The “touch of pneumonia,”
prophesied by Dr. Mangan, had proved to be a sufficiently
emphatic one. Larry’s recovery was slow,
and during his languid convalescence, he found himself
becoming sincerely attached to the Big Doctor and
Mrs. Mangan, and their high place in his affections
was shared by the nurse provided by Miss Coppinger.
The bond of a common faith was one that, at this stage
of his development, had but little appeal to Larry,
but he was, at all events, spared any possibility
of suffering from the feelings of sub-friction, if
not of antagonism, that inevitably stirred in his
aunt’s breast, if she found herself brought
into relation closer than that of employer and employed
with those of the older creed.
His sense of beauty, now beginning
to acquire consciousness, and sorely afflicted by
the decorative scheme that had been adopted in Barty’s
bedroom, found solace in the faces of these two women.
Even the lazy consideration of the contrast between
their types, was a comfort to Larry, and distracted
his mind from the wall-paper (which suggested the
contents of Dr. Mangan’s surgery, rhubarb, and
mustard-leaves predominating), and from Barty’s
taste in art, which in its sacred and profane aspects
was alike deplorable.
Nurse Brennan, slight and fair, with
the clearest of blue eyes, and a Dresden china complexion Larry
was already artist enough to study and adore the shadow
of her white coif, with its subtle, reflected lights,
on her pink, rose-leaf cheek and Mrs. Mangan,
just a little over-blown, but heavily, darkly handsome,
with deep-lidded shadowy eyes, and as Master
Coppinger pleased himself by discovering a
slight suggestion of a luxurious Chesterfield sofa,
upholstered in rich cream velvet. When he was
getting better, and the rigours of the sick room were
relaxing, these two provided him with interest and
entertainment of which they were delightfully unaware.
“Well, and what will I give
him for his dinner to-day, Norrse?” (impossible
to persuade the English alphabet to disclose Mrs.
Mangan’s pronunciation of this word) his
hostess would say, drifting largely into Larry’s
room, and seating herself on the side of his bed.
“Don’t be making an invalid
of him at all, Mrs. Mangan!” Nurse Brennan would
rejoin briskly; “I’m just telling him I’d
be sorry to get a thump from that old wrist of his,
he and the Doctor think so much about! And he
hasn’t as much as a point of temperature those
three days!”
“Oh, I say, Nurse!” Larry
would protest, “then why won’t you let
me get up?”
“Be quite now” (in
Ireland the “e” in “quiet”
is not infrequently thus transposed) “and
don’t be bothering me, like a good child!”
Nurse would reply, with a sidelong flash of her charming
eyes, a recognition of Larry’s age and sex that
atoned for the opprobrious epithet.
“Would he like a bit of fish
now? I’m going down the town, and I might
meet one of the women in from Broadhaven.”
Thus Mrs. Mangan, coaxingly.
“Oh, Mrs. Mangan, please don’t bother!”
says Larry.
“Ah, no bother at all!
Sure I was going down anyway to the chapel to get
a sup of holy water. I declare the house is bone
dry! Not a drop in it!”
After dreary winter mornings spent
in reading, by the light of a misplaced window, or
age-long afternoons, drowsed through in that torpor,
mental as well as physical, that overwhelms the victim
of a prolonged sojourn in bed, Larry used to find
himself looking forward to the conversations between
Nurse Brennan and Mrs. Mangan that arose at tea-time,
and followed, stimulated by the early darkness of
January, in the firelight; the southern voices rising
and falling like the flickering flames, becoming soon
self-engrossed, and forgetful of the silent listener
in the bed. Sometimes sleep would lap him in slow,
stealthy peace, and the voices would die away, or come
intermittently, as the sound of a band marching through
a town fades and recurs at the end of a street.
But without being aware of it, he was absorbing knowledge,
learning a new point of view, breathing a new atmosphere
that was to influence him more deeply than he could
have any conception was possible.
One evening the talk fell on the congenial
topic of illness, doctors and patients, nurses and
nuns, all spinning in the many-coloured whirlpool
of talk, now one and now another cresting the changing
wave. The fact that Larry was of their own religion,
counterbalanced his belonging to an alien class, and
if their consciences sometimes hinted at a lack of
discretion, they quieted them with the assurance that
“the poor child was asleep!”
“Ah, the nuns are wonderful!”
said Mrs. Mangan, languishingly. “Look
how lovely they have the Workhouse Infirmary!
I was taking some flowers to Reverend Mother, and
she was telling me what a beautiful death old Catherine
Macsweeny made. Reverend Mother rained tears when
she told me.”
Nurse Brennan sniffed.
