The strange wooing began immediately, of course. Dick Wemys was that sort of a man. He wouldn’t have remained in the hospital if it hadn’t been for June. It was another adventure for him, but he would not have enjoyed it if he had not had June to enjoy it with. And the fact that it was another adventure for her, too, made it easier. Adventurous souls were rare, he argued. People liked to regard something that just happened to them, and which took an hour or so to happen, as an adventure. Real adventurers were those that could enjoy a long drawn out adventure, one that entailed hard work and days of depression as well as those uplifted moments that come so seldom and are remembered ever after.
You have to get outside yourself June agreed—stand afar off and watch yourself running up and down the ward with glasses of eggnog, tying patients in bed, undressing filthy longshoremen, watch yourself being scolded at by head nurses and superintendents or nurses who always insisted upon your doing the most unnecessary things at the most critical moments when it seemed absolutely essential to do something else. Dick had to share all this with June now.
There was the incident of the dirty feet, not so indelicate as it sounds. Dr. Weiss, that tiddy-nosed old flitterbottom as June called him, was examining a patient with rheumatism in his ankles. He was the sort of doctor who always insisted that the head nurse accompany him on his rounds. No ordinary blue and white striped nurse would do. And he not only needed a white gowned nurse, he needed an orderly to wheel around a dressing tray. He just had to have it. It added to his importance.
The man with rheumatism in his ankles had been a sailor all his life, used to scuffing about the docks barefooted, and the feet in their uniform brownness, thick and calloused on the soles, stubbled as to toe nails, did not correspond in whiteness with his thighs. There was tar on them too, but as June protested, if she stopped to scrape the tar from the feet of the sailors who came into ward seventy-two they would have to do without not only their medicines but their eggnogs.
Dr. Weiss came to the old sailor and the head nurse drew the immaculate bed linen from his feet. The movement was delicate. You could almost see the little finger of her hand upturned. She handled the sheets as Miss Daly had handled the bones in the anatomy class. The whiteness of the sheets and the smallness of her hands accentuated the grotesqueness of the huge widespread toes which were exposed.
The doctor turned away in disgust. “Did he just enter the hospital this morning?” He looked at the patient’s chart. “No, he has been here a week. I shall examine him another time.”
“Miss Henreddy!” It was the prim voice of the head nurse. “I shall examine the feet of every patient in the ward at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Behind her back, Dick and June exchanged glances.
It was a day during the influenza epidemic when patients were brought in one after another on stretchers, and died very often before they could be put to bed and had to be carried away again.
“Believe me, those sailors won’t thank you for getting the callouses off their feet,” Dick laughed afterward. But nevertheless at six that evening when there was no danger of an inspection from head nurses, he and June informed the ward of what was before it.
“I’m taking charge of this,” Dick said briskly. And the patients who liked June and helped her whenever they could, offered their cooperation. In a minute, the two huge bath tubs at the end of the ward were full of warm water and liquid green soap, and all those patients who were able to walk or be assisted, tottered to the end of the ward and sat in a circle around the edge of the tubs. The job was taken hilariously and finished in an hour.
There was danger in it of course. Not two days before, one of the patients had taken advantage of the nurse’s absence to try to get out of bed to reach the lavatory and had dropped dead. Weakness of the heart was common in the influenza wards. But Dick claimed that the patients were so fond of June that they would risk dropping dead to save her trouble and that their mentally agreeable state would prevent any such disaster happening.
Mr. Liscinderella was another hard customer. He was brought in on a busy morning, raving fiercely and demanding liquor. June and Dick wrestled with him, strapping him into bed but their combined strength was hardly enough. He broke away from them again and again. Dick snarled at him viciously and June used the conciliatory tones proper to a nurse. Perhaps the two treatments neutralized each other. At any rate, it was a full hour before he was properly restrained. Several times June approached him with a hypodermic full of morphine which the doctor had ordered. But each time he leaped under the touch of her hand and either broke the needle or separated it from its glass cylinder.
“I know it doesn’t hurt him,” June said. “The first time I ever gave a hypo I know my hand trembled so that I must have bungled the job. After that I gave myself one with sterile water and as you don’t mind pain inflicted by yourself, my hand didn’t tremble at all and I couldn’t even feel the needle going in. All you have to do is keep a supply of fresh, sharp needles. Seeing as we have to buy our
