CHAPTER VI
SORROW OVERTAKES ME
I take up my writing again, or rather my book is propped up in front of me, and I wonder how long ago was that. It tires my head to think. My dates are more confused than ever. I know it is May, but what part of May? I look out of my window—the bed has been wheeled into the window—and I see the chestnut is crowned with its white lights, and the broom bush near the gate is a mass of golden blossom. It is the end of May; it must be nearly June, for they tell me the season is late, that there has been much cold and rain. I am almost glad to have missed that. I like my May to be smiling and gladsome, not frowning and petulant. But to-day she has put on her best bib and tucker, and with the conceit of a frail human being I weave the pleasant fancy that it is done in my honour. "They are giving me a welcome, nurse," I say. "The apple tree is rosy pink with pleasure at my greeting blown to it through the window."
And nurse, putting on her bonnet and cloak to go out, tells me to hush and not talk so much.
They have been telling me to hush for so long it seems; but now I am tired of hushing, tired of being good.
I told Dr. Renton this yesterday, and he smiled and said it showed I was getting better. "Not getting, got," I returned. "When may I get up?" And he said he would come and tell me on Wednesday; and this is Monday, three o'clock in the afternoon, and I have forty-eight long hours to get through before I know.
Nurse is just a trifle cross with my impatience. She becomes irritable when I talk about getting up. She says how would I like to lie for some months; and I reply not at all—that it would be quite impossible for Dimbie to get along without my being ever at his elbow, and that it would be still more impossible for me to remain in a recumbent position when an upright one is possible.
I was glad of this "lying down" when I was in pain. Pain! There was a time when I had not known the meaning of the word. It had passed me by, left me alone. I had seen it on a few people's faces; then I thought it was discontent, now I know it was pain.
How do people bear it—always? keep their reason? Does God try them till they are just at breaking-point, and then gently remove them? or send them the blessing of unconsciousness?
They say I lay for hours away in a world of my own. I did not flinch when they touched me, moved me, laid me on my bed, left me in the hands of the doctors.
And yet I would have stayed if I could—kept my brain unclouded to help Dimbie when he picked me up, disentangled me (he always seems to be disentangling me from something) from the wrecked bicycle, and laid me away from that terrible wall. I did so want to help him. His white, set face recalled me a moment from the haze of unconsciousness which was settling upon me, and I whispered, "Dimbie, dear!" but I never heard his answer. The mist became an impenetrable fog, and I left him alone with his difficulties.
I don't know now what I wanted to say.
He teazes me with lips that won't keep steady, and says I wished to know if my hat were straight.
"Dear goose," I protest, "it was something to do with the black chicken my wheel caught against in my headlong flight down the hill. I tried to dodge it—it was such a nice, wee black chicken, but it dodged too, and—I couldn't help it." And the tears tremble in my eyes—just from weakness. "I think I wanted you to go back up the hill and help it, for we were both in a very sorry plight."
And Dimbie, to my surprise, turns away to the window and says we shall have rain. If it had rained every time Dimbie has predicted it during my illness we should have been obliged to take refuge in an ark and float about the surface of the waters.
I am very cheerful now. I am getting better. What joy, what hope those words contain for those who have been sick and sorry. I wiped away the last tear this morning when mother went. Peter's letters had become so tiresome that I told her she had better go. And as I threw a kiss to the back of her pretty bonnet as she disappeared through the gate the tear was for her and not for myself.
"I would like to cut Peter for life, and I would but for your sake, poor dear little mother," I murmured savagely. And nurse, who entered the room at that moment, said, "You've moved."
"Yes," I replied, a little guiltily; "but as the pain has almost gone, I thought it could not do any harm just to sit up for a moment and watch mother go."
"You've sat up?" she cried in dismay.
"Yes." I snuggled my head down on the pillow. "I think I'll have a little sleep now, nurse."
"I shall tell Dr. Renton and Mr. Westover." Her voice was relentless.
"If you do I shall sit up again, and refuse to take my beef-tea," I asseverated. "Besides, it is sneaky to tell tales."
Her lips twitched as she poured some beef-tea into my feeder.
"If you sit up again I shall give up the case."
Her voice reminded me of the stone wall I had smashed against, and I told her so; but she was not to be moved.
"Will you give me your faithful promise that you will not sit up again? I am responsible to Dr. Renton and Mr. Rovell. I have nursed Mr. Rovell's cases for years, and I do not wish to lose his work."
She stood over me like an angel with a flaming sword.
"I promise, nursey, dear," I said meekly. "But you won't take my manuscript book from me? I can write quite easily lying down. You see, it has stiff covers."
"You can keep that," she conceded. "Are you doing French exercises?"
"No," I said gravely. "At present I am writing what you might call 'patience exercises.' When I am at work I forget how long it is before Mr. Westover will be home. I forget my back. I forget General Macintosh and my other worries. I am so absorbed in keeping my spelling and grammar in order that I have no time for other matters. You see, if I were to di—go before my husband, he might wish to see these exercises, and I should not like him to smile at my mistakes."
"You are not going before Mr. Westover," she said briskly. "All my patients think they are going to die. I am not altogether sorry, as they are so sorry for themselves that it keeps them absorbed and out of mischief. Were they not taken up in picturing their husbands flinging themselves on to their graves in a frenzy of grief they might be picking their bandages off."
