Nursing was like newspaper work in that it was impossible to suffer long over the tragedies which took place every day. You were too close to them to have perspective. They happened too continuously. They weighed on you—gave you a still and subdued feeling but the very fact that you were continually busy left you no time to brood.
There was brightness on the ward, the brightness of the spring sunlight, the cleanliness and the convalescent patients. Some patients could not help shedding a jovial atmosphere about them. There was the old sailor who called himself Captain Kidd, for instance. He had toppled into the river and when rescued had emptied no one knew how many bottles of whiskey to avoid bad effects, he told the doctor. But nevertheless he had been brought into the hospital with influenza. Now he was convalescing and his red bandanna handkerchief which he twined around his head made the one spot of color in the white ward. Every time the head nurse entered the ward she made him take it off. But it was on again as soon as her back was turned and June received grateful little nods and winks every time she was reprimanded for not having discipline among her patients. Red handkerchiefs were untidy, it seemed.
Even the superintendent of the nurses, who had trained in that same hospital long ago and had been there ever since, felt the influence of spring. Her yellowish-grey hair usually was pulled straight back behind her ears, but now it fluffed out a little like the wings of birds. Instead of the high stiff collar which she wore all winter, there was a low stiff one, but it was softened by a white and slightly withered throat. Every other afternoon she lectured the first year girls on anatomy and June noticed that the bones which she handled delicately, as though they were flowers, were the same color as her hair.
There was an insistent somnolence in her voice which must have come from years of association with the sick. It murmured on, those spring afternoons like the bees in the park outside. On Thursdays there were band concerts for the old peoples’ home next door and then the lecture had to be cut short. It wasn’t only that Miss Daly couldn’t compete with the noise. But the band was made up of twelve year old boys from the Catholic school nearby and every now and then came a series of bars that rasped on her nerves like the tearing of silk. She could not concentrate on what was before her. And since the lecture had been cut short there was a half hour of freedom for June and Adele to sit in the park and watch the old people smoke and mumble to themselves.
“Every one of those old ladies smokes her pipe and the county allows her tobacco,” June grumbled. “Gee, how I’d like to have a cigarette now. … What is it that you miss at these Thursday afternoon band concerts, Adele?”
“Lots of things.”
“No, I mean one thing specially. It’s the smell of cigarettes. I can’t think of those park concerts and Mr. Armand without remembering that odor of damp grass and people’s clothes and cigarettes.”
It was very restful there under the trees. The sparrows hopped up to the little old women who had saved crusts for them in their apron pockets. An occasional pigeon strutted up and down and a large black cat slunk under the benches with her yellow eyes on the birds. The trees were flecked with the pale green of new leaves.
June noticed one shrivelled little woman standing apart from the others talking to a man who was also in the uniform of the county. “Sex instinct at this late stage of the game,” she was about to say jeeringly, for the little woman was laughing coquettishly. But the smile was wiped off her lips as she recognized the bent figure as an ex-patient of hers.
“See that little old thing,” she told Adele, almost tenderly. “I saw her last night. You know the shortcut I take when I’m in a hurry—around the back of the chapel and laundry and the two old peoples’ homes. There the two of them were last night, gripping each others’ hands, trying to tear themselves away. Seven o’clock is their bed time you see. Husband and wife being taken care of by the county, poor dears, and separated. He kissed her so nicely, and she said, ‘remember John, don’t kick the covers off tonight. You’ve got to be careful of your cold.’ Think of them having to sneak around behind a laundry house to kiss each other!”
What she did not say was that now and then a vague longing came to trouble her—she felt a restless need of someone who
