Chapter XXII. IT WAS DELIRIUM
I was sure he was dead. He did not move, and when I caught his hands and called him frantically, he did not hear me. And so, with the horror over me, I half fell down the stairs and roused Jim in the studio.
They all came with lights and blankets, and they carried him into the tent and put him on the couch and tried to put whisky in his mouth. But he could not swallow. And the silence became more and more ominous until finally Anne got hysterical and cried, “He is dead! Dead!” and collapsed on the roof.
But he was not. Just as the lights in the tent began to have red rings around them and Jim’s voice came from away across the river, somebody said, “There, he swallowed that,” and soon after, he opened his eyes. He muttered something that sounded like “Andean pinnacle” and lapsed into unconsciousness again. But he was not dead! He was not dead!
When the doctor came they made a stretcher out of one of Jim’s six-foot canvases—it had a picture on it, and Jim was angry enough the next day—and took him down to the studio. We made it as much like a sick-room as we could, and we tried to make him comfortable. But he lay without opening his eyes, and at dawn the doctor brought a consultant and a trained nurse.
The nurse was an offensively capable person. She put us all out, and scolded Anne for lighting Japanese incense in the room—although Anne explained that it is very reviving. And she said that it was unnecessary to have a dozen people breathing up all the oxygen and asphyxiating the patient. She was good-looking, too. I disliked her at once. Any one could see by the way she took his pulse—just letting his poor hand hang, without any support—that she was a purely mechanical creature, without heart.
Well, as I said before, she put us all out, and shut the door, and asked us not to whisper outside. Then, too, she refused to allow any flowers in the room, although Betty had got a florist out of bed to order some.
The consultant came, stayed an hour, and left. Aunt Selina, who proved herself a trump in that trying time, waylaid him in the hall, and he said it might be a fractured skull, although it was possibly only concussion.
The men spent most of the morning together in the den, with the door shut. Now and then one of them would tiptoe upstairs, ask the nurse how her patient was doing, and creak down again. Just before noon they all went to the roof and examined again the place where he had been found. I know, for I was in the upper hall outside the studio. I stayed there almost all day, and after a while the nurse let me bring her things as she needed them. I don’t know why mother didn’t let me study nursing—I always wanted to do it. And I felt helpless and childish now, when there were things to be done.