A Diary Without Dates Part 18

Between them the three old things, priests in their way, measure and weigh and mix and scold and let up the panel and bang it down through the long day, filling the hospital with their coloured bottles, sealed packets of pills, jars and vaccines, and precious syringes in boxes marked "To be returned at once" (I never knew a Sister fail to toss her head when she saw this message).

It is a very social spot outside the panel of the dispensary: each V.A.D. goes there each morning as one might do one's marketing, and, meeting there, puts down her straw basket, taps at the panel, and listens to the scolding of the old men with only half an ear.

For the bachelors amuse themselves when they are not mixing and weighing by inventing odd rules and codes of their own, and, reaching a skinny arm through the hatchway, they pin them on, little sc.r.a.ps of paper which fall down and are swept to heaven in the charwomen's pails.

And the V.A.D.'s, who are not at all afraid, because one cannot be afraid of a man of whom one has never seen more than half, turn a blind eye to the slips and a deaf ear to the voices, bringing their bottles and their jars just in the manner they were taught to do when first they entered the hospital. And they gossip! They have just seen the morning papers on all the beds; they have just heard about the half-days for the week; they have collected little rags and ends of news as they came along the corridor.

They gossip. And once a bearded bachelor thumped the panel down almost on my finger, leaving three startled faces staring at a piece of painted wood. But a little dark girl worked the panel up an inch with her nails and cajoled through the crack.

I have said before that the long corridor is wonderful. In the winter afternoons and evenings, when the mist rolled up and down over the tiles like the smoke in a tunnel, when one walked almost in darkness and peered into the then forbidden wards, when dwarfs coming from the G block grew larger and larger till the A block turned them into beings of one's own size, the corridor always made a special impression on me.

But in the summer mornings it is remarkable too. Then regiments of charwomen occupy it, working in close ma.s.s formation. Seven will work abreast upon their knees, flanked by their pails, their hands moving backwards and forwards in so complicated a system that there appears to be no system at all.

Patches of the corridor are thick with soapsuds; patches are dry. The art of walking the corridor in the morning can be learnt, and for a year and five months I have done it with no more than a slip and a slide.

But yesterday I stepped on a charwoman's hand. It was worse than stepping on a puppy: one knows that sickening lift of the heart, as though the will could undo the weight of the foot....

The stagger, the sense of one's unpardonable heaviness.... I slipped on her hand as on a piece of orange-peel, and, jumping like a chamois, sent the next pail all over the heels of the front rank.

It was the sort of situation with which one can do nothing.

I met a friend yesterday, one of the old Chelsea people. He has followed his natural development. Although he talks war, war, war, it is from his old angle, it wears the old hall-mark.

He belongs to a movement which believes it "feels the war." Personal injury or personal loss does not enter the question; the heart of this movement of his bleeds perpetually, but impersonally. He claims for it that this heart is able to bleed more profusely than any other heart, individual or collective, in ... let us limit it to England!

In fact it is the only blood he has noticed.

When the taxes go up he says, "Well, now perhaps it will make people feel the war!" For he longs that every one should lose their money so that at last they may "feel the war," "stop the war" (interchangeable!)

He forgets that even in England a great many quite stupid people would rather lose their money than their sons.

How strange that these people should still picture the minds of soldiers as filled with the glitter of bright bayonets and the glory of war! They think we need a vision of blood and ravage and death to turn us from our bright thoughts, to still the noise of the drum in our ears. The drums don't beat, the flags don't fly....

He should come down the left-hand side of the ward and hear what the dairyman says.

"I 'ates it, nurse; I 'ates it. Them 'orses'll kill me; them drills....

It's no life for a man, nurse."

The dairyman hasn't been to the Front; you needn't go to the Front to hate the war. Sometimes I get a glimpse from him of what it means to the weaklings, the last-joined, feeble creatures.

"Me 'ead's that queer, nurse; it seems to get queerer every day. I can't 'elp worryin'. I keep thinkin' of them 'orses."

Always the horses....

I said to Sister, "Is No. 24 really ill?"

"There's a chance of his being mental," she said. "He is being watched."

Was he mental before the war took him, before the sergeant used to whip the horses as they got to the jumps, before the sergeant cried out "Cross your stirrups!"?

It isn't his fault; there are strong and feeble men.

A dairyman's is a gentle job; he could have sc.r.a.ped through life all right. He sleeps in the afternoon, and stirs and murmurs: "Drop your reins.... Them 'orses, sergeant! I'm comin', sergeant; don't touch 'im this time!" And then in a shriller voice, "Don't touch 'im...." Then he wakes.

Poor ma.s.s of nerves.... He nods and smiles every time one looks at him, frantic to please.

There are men and men. Scutts has eleven wounds, but he doesn't "mind"

the war. G.o.d made many brands of men, that is all; one must accept them.

But war finds few excuses; and there are strange minnows in the fis.h.i.+ng-net. Sometimes, looking into the T.B. ward, I think: "It almost comes to this: one must spit blood or fight...."

"Why don't you refuse?" my friend would say to the dairyman. "Why should you fight because another man tells you to?"

It isn't so simple as that, is it, dairyman? It isn't even a question of the immense, vague machinery behind the sergeant, but just the sergeant himself; it isn't a question of generals or politicians of great wrongs or fierce beliefs ... but of the bugle which calls you in the morning and the bugle which puts you to bed at night.

Well, well.... The dairyman is in hospital, and that is the best that he can hope for.

I read a book once about a prison. They too, the prisoners, sought after the prison hospital, as one seeks after one's heaven.

It is so puffed up of my friend to think that his and his "movement's"

are the only eyes to see the vision of horror. Why, these others _are_ the vision!

This afternoon I was put at splints again.

I only had an inch or two to finish and I spun it out, very happy.

Presently the foot of a bed near me began to catch my attention: the toe beneath the sheets became more and more agitated, then the toes of the other foot joined the first foot, beating a frenzied tattoo beneath the coverings. I looked up.

Facing me a pair of blue eyes were bulging above an open mouth, the nostrils were quivering, the fingers were wrung together. It was Gayner, surely seeing a ghost.

I rose and went to his bed.

"My jaws want to close," he muttered. "I can't keep them open."

I jumped and went for Sister, who took the news in a leisurely fas.h.i.+on, which reproved me for my excitement. Feeling a fool, I went and sat down again, taking up my splint. But there was no forgetting Gayner.

I tried to keep my eyes on my work, but first his toes and then his hands filled all my mind, till at last I had to look up and meet the eyes again.

Still looking as though he had seen a ghost--a beast of a ghost...! In hospital since Mons.... "I wonder how many men he has seen die of teta.n.u.s?" I thought.

"He's got the jumps," I thought.

So had I. Suppose Sister was wrong! Suppose the precious minutes were pa.s.sing! Suppose...! She was only the junior Sister.