“If you knew how I suffer from that woman,” he whispered. “She is not at all unkind to me. On the contrary. But I can’t stand people with that sort of stolid face. I shiver when she touches me.”
“Why don’t you send her away?”
“No, it is so difficult. I can’t bring myself to do it. Once she is here she has certain claims on me.”
Percy was silent for a moment, then he stretched out his hand entreatingly:
“Perhaps you could help me, Stellan? Hasn’t the Army some connection with the Red Cross? Oh, if you could find me in some way a more bearable face!”
Stellan suddenly had an idea, a strange half-impossible idea which, however, at bottom seemed to him to be curiously charged with infinite possibilities. “Hedvig!” he thought. “Hedvig!” He had to make an effort to recover his normal, smooth and kindly tone.
“I could speak to my sister Hedvig,” he said. “She is a nurse. But I tell you beforehand that she has a sombre and strange temper. But her face is really something for an artist to look upon.”
Percy became quite excited and was filled with touching gratitude:
“A face, a temperament, a human being! Oh, how grateful I should be to you!”
“Good, I’ll speak to her if she can get free. Anyhow this grinning monster must be got rid of!”
With this Stellan took a warm goodbye. But at the door he turned round with his most charming and unconcerned expression.
“By the way, Percy, I am going about with a damned little bill in my hip pocket. You would not like by any chance to put your scrawl across it?”
“With pleasure, old boy, with pleasure.”
Stellan stepped whistling out of Hill’s villa and, in excellent temper, resumed his command over his dusty and perspiring platoon.
The same evening Stellan went to see Laura. He had got into the habit of running up to her to talk things over before he settled anything important.
Laura was dressing to go to the theatre. He helped her to fasten her frock behind.
“Percy has had a hæmorrhage of the lungs and is dissatisfied with his nurse. I offered to get Hedvig for him. What do you think about it?”
“Poor Percy!”
“But how shall I persuade Hedvig?”
“You must talk about sacrifice, and give her an opportunity to look long-suffering.”
Stellan rang up the Red Cross at once. There he was given another telephone number and rang again. A weak tremulous voice replied:
“Sister Hedvig? Yes, I’ll tell her.”
Hedvig came to the telephone. Stellan presented his case. He made Percy as ill as possible and begged her to sacrifice herself for their old friend. Hedvig’s distant voice assumed a peculiarly hard resigned note.
“I don’t think I can.”
“But why?”
“Well, at least not at once.”
“Why?”
She lowered her voice:
“No, it won’t be … all over here for another few days. …”
“All over!” Then a human being lay dying at the other end of the wire! Stellan felt a cold shiver. He looked at Laura, who sat there in low-cut evening frock polishing her nails. He looked around him in the coquettish little room. All over in a few days. All over! How curiously Hedvig had said that. It was as if she had wanted to force the thought of death on him like a tablespoonful of medicine.
“Well, … I may tell poor Percy that you will come when you … you are free?”
“Yes, I suppose I must give up my idea of resting a little.”
Then she rang off.
Stellan hung up the receiver.
“Yes, she will go to Percy as soon as her present patient has had time to die. And it is Hedvig who is leading such a life! Really I can’t understand it. …”
Laura pursed up her lips whilst she pulled on her glove. She looked unusually free from any sentimentality at that moment.
“Hedvig is frightened,” she said.
Stellan felt nervous.
“Frightened? Damned funny way of being frightened. What do you really mean?”
Laura’s answer came short, sharp and pleased. One could see how she had worried about this matter and at last found a satisfactory explanation:
“Who is it that runs about in the cemeteries at midnight?” she said. “Precisely those who are afraid of ghosts. Others have no business there.”
And then Mrs. Laura went to the theatre.
It was a fact that for a year and a half past Hedvig had been a trained Red Cross nurse and that she was already one of those who was sent to the more difficult cases and that she herself desired it so.
To her fellow nurses she was an enigma. They felt at once that she was not one of those simple good women whose hearts call them to serve, care for, and struggle against suffering and death. As they knew that she had gone straight from her sister’s wedding to the hospital the younger nurses at once concluded that Hedvig’s secret was unrequited love, but the older and more experienced nurses shook their heads.
The doctors also discussed Sister Hedvig. Men will always discuss women such as Sister Hedvig. After long discussions which were not free from criticism, though they were supposed to be scientific, they too, turned to love as explanation. And they of course protested against such childish nonsense as women’s talk of an unhappy love. A young psychiatrist had the word last. He said nothing cynical. He would perhaps have done so ten years earlier. But now cynicism was no longer the fashion—at least among the psychiatrists—that was left to the surgeons and other humbler craftsmen.
“Sister Hedvig,” the young doctor said, “is a very interesting case. As a matter of fact she cannot look a healthy man full in the eyes. But all the same she at once
