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Page 57
"Hot-water bottles and screens," it said variously. "Take her
temperature. Don't be frightened! There'll be a doctor in a minute."
The girl lay on the bed with her eyes shut. It was Irish Delia who
saw the Dummy and raised a cry.
"Look at the Dummy!" she said. "He's crying."
The Dummy's world had always been a small one. There was the
superintendent, who gave him his old clothes; and there was the
engineer, who brought him tobacco; and there were the ambulance
horses, who talked to him now and then without speech. And, of
course, there was his Father.
Fringing this small inner circle of his heart was a kaleidoscope of
changing faces, nurses, _internes_, patients, visitors--a wall of
life that kept inviolate his inner shrine. And in the holiest place,
where had dwelt only his Father, and not even the superintendent,
the Dummy had recently placed the Avenue Girl. She was his saint,
though he knew nothing of saints. Who can know why he chose her? A
queer trick of the soul perhaps--or was it super-wisdom?--to choose
her from among many saintly women and so enshrine her.
Or perhaps---- Down in the chapel, in a great glass window, the
young John knelt among lilies and prayed. When, at service on
Sundays, the sunlight came through on to the Dummy's polished choir
rail and candles, the young John had the face of a girl, with short
curling hair, very yellow for the colour scheme. The Avenue Girl had
hair like that and was rather like him in other ways.
And here she was where all the others had come, and where countless
others would come sooner or later. She was not unconscious and at
Delia's cry she opened her eyes. The Probationer was off filling
water bottles, and only the Dummy, stricken, round-shouldered,
unlovely, stood beside her.
"Rotten luck, old top!" she said faintly.
To the Dummy it was a benediction. She could open her eyes. The
miracle of speech was still hers.
"Cigarette!" explained the Avenue Girl, seeing his eyes still on
her. "Must have gone to sleep with it and dropped it. I'm--all in!"
"Don't you talk like that," said Irish Delia, bending over from the
next bed. "You'll get well a' right--unless you inhaled. Y'ought to
'a' kept your mouth shut."
Across the ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue
calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old
Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where
squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and scorned it.
"Humph!" she said, without troubling to lower her voice. "I've seen
her often. I done her washing once. She's as bad as they make 'em."
"You shut your mouth!" Irish Delia rose to the defence. "She's in
trouble now and what she was don't matter. You go back to bed or
I'll tell the Head Nurse on you. Look out! The Dummy----"
The Dummy was advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the
woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands
and jerked her away from the bed. Old Maggie reeled--almost fell.
"You all seen that!" she appealed to the ward. "I haven't even spoke
to him and he attacked me! I'll go to the superintendent about it.
I'll----"
The Probationer hurried in. Her young cheeks were flushed with
excitement and anxiety; her arms were full of jugs, towels,
bandages--anything she could imagine as essential. She found the
Dummy on his knees polishing a bed plate, and the ward in
order--only Old Maggie was grumbling and making her way back to bed;
and Irish Delia was sitting up, with her eyes shining--for had not
the Dummy, who could not hear, known what Old Maggie had said about
the new girl? Had she not said that he knew many things that were
hidden, though God knows how he knew them?
The next hour saw the Avenue Girl through a great deal. Her burns
were dressed by an _interne_ and she was moved back to a bed at the
end of the ward. The Probationer sat beside her, having refused
supper. The Dummy was gone--the Senior Nurse had shooed him off as
one shoos a chicken.
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