"Fower," he says.
Four tin monkeys sold in a thick fog.
Marvellous! Incredible!
Battle
They lie in long, bright wards, which are full of that clean hospital smell of warmth, flowers, and drugs. A neat-waisted nurse moves between the beds, smiling, bending, whispering, easing a pillow, passing from weary smile to weary smile, so young by contrast with these sufferers, so healthy, so calm, so reliable.
The women are mostly middle-aged, but their plaited hair, lying in two little coils over their shoulders, gives them a youthful look, so that you realize what they were like when they were eighteen. Some are pale, their poor, thin arms the colour of unbleached wax; many look so well that you marvel that they should be there. It is the same in the men's wards. Cancer! That malignant, hissing word that lurks like a spectre at the back of so many minds has brought these men and women to one of the most noble hospitals in the world—the Free Cancer Hospital in the Fulham Road.
I admit that when I entered my first ward I shrank, in the shameful cowardice of my health, as I did once when a leper in the East rose up on his stumps out of the dust and touched my arm. To see the unimaginable horrors which you could be called on to suffer, to see lying there before your eyes the unthinkable depths to which your fine, strong body could sink, is a ghastly ordeal.
Yet what did I see? I saw greater than this black thing whose vileness no words can mitigate, the splendid forces of Heroism and Hope: Heroism in the long, quiet wards, Hope in the operating theatres, in the laboratories. Here in the middle of London, with streams of omnibuses thundering past beyond the railings, is a day and night battle with agony. Tragedy and triumph follow each other through these white halls, and over all is that fine spirit of enthusiasm as of an army banded to fight for a cause.
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