THE YOUNG NURSE
The local hospital of the village
of Harmonville, which was ten miles from Harmon proper,
where the famous boarding-school for young ladies
was located, presented an aspect so far from institutional
that but for the sign board tacked modestly to an
elm tree just beyond the break in the hedge that constituted
the main entrance, the gracious, old colonial structure
might have been taken for the private residence for
which it had served so many years.
It was a crisp day in late September,
and a pale yellow sun was spread thin over the carpet
of yellow leaves with which the wide lawn was covered.
In the upper corridor of the west wing, grouped about
the window-seat with their embroidery or knitting,
the young nurses were talking together in low tones
during the hour of the patients’ siestas.
The two graduates, dark-eyed efficient girls, with
skilled delicate fingers taking precise stitches in
the needlework before them, were in full uniform,
but the younger girls clustered about them, beginners
for the most part, but a few months in training, were
dressed in the simple blue print, and little white
caps and aprons, of the probationary period.
The atmosphere was very quiet and
peaceful. A light breeze blew in at the window
and stirred a straying lock or two that escaped the
starched band of a confining cap. Outside the
stinging whistle of the insect world was interrupted
now and then by the cough of a passing motor.
From the doors opening on the corridor an occasional
restless moan indicated the inability of some sufferer
to take his dose of oblivion according to schedule.
Presently a bell tinkled a summons to the patient
in the first room on the right a gentle
little old lady who had just had her appendix removed.
“Will you take that, Miss Hamlin?”
the nurse in charge of the case asked the tallest
and fairest of the young assistants.
“Certainly.” Eleanor,
demure in cap and kerchief as the most ravishing of
young Priscillas, rose obediently at the request.
“May I read to her a little if she wants me
to?”
“Yes, if you keep the door closed.
I think most of the others are sleeping.”
The little old lady who had just had
her appendix out, smiled weakly up at Eleanor.
“I hoped ’twould be you,”
she said, “and then after I’d rung I lay
in fear and trembling lest one o’ them young
flipperti-gibbets should come, and get me all worked
up while she was trying to shift me. I want to
be turned the least little mite on my left side.”
“That’s better, isn’t
it?” Eleanor asked, as she made the adjustment.
“I dunno whether that’s
better, or whether it just seems better to me, because
’twas you that fixed me,” the little old
lady said. “You certainly have got a soothin’
and comfortin’ way with you.”
“I used to take care of my grandmother
years ago, and the more hospital work I do, the more
it comes back to me, and the better I remember
the things that she liked to have done for her.”
“There’s nobody like your
own kith and kin,” the little old lady sighed.
“There’s none left of mine. That other
nurse that black haired one she
said you was an orphan, alone in the world. Well,
I pity a young girl alone in the world.”
“It’s all right to be
alone in the world if you just keep busy
enough,” Eleanor said. “But you mustn’t
talk any more. I’m going to give you your
medicine and then sit here and read to you.”
On the morning of her flight from
the inn, after a night spent staring motionless into
the darkness, Eleanor took the train to the town some
dozen miles beyond Harmonville, where her old friend
Bertha Stephens lived. To “Stevie,”
to whom the duplicity of Maggie Lou had served to
draw her very close in the ensuing year, she told a
part of her story. It was through the influence
of Mrs. Stephens, whose husband was on the board of
directors of the Harmonville hospital, that Eleanor
had been admitted there. She had resolutely put
all her old life behind her. The plan to take
up a course in stenography and enter an editorial
office was to have been, as a matter of course, a part
of her life closely associated with Peter. Losing
him, there was nothing left of her dream of high adventure
and conquest. There was merely the hurt desire
to hide herself where she need never trouble him again,
and where she could be independent and useful.
Having no idea of her own value to her guardians,
or the integral tenderness in which she was held,
she sincerely believed that her disappearance must
have relieved them of much chagrin and embarrassment.
Her hospital training kept her mercifully
busy. She had the temperament that finds a virtue
in the day’s work, and a balm in its mere iterative
quality. Her sympathy and intelligence made her
a good nurse and her adaptability, combined with her
loveliness, a general favorite.
She spent her days off at the Stephens’
home. Bertha Stephens had been the one girl that
Peter had failed to write to, when he began to circulate
his letters of inquiry. Her name had been set
down in the little red book, but he remembered the
trouble that Maggie Lou had precipitated, and arrived
at the conclusion that the intimacy existing between
Eleanor and Bertha had not survived it. Except
that Carlo Stephens persisted in trying to make love
to her, and Mrs. Stephens covertly encouraged his
doing so, Eleanor found the Stephens’ home a
very comforting haven. Bertha had developed into
a full breasted, motherly looking girl, passionately
interested in all vicarious love-affairs, though quickly
intimidated at the thought of having any of her own.
She was devoted to Eleanor, and mothered her clumsily.
It was still to her diary that Eleanor
turned for the relief and solace of self-expression.
“It is five months to-day,”
she wrote, “since I came to the hospital.
It seems like five years. I like it, but I feel
like the little old woman on the King’s Highway.
I doubt more every minute if this can be I. Sometimes
I wonder what ‘being I’ consists of, anyway.
I used to feel as if I were divided up into six parts
as separate as protoplasmic cells, and that each one
was looked out for by a different cooperative parent.
