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Page 55
In this world of his there was no uncharitableness--no sin. There
was a God--why should he not know his Father?--there were brasses to
clean and three meals a day; and there was chapel on Sunday, where
one held a book--the Dummy held his upside down--and felt the
vibration of the organ, and proudly watched the afternoon sunlight
smiling on the polished metal of the chandelier and choir rail.
* * * * *
The Probationer sat turning the bandage machine and watching the
Dummy, who was polishing the brass plates on the beds. The plates
said: "Endowed in perpetuity"--by various leading citizens, to whom
God had given His best gifts, both heart and brain.
"How old do you suppose he is?" she asked, dropping her voice.
The Senior Nurse was writing fresh labels for the medicine closet,
and for "tincture of myrrh" she wrote absently "tincture of mirth,"
and had to tear it up.
"He can't hear you," she said rather shortly. "How old? Oh, I don't
know. About a hundred, I should think."
This was, of course, because of his soul, which was all he had, and
which, having existed from the beginning, was incredibly old. The
little dead mother could have told them that he was less than
thirty.
The Probationer sat winding bandages. Now and then they went
crooked and had to be done again. She was very tired. The creaking
of the bandage machine made her nervous--that and a sort of
disillusionment; for was this her great mission, this sitting in a
silent, sunny ward, where the double row of beds held only querulous
convalescent women? How close was she to life who had come to soothe
the suffering and close the eyes of the dying; who had imagined that
her instruments of healing were a thermometer and a prayer-book; and
who found herself fighting the good fight with a bandage machine
and, even worse, a scrubbing brush and a finetooth comb?
The Senior Nurse, having finished the M's, glanced up and surprised
a tear on the Probationer's round young cheek. She was wise, having
trained many probationers.
"Go to first supper, please," she said. First supper is the Senior's
prerogative; but it is given occasionally to juniors and
probationers as a mark of approval, or when the Senior is not
hungry, or when a probationer reaches the breaking point, which is
just before she gets her uniform.
The Probationer smiled and brightened. After all, she must be doing
fairly well; and if she were not in the battle she was of it.
Glimpses she had of the battle--stretchers going up and down in the
slow elevator; sheeted figures on their way to the operating room;
the clang of the ambulance bell in the courtyard; the occasional cry
of a new life ushered in; the impressive silence of an old life
going out. She surveyed the bandages on the bed.
"I'll put away the bandages first," she said. "That's what you said,
I think--never to leave the emergency bed with anything on it?"
"Right-oh!" said the Senior.
"Though nothing ever happens back here--does it?'
"It's about our turn; I'm looking for a burned case." The
Probationer, putting the bandages into a basket, turned and stared.
"We have had two in to-day in the house," the Senior went on,
starting on the N's and making the capital carefully. "There will be
a third, of course; and we may get it. Cases always seem to run in
threes. While you're straightening the bed I suppose I might as well
go to supper after all."
So it was the Probationer and the Dummy who received the new case,
while the Senior ate cold salmon and fried potatoes with other
seniors, and inveighed against lectures on Saturday evening and
other things that seniors object to, such as things lost in the
wash, and milk in the coffee instead of cream, and women from the
Avenue who drank carbolic acid and kept the ambulance busy.
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