I giggled and choked into my beef-tea.
"I hate beef-tea," I said when I had recovered. "Besides, it is only a stimulant, and not a food."
"How do you know that?" she asked.
"I saw it in mother's medical book." I spoke carelessly.
"Where is it?" Her voice was sharp.
"Down the bed."
She dived gently but firmly under the clothes and removed the book which I had had such trouble in purloining from mother by bribing Amelia.
"Is there anything else you have read in it?"
"No," I said, "I've not had time. I was just running through the index when my eye caught the word beef-tea."
"What were you going to look for?"
"Spines," I returned promptly. "As mine has gone a bit wrong I thought I would like a little information about it."
"And I'm just glad I caught you in time," she said sternly. "That is why I like nursing men so much better than women. Men are too scared about themselves to go poking their noses into medical books, but women are so curious about their own cases that there is no holding them in. They look at their charts—I have seen them doing it in hospital when the nurses' backs were turned. They take their own temperatures, feel their own pulses, and ask a thousand questions which no sensible nurse would dream of answering."
"I have not asked silly questions," I argued.
"No, because up to now you have been far too poorly. What is it you want to know?"
"When I may get up," I said eagerly.
"Well, you won't find that in a medical book. Did you expect to do so?"
"Oh, no. I wanted to find out of what spines are made; the diseases to which they are subject," I said rather lamely.
"Yours isn't a disease, but an accident. Dr. Renton will tell you fast enough when you may get up." She put the book into a drawer.
"It seems so long to Wednesday."
"He is not coming till next week."
"Not till next week," I said blankly, "and this is only Monday. He said he would come on Wednesday."
"No, he didn't. You assumed that he would."
"Well, I call it most neglectful."
"There is nothing to come for now," she said soothingly. "It is a good way from Dorking to Pine Tree Valley, and of course, as he said, there is no good in running up a long bill."
"I don't believe he said that," I cried heatedly.
"Perhaps he didn't," she admitted; "but you mustn't excite yourself. I am going to lower the blinds. You said you were sleepy."
"I never was so wide awake in all my life," I almost sobbed. "I think it is mean of Dr. Renton. I did so want to get up this week and smell the wallflowers before they were quite over. I think they were late in flowering for my sake. I put them in and they waited for me, and now I shall miss them."
"I will bring some in for you to smell."
"It won't be the same," I cried petulantly. "You don't understand, nurse. To enjoy wallflowers to the full the sun must be shining upon them, and you must stand a little away from the bed, and the west wind must come along gently, bearing in its arms the scent—just a breath of warm fragrance, and—well, that is the way to enjoy wallflowers, and—oh, nurse, I do so want to bury my face in them." I tailed off to a wail.
She walked to the window and lowered the blind.
"If you carry on in this way you will never smell wallflowers again." She was cross. "I shall leave you now, and perhaps you'll be calmer when I come back."
"Oh, nurse," I said penitently, "don't go. I will be good. And I want you to read me Peggy and Other Tales. You read it so beautifully."
Peggy is a dear black book which belonged to mother when she was a little girl. It was my especial favourite when I was seven, and it has been quite the most suitable form of literature for a weak, fractious invalid with a hazy brain and wobbly emotions.
Nurse laughed as she picked up the book.
"Are you not tired of it?"
"No," I replied. "Peggy comforts me very much. And when you have finished her, you might read me something out of Ecclesiastes. It is not that I am feeling religious or think I am going to die, but the language is so musical and grand: 'Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.' It is the repetition of the word 'broken' I like. Now had I been writing the verse I should have searched about for another verb—smashed, cracked—and straightway the beauty of the lines would have been spoiled. But Solomon was so sure of himself. He knew the word 'broken' was just the right word even if used three times and so he used it."
Nurse sat and looked at me with surprise chasing across her face.
"Dear me," she said, "I never notice things like that when I am reading."
"What do you notice?" I inquired.
"Oh, I don't think I notice anything. I just want to hurry on to where the man proposes."
"But men don't often propose in the Bible, with the exception of Jacob," I said laughing.
"I didn't refer to the Bible. I was thinking of books generally."
"You mean you never notice how a book is written. You just want to get on with the plot."
"That's it," she agreed. "I hate descriptions. They tire me to death, especially as to how the characters feel inside about things. Heroines are the worst of all. They commune with themselves for hours over the merest trifles."
"Do you mean as to whether they will get a new dress, or engage a man to put a new washer on the bathroom tap which drips?"
"Oh, no," she said, a little impatiently, "I can't explain; it is not over things like that they worry themselves. But you look tired. You are talking too much. I will read you to sleep."
She spoke with finality, and picked up the book.
As she read aloud in a somewhat sonorous voice I lay and watched the tree-tops. "Next week," I thought, "I shall be out of doors once more. I shall visit the frog-pond with Dimbie. I shall wander through the fields with him. His arm will clasp mine, as I shall be weak, and we shall sit and rest under a white hawthorn hedge. The scent will be heavy on the still evening air. The fields of clover and wheat will——" And at this point I left Peggy and nurse, and fell asleep.