I thought that I would truly be I when I got them
all together, and looked out for them myself, but I
find I am no more of an entity than I ever was.
The puzzling question of ’what am I?’
still persists, and I am farther away from the right
answer than ever. Would a sound be a sound if
there were no one to hear it? If the waves of
vibration struck no human ear, would the sound be in
existence at all? This is the problem propounded
by one of the nurses yesterday.
“How much of us lives when we
are entirely shut out of the consciousness of those
whom we love? If there is no one to realize
us day by day, if all that love has made
of us is taken away, what is left? Is there anything?
I don’t know. I look in the glass, and see
the same face, Eleanor Hamlin, almost nineteen,
with the same bow shaped eyebrows, and the same double
ridge leading up from her nose to her mouth, making
her look still very babyish. I pinch myself, and
find that it hurts just the same as it used to six
months ago, but there the resemblance to what I used
to be, stops. I’m a young nurse now in
hospital training, and very good at it, too, if I do
say it as shouldn’t; but that’s all I
am. Otherwise, I’m not anybody to
anybody, except a figure of romance to good
old Stevie, who doesn’t count in this kind of
reckoning. I take naturally to nursing they tell
me. A nurse is a kind of maternal automaton.
I’m glad I’m that, but there used to be
a lot more of me than that. There ought to be
some heart and brain and soul left over, but there
doesn’t seem to be. Perhaps I am like the
Princess in the fairy story whose heart was an auk’s
egg. Nobody had power to make her feel unless
they reached it and squeezed it.
“I feel sometimes as if I were
dead. I wish I could know whether Uncle Peter
and Aunt Beulah were married yet. I wish I could
know that. There is a woman in this hospital
whose suitor married some one else, and she has nervous
prostration, and melancholia. All she does all
day is to moan and wring her hands and call out his
name. The nurses are not very sympathetic.
They seem to think that it is disgraceful to love
a man so much that your whole life stops as soon as
he goes out of it. What of Juliet and Ophelia
and Francesca de Rimini? They loved so they could
not tear their love out of their hearts without lacerating
them forever. There is that kind of love in the
world, bigger than life itself. All
the big tragedies of literature were made from it, why
haven’t people more sympathy for it? Why
isn’t there more dignity about it in the eyes
of the world?
“It is very unlucky to love,
and to lose that which you cherish, but it is unluckier
still never to know the meaning of love, or to find
‘Him whom your soul loveth.’ I try
to be kind to that poor forsaken woman. I am
sorry for his sake that she calls out his name, but
she seems to be in such torture of mind and body that
she is unable to help it.
“They are trying to cut down
expenses here, so they have no regular cook, the housekeeper
and her helper are supposed to do it all. I said
I would make the desserts, so now I have got to go
down-stairs and make some fruit gelatin. It is
best that I should not write any more to-day, anyway.”
Later, after the Thanksgiving holiday, she wrote:
“I saw a little boy butchered
to-day, and I shall never forget it. It is wicked
to speak of Doctor Blake’s clean cut work as
butchery, but when you actually see a child’s
leg severed from its body, what else can you call
it?
“The reason that I am able to
go through operations without fainting or crying is
just this: other people do. The first
time I stood by the operating table to pass the sterilized
instruments to the assisting nurse, and saw the half
naked doctors hung in rubber standing there preparing
to carve their way through the naked flesh of the
unconscious creature before them, I felt the kind of
pang pass through my heart that seems to kill as it
comes. I thought I died, or was dying, and
then I looked up and saw that every one else was ready
for their work. So I drew a deep breath and became
ready too. I don’t think there is anything
in the world too hard to do if you look at it that
way.
“The little boy loved me and
I loved him. We had hoped against hope that we
would be able to save his poor little leg, but it had
to go. I held his hand while they gave him the
chloroform. At his head sat Doctor Hathaway with
his Christlike face, draped in the robe of the anesthetist.
‘Take long breaths, Benny,’ I said, and
he breathed in bravely. It was over quickly.
To-morrow, when he is really out of the ether, I have
got to tell him what was done to him. Something
happened to me while that operation was going on.
He hasn’t any mother. I think the spirit
of the one who was his mother passed into me, and I
knew what it would be like to be the mother of a son.
Benny was not without what his mother would have felt
for him if she had been at his side. I can’t
explain it, but that is what I felt.
“To-night it is as black as
ink outside. There are no stars. I feel as
if there should be no stars. If there were, there
might be some strange little bit of comfort in them
that I could cling to. I do not want any comfort
from outside to shine upon me to-night. I have
got to draw all my strength from a source within,
and I feel it welling up within me even now.
“I wonder if I have been selfish
to leave the people I love so long without any word
of me. I think Aunt Gertrude and Aunt Beulah and
Aunt Margaret all had a mother feeling for me.
I am remembering to-night how anxious they used to
be for me to have warm clothing, and to keep my feet
dry, and not to work too hard at school. All those
things that I took as a matter of course, I realize
now were very significant and beautiful. If I
had a child and did not know to-night where it would
lie down to sleep, or on what pillow it would put its
head, I know my own rest would be troubled. I
wonder if I have caused any one of my dear mothers
to feel like that. If I have, it has been very
wicked and cruel of me.”