A Diary Without Dates Part 9

I was down at the hospital to-night when the factory blew up over the river.

The lights went out, and as they sank I reached the kitchen hatchway with my tray. At the bottom of the stairs I could see through the garden door the sky grown sulphur and the bushes glowing, while all the panes of gla.s.s turned incandescent.

Then the explosion came; it sounded as though it was just behind the hospital. Two hundred panes of gla.s.s fell out, and they made a noise too.

Standing in the dark with a tray in my hand I heard a man's voice saying gleefully, "I haven't been out of bed this two months!"

Some one lit a candle, and by its light I saw all the charwomen from the kitchen bending about like broken weeds, and every officer was saying, "There, there now!"

We watched the fires till midnight from the hill.

I went over this morning early. We were thirty-two in a carriage--Lascars, Chinese, children, Jews, n.i.g.g.e.rs from the docks.

Lascars and children and Jews and I, we fought to get off the station platform; sometimes there wasn't room on the ground for both my feet at once.

The fires were still burning and smouldering there at midday, but a shower of rime fell on it, so that it looked like an old ruin, something done long ago.

At Pompeii, some one told me, one looked into the rooms and they were as they had been left--tables laid.... Here, too, I saw a table laid for the evening meal with a bedstead fallen from the upper floor astraddle across it. The insides of the houses were coughed into their windows, basket-chairs hanging to the sills, and fire-irons.

Outside, the soil of the earth turned up; a workman's tin mug stuck and roasted and hardened into what looks like solid rock--a fossil, as though it had been there for ever.

London is only skin-deep. Beneath lies the body of the world.

The hump under the blankets rolls over and a man's solemn face appears upon the pillow.

"Can you get me a book, nurse?"

"Yes. What kind do you like?"

"Nothing fanciful; something that might be true."

"All right!"

"Oh--and nurse...?"

"Yes?"

"Not sentimental and not funny, I like a practical story."

I got him "Lord Jim."...

Another voice: "Nurse, is there any modern French poetry in that bookcase?"

"Good heavens, no! Who would have brought it here?"

(Who are they all ... these men with their differing tastes?)

Perhaps the angels feel like this as they trail about in heaven with their wings flapping on their thin white legs....

"Who were you, angel?"

"I was a beggar outside San Marco."

"Were you? How odd! I was an Englishman."

The concerts that we give in the ward touch me with some curious emotion. I think it is because I am for once at rest in the ward and have time to think and wonder.

There is Captain Thomson finis.h.i.+ng his song. He doesn't know what to do with his hands; they swing. He is tall and dark, with soft eyes--and staff badges.

Could one guess what he is? Never in a dozen years.... But I _know_!

He said to me last night, "Nurse, I'm going out to-morrow."

I leant across the table to listen to him.

"Nurse, if you ever want any _crepe de Chine_ ... for nightgowns ...

mind, at wholesale prices...."

"I have bought some at a sale."

"May I ask at what price?"

"Four-and-eleven a yard."

"Pity! You could have had it from me at three!"

He gave me his business card. "That's it, nurse," he said, as he wrote on the back of it. "Drop me a line to that address and you'll get any material for underwear at trade prices."

He booked one or two orders the night he went away--not laughingly, not as a joke, but with deep seriousness, and gravely pleased that he was able to do what he could for us. He was a traveller in ladies'

underwear. I have seldom met any one so little a sn.o.b....

Watch Mr. Gray singing....

One hand on the piano, one on his hip:

"I love every mouse in that old-fas.h.i.+oned house."

"That fellow can sing!" whispers the man beside me.

"Is he a professional?" I asked as, finis.h.i.+ng, the singer made the faintest of bows and walked back to his chair.

"I think he must be."

"He is, he is!" whispered Mr. Matthews, "I've heard him before."