Novel Notes Part 19

"It is the law of nature," said Jephson: "we are not the first party of young philosophers who have been struck with the fact that one man's misfortune is another man's opportunity."

"Occasionally, another woman's," I observed.

I was thinking of an incident told me by a nurse. If a nurse in fair practice does not know more about human nature--does not see clearer into the souls of men and women than all the novelists in little Bookland put together--it must be because she is physically blind and deaf. All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; so long as we are in good health, we play our parts out bravely to the end, acting them, on the whole, artistically and with strenuousness, even to the extent of sometimes fancying ourselves the people we are pretending to be. But with sickness comes forgetfulness of our part, and carelessness of the impression we are making upon the audience. We are too weak to put the paint and powder on our faces, the stage finery lies unheeded by our side. The heroic gestures, the virtuous sentiments are a weariness to us. In the quiet, darkened room, where the foot-lights of the great stage no longer glare upon us, where our ears are no longer strained to catch the clapping or the hissing of the town, we are, for a brief s.p.a.ce, ourselves.

This nurse was a quiet, demure little woman, with a pair of dreamy, soft gray eyes that had a curious power of absorbing everything that pa.s.sed before them without seeming to look at anything. Gazing upon much life, laid bare, had given to them a slightly cynical expression, but there was a background of kindliness behind.

During the evenings of my convalescence she would talk to me of her nursing experiences. I have sometimes thought I would put down in writing the stories that she told me, but they would be sad reading. The majority of them, I fear, would show only the tangled, seamy side of human nature, and G.o.d knows there is little need for us to point that out to each other, though so many nowadays seem to think it the only work worth doing. A few of them were sweet, but I think they were the saddest; and over one or two a man might laugh, but it would not be a pleasant laugh.

"I never enter the door of a house to which I have been summoned," she said to me one evening, "without wondering, as I step over the threshold, what the story is going to be. I always feel inside a sick-room as if I were behind the scenes of life. The people come and go about you, and you listen to them talking and laughing, and you look into your patient's eyes, and you just know that it's all a play."

The incident that Jephson's remark had reminded me of, she told me one afternoon, as I sat propped up by the fire, trying to drink a gla.s.s of port wine, and feeling somewhat depressed at discovering I did not like it.

"One of my first cases," she said, "was a surgical operation. I was very young at the time, and I made rather an awkward mistake--I don't mean a professional mistake--but a mistake nevertheless that I ought to have had more sense than to make.

"My patient was a good-looking, pleasant-spoken gentleman. The wife was a pretty, dark little woman, but I never liked her from the first; she was one of those perfectly proper, frigid women, who always give me the idea that they were born in a church, and have never got over the chill.

However, she seemed very fond of him, and he of her; and they talked very prettily to each other--too prettily for it to be quite genuine, I should have said, if I'd known as much of the world then as I do now.

"The operation was a difficult and dangerous one. When I came on duty in the evening I found him, as I expected, highly delirious. I kept him as quiet as I could, but towards nine o'clock, as the delirium only increased, I began to get anxious. I bent down close to him and listened to his ravings. Over and over again I heard the name 'Louise.' Why wouldn't 'Louise' come to him? It was so unkind of her--they had dug a great pit, and were pus.h.i.+ng him down into it--oh! why didn't she come and save him? He should be saved if she would only come and take his hand.

"His cries became so pitiful that I could bear them no longer. His wife had gone to attend a prayer-meeting, but the church was only in the next street. Fortunately, the day-nurse had not left the house: I called her in to watch him for a minute, and, slipping on my bonnet, ran across. I told my errand to one of the vergers and he took me to her. She was kneeling, but I could not wait. I pushed open the pew door, and, bending down, whispered to her, 'Please come over at once; your husband is more delirious than I quite care about, and you may be able to calm him.'

"She whispered back, without raising her head, 'I'll be over in a little while. The meeting won't last much longer.'

"Her answer surprised and nettled me. 'You'll be acting more like a Christian woman by coming home with me,' I said sharply, 'than by stopping here. He keeps calling for you, and I can't get him to sleep.'

"She raised her head from her hands: 'Calling for me?' she asked, with a slightly incredulous accent.

"'Yes,' I replied, 'it has been his one cry for the last hour: Where's Louise, why doesn't Louise come to him.'

"Her face was in shadow, but as she turned it away, and the faint light from one of the turned-down gas-jets fell across it, I fancied I saw a smile upon it, and I disliked her more than ever.

"'I'll come back with you,' she said, rising and putting her books away, and we left the church together.

"She asked me many questions on the way: Did patients, when they were delirious, know the people about them? Did they remember actual facts, or was their talk mere incoherent rambling? Could one guide their thoughts in any way?

"The moment we were inside the door, she flung off her bonnet and cloak, and came upstairs quickly and softly.

"She walked to the bedside, and stood looking down at him, but he was quite unconscious of her presence, and continued muttering. I suggested that she should speak to him, but she said she was sure it would be useless, and drawing a chair back into the shadow, sat down beside him.

"Seeing she was no good to him, I tried to persuade her to go to bed, but she said she would rather stop, and I, being little more than a girl then, and without much authority, let her. All night long he tossed and raved, the one name on his lips being ever Louise--Louise--and all night long that woman sat there in the shadow, never moving, never speaking, with a set smile on her lips that made me long to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

"At one time he imagined himself back in his courting days, and pleaded, 'Say you love me, Louise. I know you do. I can read it in your eyes.

