breathing.
"Why, Johnny!" said the Probationer, in a strangled voice.
The Senior Surgical Interne was interested.
"Know him?" he said.
"He is a boy from home." She was still staring at this quiet, un-impudent figure.
The Senior Surgical Interne eyed her with an eye that was only partially professional. Then he went to the medicine closet and poured a bit of aromatic ammonia into a glass.
"Sit down and drink this," he said, in a very masculine voice. He liked to feel that he could do something for her. Indeed, there was something almost proprietary in the way he took her pulse.
Some time after the early hospital supper that evening Twenty-two, having oiled his chair with some olive oil from his tray, made a clandestine trip through the twilight of the corridor back of the elevator shaft. To avoid scandal he pretended interest in other wards, but he gravitated, as a needle to the pole, to H. And there he found the Probationer, looking rather strained, and mothering a quiet figure on a bed.
He was a trifle puzzled at her distress, for she made no secret of Johnny's status in the community. What he did not grasp was that Johnny Fraser was a link between this new and rather terrible world of the hospital and home. It was not Johnny alone, it was Johnny scrubbing a home porch and doing it badly, it was Johnny in her father's old clothes, it was Johnny fishing for catfish in the creek, or lending his pole to one of the little brothers whose pictures were on her table in the dormitory.
Twenty-two felt a certain depression. He reflected rather grimly that he had been ten days missing and that no one had apparently given a hang whether he turned up or not.
"Is he going to live?" he inquired. He could see that the ward nurse had an eye on him, and was preparing for retreat.
"O yes," said Jane Brown. "I think so now. The interne says they have had a message from Doctor Willie. He is coming." There was a beautiful confidence in her tone.
Things moved very fast with the Probationer for the next twenty-four hours. Doctor Willie came, looking weary but smiling benevolently. Jane Brown met him in a corridor and kissed him, as, indeed, she had been in the habit of doing since her babyhood.
"Where is the young rascal?" said Doctor Willie. "Up to his old tricks, Nellie, and struck by a train." He put a hand under her chin, which is never done to the members of the training school in a hospital, and searched her face with his kind old eyes. "Well, how does it go, Nellie?"
Jane Brown swallowed hard.
"All right," she managed. "They want to operate, Doctor Willie."
"Tut!" he said. "Always in a hurry, these hospitals. We'll wait a while, I think."
"Is everybody well at home?"
It had come to her, you see, what comes to every nurse once in her training—the thinness of the veil, the terror of calamity, the fear of death.
"All well. And——" he glanced around. Only the Senior Surgical Interne was in sight, and he was out of hearing. "Look here, Nellie," he said, "I've got a dozen fresh eggs for you in my satchel. Your mother sent them."
She nearly lost her professional manner again then. But she only asked him to warn the boys about automobiles and riding on the backs of wagons.
Had any one said Twenty-two to her, she would not have known what was meant. Not just then, anyhow.
In the doctors' room that night the Senior Surgical Interne lighted a cigarette and telephoned to the operating room.
"That trephining's off," he said, briefly.
Then he fell to conversation with the Senior Medical, who was rather worried about a case listed on the books as Augustus Baird, coloured.
Twenty-two did not sleep very well that night. He needed exercise, he felt. But there was something else. Miss Brown had been just a shade too ready to accept his explanation about Mabel, he felt, so ready that he feared she had been more polite than sincere. Probably she still believed there was a Mabel. Not that it mattered, except that he hated to make a fool of himself. He roused once in the night and was quite sure he heard her voice down the corridor. He knew this must be wrong, because they would not make her work all day and all night, too.
But, as it happened, it was Jane Brown. The hospital provided plenty of sleeping time, but now and then there was a slip-up and somebody paid. There had been a night operation, following on a busy day, and the operating-room nurses needed help. Out of a sound sleep the night Assistant had summoned Jane Brown to clean instruments.
At five o'clock that morning she was still sitting on a stool beside a glass table, polishing instruments which made her shiver. All around were things that were spattered with blood. But she looked anything but fluttery. She was a very grim and determined young person just then, and professional beyond belief. The other things, like washing window-sills and cutting toe-nails, had had no significance. But here she was at last on the edge of mercy. Some one who might have died had lived that night because of this room, and these instruments, and willing hands.
She hoped she would always have willing hands.
She looked very pale at breakfast the next morning, and rather older. Also she had a new note of authority in her voice when she telephoned the kitchen and demanded H ward's soft-boiled eggs. She washed window-sills that morning again, but no longer was there rebellion in her soul. She was seeing suddenly how the hospital required all these menial services, which were not menial at all but only preparation; that there were little tasks and big ones, and one graduated from the one to the other.
She took some flowers from the ward bouquet and put them beside Johnny's bed—Johnny, who was still lying quiet, with closed eyes.
The Senior Surgical Interne did a dressing in the ward that morning. He had been in to see Augustus Baird, and he felt uneasy. He vented it on Tony, the Italian, with a stiletto thrust in his neck, by jerking at the adhesive. Tony wailed, and Jane Brown, who was the "dirty" nurse—which does not mean what it appears to mean, but is the person who receives the soiled dressings—Jane Brown gritted her teeth.
"Keep quiet," said the S.S.I., who was a good fellow, but had never been stabbed in the neck for running away with somebody else's wife.
"Eet hurt," said Tony. "Ow."
Jane Brown turned very pink.
"Why don't you let me cut it off properly?" she said, in a strangled tone.
The total result of this was that Jane Brown was reprimanded by the First Assistant, and learned some things about ethics.
"But," she protested, "it was both stupid and cruel. And if I know I am right——"
"How are you to know you are right?" demanded the First Assistant, crossly. Her feet were stinging. "'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.'" This was a favorite quotation of hers, although not Browning. "Nurses in hospitals are there to carry out the doctor's orders. Not to think or to say what they think unless they are asked. To be intelligent, but——"
"But not too intelligent!" said the Probationer. "I see."
This
