Max was interested in her. K. could see that, too. More than once he had taken Sidney back to the hospital in his car. Le Moyne, handicapped at every turn, found himself facing two alternatives, one but little better than the other. The affair might run a legitimate course, ending in marriage—a year of happiness for her, and then what marriage with Max, as he knew him, would inevitably mean: wanderings away, remorseful returns to her, infidelities, misery. Or, it might be less serious but almost equally unhappy for her. Max might throw caution to the winds, pursue her for a time,—K. had seen him do this,—and then, growing tired, change to some new attraction. In either case, he could only wait and watch, eating his heart out during the long evenings when Anna read her “Daily Thoughts” upstairs and he sat alone with his pipe on the balcony.
Sidney went on night duty shortly after her acceptance. All of her orderly young life had been divided into two parts: day, when one played or worked, and night, when one slept. Now she was compelled to a readjustment: one worked in the night and slept in the day. Things seemed unnatural, chaotic. At the end of her first night report Sidney added what she could remember of a little verse of Stevenson’s. She added it to the end of her general report, which was to the effect that everything had been quiet during the night except the neighborhood.
“And does it not seem hard to you, When all the sky is clear and blue, And I should like so much to play, To have to go to bed by day?”
The day assistant happened on the report, and was quite scandalized.
“If the night nurses are to spend their time making up poetry,” she said crossly, “we’d better change this hospital into a young ladies’ seminary. If she wants to complain about the noise in the street, she should do so in proper form.”
“I don’t think she made it up,” said the Head, trying not to smile. “I’ve heard something like it somewhere, and, what with the heat and the noise of traffic, I don’t see how any of them get any sleep.”
But, because discipline must be observed, she wrote on the slip the assistant carried around: “Please submit night reports in prose.”
Sidney did not sleep much. She tumbled into her low bed at nine o’clock in the morning, those days, with her splendid hair neatly braided down her back and her prayers said, and immediately her active young mind filled with images—Christine’s wedding, Dr. Max passing the door of her old ward and she not there, Joe—even Tillie, whose story was now the sensation of the Street. A few months before she would not have cared to think of Tillie. She would have retired her into the land of things-one-must-forget. But the Street’s conventions were not holding Sidney’s thoughts now. She puzzled over Tillie a great deal, and over Grace and her kind.
On her first night on duty, a girl had been brought in from the Avenue. She had taken a poison—nobody knew just what. When the internes had tried to find out, she had only said: “What’s the use?”
And she had died.
Sidney kept asking herself, “Why?” those mornings when she could not get to sleep. People were kind—men were kind, really,—and yet, for some reason or other, those things had to be. Why?
After a time Sidney would doze fitfully. But by three o’clock she was always up and dressing. After a time the strain told on her. Lack of sleep wrote hollows around her eyes and killed some of her bright color. Between three and four o’clock in the morning she was overwhelmed on duty by a perfect madness of sleep. There was a penalty for sleeping on duty. The old night watchman had a way of slipping up on one nodding. The night nurses wished they might fasten a bell on him!
Luckily, at four came early-morning temperatures; that roused her. And after that came the clatter of early milk-wagons and the rose hues of dawn over the roofs. Twice in the night, once at supper and again toward dawn, she drank strong black coffee. But after a week or two her nerves were stretched taut as a string.
Her station was in a small room close to her three wards. But she sat very little, as a matter of fact. Her responsibility was heavy on her; she made frequent rounds. The late summer nights were fitful, feverish; the darkened wards stretched away like caverns from the dim light near the door. And from out of these caverns came petulant voices, uneasy movements, the banging of a cup on a bedside, which was the signal of thirst.
The older nurses saved themselves when they could. To them, perhaps just a little weary with time and much service, the banging cup meant not so much thirst as annoyance. They visited Sidney sometimes and cautioned her.
“Don’t jump like that, child; they’re not parched, you know.”
“But if you have a fever and are thirsty—”
“Thirsty nothing! They get lonely. All they want is to see somebody.”
“Then,” Sidney would say, rising resolutely, “they are going to see me.”
Gradually the older girls saw that she would not save herself. They liked her very much, and they, too, had started in with willing feet and tender hands; but the thousand and one demands of their service had drained them dry. They were efficient, cool-headed, quick-thinking machines, doing their best, of course, but differing from Sidney in that their service was of the mind, while hers was of the heart. To them, pain was a thing to be recorded on a report; to Sidney, it was written on the tablets of her soul.
Carlotta Harrison went on night duty at the same time—her last night service, as it was Sidney’s first. She accepted it stoically. She had charge of the three wards on the floor just below Sidney, and of the ward into which all emergency cases were taken. It was a difficult service, perhaps the most difficult in the house. Scarcely a night went by without its patrol or ambulance case. Ordinarily, the emergency ward had its own night nurse. But the house was full to overflowing. Belated vacations and illness had depleted the training-school. Carlotta, given double duty, merely shrugged her shoulders.
“I’ve always had things pretty hard here,” she commented briefly. “When I go out, I’ll either be competent enough to run a whole hospital singlehanded, or I’ll be carried out feet first.”
Sidney was glad to have her so near. She knew her better than she knew the other nurses. Small emergencies were constantly arising and finding her at a loss. Once at least every night, Miss Harrison would hear a soft hiss from the back staircase that connected the two floors, and, going out, would see Sidney’s flushed face and slightly crooked cap bending over the stair-rail.
“I’m dreadfully sorry to bother you,” she would say, “but So-and-So won’t have a fever bath”; or, “I’ve a woman here who refuses her medicine.” Then would follow rapid questions and equally rapid answers. Much as Carlotta disliked and feared the girl overhead, it never occurred to her to refuse her assistance. Perhaps the angels who keep the great record will put that to her credit.
Sidney saw her first death shortly after she went on night duty. It was the most terrible experience of all her life; and yet, as death goes, it was quiet enough. So gradual was it that Sidney, with K.‘s little watch in hand, was not sure exactly when it happened. The light was very dim behind the little screen. One moment the sheet was quivering slightly under the struggle for breath, the next it was still. That was all. But to the girl it was catastrophe. That life, so potential, so tremendous a thing, could end so ignominiously, that the long battle should terminate always in this capitulation—it seemed to her that she could not stand it. Added to all her other new problems of living was this one of dying.
She made mistakes, of course, which the kindly nurses forgot to report—basins left about, errors on her records. She rinsed her thermometer in hot water one night, and startled an interne by sending him word that Mary McGuire’s temperature was a hundred and ten degrees. She let a delirious patient escape from the ward another night and go airily down the fire-escape before she discovered what had happened! Then she distinguished herself by flying down the iron staircase and bringing the runaway back singlehanded.