What's the use of our pretending? We _know_ each other. Put your white arms about me. Let me feel your breath upon my neck. Ah! I knew it, my darling, my love!'

"The whole house was deadly still, and I could hear every word of his troubled ravings. I almost felt as if I had no right to be there, listening to them, but my duty held me. Later on, he fancied himself planning a holiday with her, so I concluded. 'I shall start on Monday evening,' he was saying, and you can join me in Dublin at Jackson's Hotel on the Wednesday, and we'll go straight on.'

"His voice grew a little faint, and his wife moved forward on her chair, and bent her head closer to his lips.

"'No, no,' he continued, after a pause, 'there's no danger whatever. It's a lonely little place, right in the heart of the Galway Mountains--O'Mullen's Half-way House they call it--five miles from Ballynahinch. We shan't meet a soul there. We'll have three weeks of heaven all to ourselves, my G.o.ddess, my Mrs. Maddox from Boston--don't forget the name.'

"He laughed in his delirium; and the woman, sitting by his side, laughed also; and then the truth flashed across me.

"I ran up to her and caught her by the arm. 'Your name's not Louise,' I said, looking straight at her. It was an impertinent interference, but I felt excited, and acted on impulse.

"'No,' she replied, very quietly; 'but it's the name of a very dear school friend of mine. I've got the clue to-night that I've been waiting two years to get. Good-night, nurse, thanks for fetching me.'

"She rose and went out, and I listened to her footsteps going down the stairs, and then drew up the blind and let in the dawn.

"I've never told that incident to any one until this evening," my nurse concluded, as she took the empty port wine gla.s.s out of my hand, and stirred the fire. "A nurse wouldn't get many engagements if she had the reputation for making blunders of that sort."

Another story that she told me showed married life more lovelit, but then, as she added, with that cynical twinkle which glinted so oddly from her gentle, demure eyes, this couple had only very recently been wed--had, in fact, only just returned from their honeymoon.

They had been travelling on the Continent, and there had both contracted typhoid fever, which showed itself immediately on their home-coming.

"I was called in to them on the very day of their arrival," she said; "the husband was the first to take to his bed, and the wife followed suit twelve hours afterwards. We placed them in adjoining rooms, and, as often as was possible, we left the door ajar so that they could call out to one another.

"Poor things! They were little else than boy and girl, and they worried more about each other than they thought about themselves. The wife's only trouble was that she wouldn't be able to do anything for 'poor Jack.' 'Oh, nurse, you will be good to him, won't you?' she would cry, with her big childish eyes full of tears; and the moment I went in to him it would be: 'Oh, don't trouble about me, nurse, I'm all right. Just look after the wifie, will you?'

"I had a hard time between the two of them, for, with the help of her sister, I was nursing them both. It was an unprofessional thing to do, but I could see they were not well off, and I a.s.sured the doctor that I could manage. To me it was worth while going through the double work just to breathe the atmosphere of unselfishness that sweetened those two sick-rooms. The average invalid is not the patient sufferer people imagine. It is a fretful, querulous, self-pitying little world that we live in as a rule, and that we grow hard in. It gave me a new heart, nursing these young people.

"The man pulled through, and began steadily to recover, but the wife was a wee slip of a girl, and her strength--what there was of it--ebbed day by day. As he got stronger he would call out more and more cheerfully to her through the open door, and ask her how she was getting on, and she would struggle to call back laughing answers. It had been a mistake to put them next to each other, and I blamed myself for having done so, but it was too late to change then. All we could do was to beg her not to exhaust herself, and to let us, when he called out, tell him she was asleep. But the thought of not answering him or calling to him made her so wretched that it seemed safer to let her have her way.

"Her one anxiety was that he should not know how weak she was. 'It will worry him so,' she would say; 'he is such an old fidget over me. And I _am_ getting stronger, slowly; ain't I, nurse?'

"One morning he called out to her, as usual, asking her how she was, and she answered, though she had to wait for a few seconds to gather strength to do so. He seemed to detect the effort, for he called back anxiously, 'Are you _sure_ you're all right, dear?'

"'Yes,' she replied, 'getting on famously. Why?'

"'I thought your voice sounded a little weak, dear,' he answered; 'don't call out if it tries you.'

"Then for the first time she began to worry about herself--not for her own sake, but because of him.

"'Do you think I _am_ getting weaker, nurse?' she asked me, fixing her great eyes on me with a frightened look.

"'You're making yourself weak by calling out,' I answered, a little sharply. 'I shall have to keep that door shut.'

"'Oh, don't tell him'--that was all her thought--'don't let him know it.

Tell him I'm strong, won't you, nurse? It will kill him if he thinks I'm not getting well.'

"I was glad when her sister came up, and I could get out of the room, for you're not much good at nursing when you feel, as I felt then, as though you had swallowed a tablespoon and it was sticking in your throat.

"Later on, when I went in to him, he drew me to the bedside, and whispered me to tell him truly how she was. If you are telling a lie at all, you may just as well make it a good one, so I told him she was really wonderfully well, only a little exhausted after the illness, as was natural, and that I expected to have her up before him.

"Poor lad! that lie did him more good than a week's doctoring and nursing; and next morning he called out more cheerily than ever to her, and offered to bet her a new bonnet against a new hat that he would race her, and be up first.

"She laughed back quite merrily (I was in his room at the time). 'All right,' she said, 'you'll lose. I shall be well first, and I shall come and visit you.'