“Reverend Mother’s a sweet
woman, and the nuns are very attentive when a person’d
be dying, but indeed Mrs. Mangan, if you ask me,
I’d say ’twas the only time they were
much use to their patients! Up at that infirmary
what have patients at night to look after them only
an old inmate, and she ‘wanting’ maybe!”
Larry began to giggle, and was moved to try his wit.
“Nurse! What’s the
difference between a stale mate and an old inmate?
And what does it want?”
“It wants the very same as yourself brains!”
returned Nurse, swiftly. “Now may be!”
She wagged her head at him triumphantly, turning aside
to hide the smile of victory, and Larry thought how
lovely was her profile, as the firelight etched it
in incandescent lines on the smoky background.
“Well, indeed, the Poor have
a deal to put up with!” said Mrs. Mangan, lazily,
leaning back in her basket-chair, with her big grey
cat purring like an aeroplane engine on her knee.
“The Doctor says no one but himself knows the
way he’s dragged all over the country, patching
up after some of them young fellows that get dispensaries
before they’re fit to doctor the cat!”
The reformer, that underlay the artist in Larry, awoke.
“But, Mrs. Mangan,” he
said, hotly, sitting up in bed, and glaring into the
gloom at Mrs. Mangan’s half-seen face, “why
do they give dispensaries to chaps that can’t
doctor a cat?”
“Because their fathers can spend
four or five hundred pounds to buy votes!” returned
Mrs. Mangan, laughing at him. “Is that news
to you? Lie down child, and don’t be looking
at me like that! I haven’t a vote to
sell!”
Larry subsided with vague splutterings.
Nurse came to his bedside and smoothed the clothes.
“Listen to me now,” she
said impressively, “and I’ll tell
you something to make you angry, if you like!”
She leaned against the foot of the
bed, with her hands in the pockets of her apron, looking
down at him. “I was in charge of th’
infirmary at Mellifont one time, and late one evening
a young farm-boy was brought in to me with a dislocated
foot and a ’Pott’s Fracture’
“In the name o’ God, what’s that?”
enquired Mrs. Mangan.
“Fracture of the fibula, but
the case I’m speaking of had the two bones broken
at the ankle,” explained Nurse Brennan, in her
most professional manner; “sure I thought anyone’d
know that! And I can tell you,” she leaned
towards Larry, striking the palm of her left hand
with her little clenched right fist, as if to hammer
the words into him, “I can assure you,
that as bad as you thought you were, you don’t
know what pain is beside what that boy suffered!
Well, I sent for the doctor a young brat
of a fella that hadn’t but just left college.
‘He’ll want an anæsthetic,’ says
he, ‘I’ll send down for Doctor ’
(I’ll not tell you his name Smith,
I’ll call him!) ‘Do you give him some brandy,
nurse,’ says he, ’Dr. Smith’ll be
here soon.’ Sure enough he was, and glad
I was to see him, for the patient was suffering greatly,
and the leg swelling every minyute. It was a
long ward he was in, and no one at all in it but himself.
At the far end there was a table and a lamp, and down
at the table me gentlemen sat, and commenced to talk.”
Nurse Brennan paused, and Mrs. Mangan
gave the fire a well-directed poke, that set the flames
branching upwards. The tale was resumed, in those
cool and equable tones that express a more perfected
indignation than any heat or haste could convey.
“Well, that was nine o’clock,
and they talked there for two hours, and I giving
the patient brandy, and expecting every minyute he’d
collapse. And what do you suppose they were talking
about? Fighting they were! Disputing which
of them would perform the operation, and which would
administer the chloroform!”
Mrs. Mangan laughed lightly, and said:
“I wouldn’t at all doubt it!”
“Impossible!” exclaimed Larry.
“Not a bit impossible!”
said Nurse Brennan, “and how d’ye think
they settled it in the end? They arranged one
of them would begin th’ operation and go on
for five minutes, and then he should stop and give
the anæsthetic, and the other would go on with the
leg! Oh, it’s the case, I assure you!
It was twelve o’clock at night before they were
done!”
She paused, laughing a little at the
hot questions with which Larry assailed her, but he
could see the unshed tears gleaming in her eyes.
“I was summoned to a private case next day; I
don’t know what happened to the unfortunate
poor creature of a patient.”
“A stiff leg he has, I’ll be bound!”
said Mrs. Mangan.
Larry lay silent. He saw it all.
The long, dark ward, the white angel figure (he thought,
romantically) bending over the tortured creature on
the bed, and, far away, the pool of yellow light and
in it those two he sought in vain for adjectives
to express what he thought of Dr. I’ll-not-tell-you-his-name,
and his young colleague.