A Diary Without Dates Part 5

The hospital--a sort of monotone, a place of whispers and wheels moving on rubber tyres, long corridors, and strangely uns.e.xed women moving in them. Uns.e.xed not in any real sense, but the white clothes, the hidden hair, the stern white collar just below the chin, give them an air of school-girlishness, an air and a look women don't wear in the world.

They seem unexpectant.

Then at Madeleine's ... the light, the talk, the deep bath got ready for me by a maid, instead of my getting it ready for a patient....

Not that I mind getting it ready; I like it. Only the change! It's like being turn and turn about maid and mistress.

There is the first snow here, scanty and frozen on the doorstep.

I came home last night in the dark to dinner and found its faint traces on the road and in the gutter as I climbed the hill. I couldn't see well; there were stars, but no moon. Higher up it was unmistakable; long white tracks frozen in the dried mud of the road, and a branch under a lamp thickened with frozen snow.

Shall I ever grow out of that excitement over the first bit of snow...?

I felt a glow of pride in the hill, thinking:

"In London it's all slush and mud. They don't suspect what we've got here. A suburb is a wonderful place!"

After a wet and muddy day in London I've seen the trains pull into Charing Cross with snow piled on the roofs of the carriages, and felt a foot taller for joy that I was one of those fortunates who might step into a train and go down into a white countryside.

It is the same excitement to wake up early to an overnight fall and see down the Dover Road for miles no foot of man printed, but only the birds' feet. Considering the Dover Road has been a highway since the Romans, it really is a fine moment when you realize its surface has suddenly become untrodden and unexplored as any jungle.

Alas, the amount of snow that has set me writing!... two bucketfuls in the whole garden!

When a Medical Officer goes sick, or, in other words, when an M.O. is warded, a very special and almost cynical expression settles on his face. Also the bedside manner of the Visiting Officer is discarded as he reaches the bed of the sick M.O.

"My knees are very painful," says the sick M.O., but it is a despondent statement, not a plea for aid.

The Visiting Officer nods, but he does not suggest that they will soon be better.

They look at each other as weak human beings look, and:

"We might try...?" says the Visiting Officer questioningly.

The M.O. agrees without conviction, and settles back on his pillows. Not for him the comfortable trust in the divine knowledge of specialists. He can endure like a dog, but without its faith in its master.

The particular M.O. whose knees are painful is, as a matter of fact, better now. He got up yesterday.

Mooning about the ward in a dressing-gown, he stared first out of one window into the fog and then out of another.

Finally, just before he got back into bed, he made an epigram.

"Nurse," he said, "the difference between being in bed and getting up is that in bed you do nothing, but when you get up there's nothing to do...."

I tucked him up and put the cradle over his knees, and he added, "One gets accustomed to everything," and settled back happily with his reading-lamp, his French novel, and his dictionary.

The fog developed all day yesterday, piling up white and motionless against the window-panes. As night fell a little air of excitement ran here and there amongst the V.A.D.'s.

"How shall we get home...?" "Are the buses running?" "Oh no, the last one is stuck against the railings outside!" "My torch has run out...."

By seven o'clock even the long corridor was as dim as the alley outside.

No one thought of shutting the windows--I doubt whether they will shut ... and the fog rolled over the sill in banks and round the open gla.s.s doors, till even the white cap of a Sister could hardly be seen as she pa.s.sed.

I am pleased with any atmospheric exaggeration; the adventure of going home was before me....

At eight I felt my way down over the steps into the alley; the torch, held low on the ground, lighted but a small, pale circle round my shoes.

Outside it was black and solid and strangely quiet.

In the yard a man here and there raised his voice in a shout; feet strayed near mine and edged away.

At the cross-roads I came on a lantern standing upon the ground, and by it drooped the nose of a benighted horse; the spurt of a match lit the face of its owner.

Up the hill, the torch held low against the kerbstone, the sudden looming of a black giant made me start back as I nearly ran my head into a telegraph-post....

I was at the bottom of the sea; fathoms and fathoms of fog must stand above my head.

Suddenly a dozen lights showed about me, then the whole sky alight with stars, and naked trees with the rime on them, bristling; the long road ran up the hill its accustomed steel colour, the post office was there with its red window, the lean old lamp-post with its broken arm....

I had walked out of the fog as one walks out of the sea on to a beach!

Looking back, I could see the pit behind me; the fog standing on the road like a solid wall, straight up and down. Again I felt a pride in the hill. "Down there," I thought, "those groping feet and shouting voices; that man and that horse ... they don't guess!"

I walked briskly up the hill, and presently stepped on to the pavement; but at the edge of the asphalt, where tufted gra.s.s should grow, something crackled and hissed under my feet. Under the torchlight the unnatural gra.s.s was white and brittle with rime, fanciful as a stage fairy scene, and the railings beyond it glittered too.

I slid in the road as I turned down the drive; a sheet of ice was spread where the leaky pipe is, and the steps up to the house door were slippery.

But oh, the honeysuckle and the rose-trees...! Bush, plant, leaf, stem, rimed from end to end. The garden was a Bond Street jeweller's!

Perhaps the final chapter on Mr. Pett.i.tt....

In the excitement of the ward I had almost forgotten him; he is buried in the Mess, in the days when I lived on the floor below.

To-night, as I was waiting by the open hatch of the kitchen for my tray to be filled with little castles of lemon jelly, the hot blast from the kitchen drawing stray wisps of hair from beneath my cap, I saw the familiar limping figure--a figure bound up with my first days at the hospital, evoking a hundred evenings at the concerts, in the dining-room. I felt he had been away, but I didn't dare risk a "So you're back!"

He smiled, blushed, and limped past me.

Upstairs in the ward, as I was serving out my jellies, he arrived in the doorway, but, avoiding me, hobbled round the ward, visiting every bed but the one I was at at the moment. Then he went downstairs again.

I pa.s.sed him on the stairs. He can't say he didn't have his opportunity, for I even stopped with my heavy tray and spoke to him.

Half an hour later he was back in the ward again (not his ward), and this time he found the courage of hysteria. There in the middle of the ward, under the glaring Christmas lights, with the eyes of every interested man in every bed glued upon us, he presented me with a fan wrapped in white paper: "A little present I bought you, nurse." I took it, eyes sizzling and burning holes in my shoulders, and stammered my frantic thanks.

"You do like it, nurse?" he said rapidly, three times in succession.

And I: "I do, I do, I do...."