surrendered.
Some seconds later Tony and Jane Brown appeared on the platform
outside. Jane Brown had Tony by the ear, and she stopped long enough
outside to exchange the ear for his shoulder, by which she shook
him, vigorously.
Twenty-two turned his chair around and wheeled himself back to his
room. He was filled with a cold rage--because she might have fallen
on the fire-escape and been killed; because he had not been able to
help her; because she was there, looking after the derelicts of
life, when the world was beautiful outside, and she was young;
because to her he was just Twenty-two and nothing more.
He had seen her exactly six times.
Jane Brown gave the ward a little talk that night before the night
nurse reported. She stood in the centre of the long room, beside the
tulips, and said that she was going to be alone there, and that she
would have to put the situation up to their sense of honour. If they
tried to escape, they would hurt her. Also they would surely be
caught and brought back. And, because she believed in a combination
of faith and deeds, she took three nails and the linen-room
flatiron, and nailed shut the window onto the fire-escape.
After that, she brushed crumbs out of the beds with a whiskbroom and
rubbed a few backs with alcohol, and smoothed the counterpanes, and
hung over Johnny's unconscious figure for a little while, giving
motherly pats to his flat pillow and worrying considerably because
there was so little about him to remind her of the Johnny she knew
at home.
After that she sat down and made up her records for the night nurse.
The ward understood, and was perfectly good, trying hard not to muss
its pillows or wrinkle the covers. And struggling, too, with a new
idea. They were prisoners. No more release cards would brighten the
days. For an indefinite period the old Frenchman would moan at
night, and Bader the German would snore, and the Chinaman would
cough. Indefinitely they would eat soft-boiled eggs and rice and
beef-tea and cornstarch.
The ward felt extremely low in its mind.
* * * * *
That night the Senior Surgical Interne went in to play cribbage with
Twenty-two, and received a lecture on leaving a young girl alone in
H with a lot of desperate men. They both grew rather heated over the
discussion and forgot to play cribbage at all. Twenty-two lay awake
half the night, because he had seen clearly that the Senior Surgical
Interne was interested in Jane Brown also, and would probably loaf
around H most of the time since there would be no new cases now. It
was a crowning humiliation to have the night nurse apply to the
Senior Surgical Interne for a sleeping powder for him!
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