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Read Ebook: A Diary Without Dates by Bagnold Enid
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Ebook has 906 lines and 26342 words, and 19 pages
At the end of the passage he almost collided with that stretcher which bears a flag.
Of the two, the stretcher moved me least.
But the new Sister is afraid of life. She is shorter-sighted.
The rain has been pouring all day.
To-night it has stopped, and all the hill is steam and drizzle and black with the blackness that war has thrust upon the countryside.
Two nights ago I went up to a dinner at Madeleine's and to stay the night. My Sister said, "Go and enjoy yourself!" And I did. It is very amusing, the change into rooms full of talk and light; I feel a glow of pleasure as I climb to the room Madeleine calls mine and find the reflection of the fire on the blue wall-paper.
The evening wasn't remarkable, but I came back full of descriptions to the bunk and Sister next day.
I was running on, inventing this and that, making her laugh, when suddenly I looked up, and she had tears in her eyes.
I wavered and came to a stop. She got up suddenly and moved about the room, and then with a muttered "Wash my hands," disappeared into the corridor.
I sat and thought: "Is it that she has her life settled, quietly continuous, and one breaks in...? Does the wind from outside hurt?"
I regretted it all the evening.
Yesterday I arrived at the hospital and couldn't find the store-cupboard keys, then ran across to her room and tapped at the door. Her voice called "Come in!" and I found her huddled in an arm-chair, unnerved and white. I asked her for the keys, and when she gave them to me she held out her hand and said: "I'm going away to-morrow. They are sending me home; they say I'm ill."
I muttered something with a feeling of shock, and going back to my bunk I brooded.
A sense of desolation was in the air, a ruthlessness on the part of some one unknown. "Shuffle, shuffle ... they shuffle us like cards!"
She was very ugly. I thought: "In a day or two I shall get to like her, and then I shan't be able to chivy her."
Out in the corridor came a tremendous tramping, boots and jingling metal. Two armed men with fixed bayonets arrived, headed by a sergeant. The sergeant paused and looked uncertainly this way and that, and then at me.
I guessed their destination. "In there," I nodded, pointing through a closed glass door, and the sergeant marched his men in and beyond the door.
An officer had been brought back under arrest; I had seen him pass with his escort. The rumour at tea had been that he had extended his two days' leave into three weeks.
I couldn't think; she worried me. Her odds and ends of conversation pecked at me like a small bird. She told me a riddle which filled me with nausea, and finally a limerick which I had heard three times in the Mess.
I left her and went into the bunk.
Here the new Sister had installed herself, gentle and pink and full of quiet murmurs.
The rain, half snow, half sleet, dabbled against the window-pane, and I lifted the blind to watch the flakes stick and melt on the glass.
She looked at me uncertainly: "Aren't you coming?"
"No," I said, "I've a note to write," forgetting that the new Sister might not allow such infringements. She gave no sign.
I slipped out behind her and down the steps into the garden--into the wet, dark garden, down the channels that were garden-paths, and felt my way over to the Sisters' quarters.
My Sister hadn't moved. There by the gas-fire, her thin hand to her face, she sat as she had two hours before.
"Come in," she offered, "and talk to me."
Her collar, which was open, she tried to do up. It made a painful impression on me of weakness and the effort to be normal.
I remembered that she had once told me she was so afraid of death, and I guessed that she was suffering now from that terror.
But when the specialist is afraid, what can ignorance say...?
Life in the bunk is wretched .
The new Sister is at the same time timid and dogged. She looks at me with a sidelong look and gives me little flips with her hand, as though she thought I might break something and that she might stave it off by playfulness.
Pain....
To stand up straight on one's feet, strong, easy, without the surging of any physical sensation, by a bedside whose coverings are flung here and there by the quivering nerves beneath it ... there is a sort of shame in such strength.
"What can I do for you?" my eyes cry dumbly into his clouded brown pupils.
I was told to carry trays from a ward where I had never been before--just to carry trays, orderly's work, no more.
No. 22 was lying flat on his back, his knees drawn up under him, the sheets up to his chin; his flat, chalk-white face tilted at the ceiling. As I bent over to get his untouched tray his tortured brown eyes fell on me.
"I'm in pain, Sister," he said.
No one has ever said that to me before in that tone.
He gave me the look that a dog gives, and his words had the character of an unformed cry.
He was quite alone at the end of the ward. The Sister was in her bunk. My white cap attracted his desperate senses.
As he spoke his knees shot out from under him with his restless pain. His right arm was stretched from the bed in a narrow iron frame, reminding me of a hand laid along a harp to play the chords, the fingers with their swollen green flesh extended across the strings; but of this harp his fingers were the slave, not the master.
"Shall I call your Sister?" I whispered to him.
He shook his head. "She can't do anything. I must just stick it out. They're going to operate on the elbow, but they must wait three days first."
His head turned from side to side, but his eyes never left my face. I stood by him, helpless, overwhelmed by his horrible loneliness.
Then I carried his tray down the long ward and past the Sister's bunk. Within, by the fire, she was laughing with the M.O. and drinking a cup of tea--a harmless amusement.
"The officer in No. 22 says he's in great pain," I said doubtfully.
"I know," she said quite decently, "but I can't do anything. He must stick it out."
I looked through the ward door once or twice during the evening, and still his knees, at the far end of the room, were moving up and down.
It must happen to the men in France that, living so near the edge of death, they are more aware of life than we are.
When they come back, when the postwar days set in, will they keep that vision, letting it play on life ... or must it fade?
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