A Late Recruit
A LITTLE before noon the following day, Mrs. David Clark, the wife of the surgeon in command of the Red Cross hospital near Château-Thierry, entered a small room in one of the towers of the old French château, which had been serving as a hospital for the American wounded.
The room was in the portion of the building set apart for the use of the Red Cross nurses.
Opening the door quietly and without knocking, Sonya stood for a moment in silence upon the threshold, staring in polite amazement at the figure she beheld sitting upright in the small hospital bed.
The figure was that of a young girl with straight brown hair cut short and parted at one side, a rather thin white face with a pointed chin and large hazel eyes. There was a boyish, or perhaps more of a sprite-like quality in her appearance. As Sonya looked straightway she saw a fleeting picture of Peter Pan, before the girl turned and spoke to her.
"You are Mrs. Clark aren't you? You are very kind to come to ask about me. I am sorry I gave you so much trouble yesterday; another mile or more and I should have arrived safely at the hospital and been none the worse for my long walk. You won't mind if I go on eating a moment longer, will you? I am dreadfully hungry and I have just succeeded in persuading the charming little girl who is taking care of me that there is nothing in the world the matter with me today, except the need for food. I really feel no worse from yesterday's experience, although it is nice to be so deliciously warm after one has come fairly near being frozen."
As the girl talked, the older woman came and took a little chair beside the bed. The newcomer to the hospital, who had been rescued from the snow storm the afternoon before, Sonya now discovered was not so young as she had originally believed. On closer observation there were tiny lines about the girl's eyes, a little droop at the corners of her mouth, which might, however, be due partly to fatigue and exposure.
"When you feel inclined and if you are strong enough, I wonder if you will not tell me something about yourself and where you were trying to go when we picked you up yesterday? Red Cross nurses have been in many unexpected places since the beginning of the war, yet one scarcely looks to find one lost in the snow in such a picturesque fashion," Sonya suggested half smiling and half serious.
In answer to Sonya's speech, the girl pushed the tray of food which by this time she had finished eating, to the bottom of her bed and sat resting her chin in the palms of her hands. She was leaning forward with her shoulders lifted and wearing a little white flannel dressing sacque which Bianca Zoli must have loaned to her.
"I want very much to explain to you, Mrs. Clark, and I am entirely all right again, only perhaps a little tired from my adventure. I do not seem even to have taken cold. First of all my name is Nora Jamison and I have traveled all the way from California to France, across a country and across an ocean. Was it my good fortune or my ill fortune that I landed in Paris just three days before the armistice was signed to begin my Red Cross nursing? I have been looking forward to the opportunity it seems to me for years. Oh, I have done war nursing, but near one of the California camps."