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Page 75
It did not occur to the Nurse to deprecate having used an evil
medium toward a righteous end. She took life much as she found it.
And so she tiptoed past the chapel again, where a faint odour of
peau d'Espagne came stealing out into the hall, and where the
children from the children's ward, in roller-chairs and on crutches,
were singing with all their shrill young voices, earnest eyes
uplifted.
The white Easter lilies on the altar sent their fragrance out over
the gathering, over the nurses, young and placid, over the hopeless
and the hopeful, over the faces where death had passed and left its
inevitable stamp, over bodies freshly risen on this Easter Sunday
to new hope and new life--over the Junior Medical, waiting with the
manuscript of "The Palms" rolled in his hand and his heart singing a
hymn of happiness.
The Nurse went up to her ward, and put a screen around Claribel,
and, with all her woman's art, tidied the immaculate white bed and
loosened the uncompromising yellow braids, so that the soft hair
fell across Claribel's bloodless forehead and softened the defiance
in her blue eyes. She brought the pink hyacinth in its pot, too, and
placed it on the bedside table. Then she stood off and looked at her
work. It was good.
Claribel submitted weakly. She had stopped staring at the wall, and
had taken to watching the open window opposite with strange
intentness. Only when the Nurse gave a final pat to the bedspread
she spoke.
"Was it a boy--or a girl?" she asked.
"Girl," said the nurse briskly. "A little beauty, perfect in every
way."
"A girl--to grow up and go through this hell!" she muttered, and her
eyes wandered back to the window.
But the Nurse was wise with the accumulated wisdom of a sex that has
had to match strength with wile for ages, and she was not yet ready.
She went into the little room where eleven miracles lay in eleven
cribs, and, although they all looked exactly alike, she selected
Claribel's without hesitation, and carried it to the mysterious room
down the hall--which was no longer a torture-chamber, but a
resplendently white place, all glass and tile and sunlight, and
where she did certain things that are not prescribed in the hospital
rules.
First of all, she opened a cupboard and took out a baby dress of
lace and insertion,--and everybody knows that such a dress is used
only when a hospital infant is baptised,--and she clothed Claribel's
baby in linen and fine raiment, and because they are very, very red
when they are so new, she dusted it with a bit of talcum--to break
the shock, as you may say. It was very probable that Al had never
seen so new a baby, and it was useless to spoil the joy of
parenthood unnecessarily. For it really was a fine child, and
eventually it would be white and beautiful.
The baby smelled of violet, for the christening-robe was kept in a
sachet.
Finally she gave it another teaspoonful of warm water and put it
back in its crib. And then she rustled starchily back to the
throne-chair by the record-table, and opened her Bible at the place
where it said that Annie Petowski might sit up, and the Goldstein
baby--bran baths, and the other thing written just below.
III
The music poured up the well of the staircase; softened by distance,
the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty basses of the medical
staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty.
Liz sat on the top step of the stairs, with her baby in her arms;
and, as the song went on, Liz's eyes fell to her child and stayed
there.
At three o'clock the elevator-man brought Rosie Davis along the
hall--Rosie, whose costume betrayed haste, and whose figure, under a
gaudy motor-coat, gave more than a suggestion of being unsupported
and wrapper-clad. She carried a clinking silver chatelaine, however,
and at the door she opened it and took out a quarter, extending it
with a regal gesture to the elevator-man.
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