“I am the doctor,” she answered.
Of the female of the species, Sergeant Jones of course had heard. He had never before seen one. “I’ll be—” he started to say. But he wasn’t. Then he would have jerked away. But he couldn’t. “I want a doctor, a real one,” he blurted out angrily.
A shadow of a smile flickered for an instant in the woman’s eyes. Often she had seen them like this. “I am the surgeon in charge, the commanding military officer here,” she replied evenly. “After awhile, I’m sure you won’t mind.”
She went quietly on unwinding him. He heard her scissors snip. She was going to take some stitches. Once or twice she had to hurt horribly. She did it with deft precision. With the same quick motions, the sergeant had seen his wife at home roll out a pudding crust or flap a pancake. It was the convincing sureness of the woman who knows her business. Could a woman be a doctor, after all? The strips of linen had piled in a blood stained heap on the floor. With an effort the sergeant steadied his voice: “What is there left of me?” he asked.
The doctor smoothed his pillow first. “Sergeant,” she said very gently, “you have one perfectly good arm. I think there will be one leg. Last week the other—” But the sergeant did not have to hear the rest of the sentence. When he struggled back from somewhere in a black abyss, the hand that last week had held the surgeon’s knife was softly smoothing back the damp locks of hair from his cold forehead. She drew the cherry red comforter up and patted it about his shoulders with the infinite sympathy that speaks in a woman’s touch. She leaned over him with a glance that signalled courage and understanding. Then she left him to fight the fight he had to fight in the grim grey light of that London day for his own readjustment to the cruelty of existence. Was he glad that a woman was a doctor? She had saved his life.
There were weeks of convalescence. The hospital librarian in khaki stopped beside his cherry red comforter. He turned his face to the wall. There was nothing she could do for him. But in time he came to watch for her on her rounds as he did for the doctor. Finally he asked for books and magazines and the papers. And the news of the day that she brought him, flared with just two topics, War and Woman. The one was man’s universal activity, the other was his Great Discovery. You know how pleased a boy is with a Christmas toy he finds will go with some new unexpected action? Women were in all kinds of unprecedented action.
THE NEW WOMAN’S SLOGAN
The girl orderly in the blue tunic dressed Sergeant Jones one day for the convalescent soldiers’ outing. A girl chauffeur of the Woman’s Reserve Ambulance Corps picked him up in her arms like a child and set him on the seat beside her and took her place at the wheel. Could a woman drive a car? She shot hers in and out of the tangled maze of the London traffic as easily as a girl he had seen send a croquet ball through a wicket. Other cars whizzed by with women at the wheel. Great motor vans, with a woman on the high driver’s seat, swung safely past. Fleets of motor busses came careening along with girl conductors in short skirts balancing jauntily in command on the rear platforms. The bus marked “Woolwich Special” drew up at the Haymarket curb to take on a load of women munition workers going out for the night shift at the great arsenal. High on a ladder against a building here in Cockspur Street, two girl window cleaners stand at work in tunic and trousers. Girl footmen are opening the doors of carriages before the fashionable shops of Oxford Street. Girl operators are running the lifts. Girl messengers in government uniform are going in and out of Whitehall.
A kingdom is in the hands of its women. Round and round the world has turned since yesterday.
Here in Trafalgar Square a crowd of a thousand people hang on the words that a woman is speaking. Jones had never heard Mrs. Pankhurst; he had forbidden his wife to when she came to their town. Rampant, women’s rights females were against the laws of God and England. This, the arch conspirator of them all, he pictured in his mind’s eye as permanently occupied in burning country residences and bombing cathedrals and engaging in hand to hand conflicts with the London police.