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Page 20
"I don't suppose, by any chance, you came to see how I am getting
along?" he inquired humbly.
"I can see that."
"You can't see how lonely I am." When she offered nothing to this
speech, he enlarged on it. "When it gets unbearable," he said, "I
sit in front of the mirror and keep myself company. If that doesn't
make your heart ache, nothing will."
"I'm afraid I have a heart-ache, but it is not that." For a
terrible moment he thought of that theory of his which referred to a
disappointment in love. Was she going to have the unbelievable
cruelty to tell him about it?
"I have to talk to somebody," she said simply. "And I came to you,
because you've worked on a newspaper, and you have had a lot of
experience. It's--a matter of ethics. But really it's a matter of
life and death."
He felt most horribly humble before her, and he hated the lie,
except that it had brought her to him. There was something so direct
and childlike about her. The very way she drew a chair in front of
him, and proceeded, talking rather fast, to lay the matter before
him, touched him profoundly. He felt, somehow, incredibly old and
experienced.
And then, after all that, to fail her!
"You see how it is," she finished. "I can't go to the Staff, and
they wouldn't do anything if I did--except possibly put me out.
Because a nurse really only follows orders. And--I've got to stay,
if I can. And Doctor Willie doesn't believe in an operation and
won't see that he's dying. And everybody at home thinks he is right,
because--well," she added hastily, "he's been right a good many
times."
He listened attentively. His record, you remember, was his own way
some ninety-seven per cent of the time, and at first he would not
believe that this was going to be the three per cent, or a part of
it.
"Well," he said at last, "we'll just make the Staff turn in and do
it. That's easy."
"But they won't. They can't."
"We can't let Johnny die, either, can we?"
But when at last she was gone, and the room was incredibly empty
without her,--when, to confess a fact that he was exceedingly
shame-faced about, he had wheeled over to the chair she had sat in
and put his cheek against the arm where her hand had rested, when he
was somewhat his own man again and had got over the feeling that his
arms were empty of something they had never held--then it was that
Twenty-two found himself up against the three per cent.
The hospital's attitude was firm. It could not interfere. It was an
outside patient and an outside doctor. Its responsibility ended with
providing for the care of the patient, under his physician's orders.
It was regretful--but, of course, unless the case was turned over to
the Staff----
He went back to the ward to tell her, after it had all been
explained to him. But she was not surprised. He saw that, after all,
she had really known he was going to fail her.
"It's hopeless," was all she said. "Everybody is right, and
everybody is wrong."
It was the next day that, going to the courtyard for a breath of
air, she saw a woman outside the iron gate waving to her. It was
Johnny's mother, a forlorn old soul in what Jane Brown recognised as
an old suit of her mother's.
"Doctor Willie bought my ticket, Miss Nellie," she said nervously.
"It seems like I had to come, even if I couldn't get in. I've been
waiting around most all afternoon. How is he?"
"He is resting quietly," said Jane Brown, holding herself very
tense, because she wanted to scream. "He isn't suffering at all."
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