“Relaxation, Mrs. Witherspoon, is the best weapon with which to fight disease. I’m tired. I think I’ll take a nap.”
“Do you good, dearie. Excitement and all, and then puttin’ you in thet bed, too. Death-beds is weakenin’. It takes a sunnin’ every day and a good six months to make a mattress lose a death struggle.”
Rose Standish turned her face to the window and closed her eyes, and shivered. “Lose your heart, lose your appendix, lose anything, but don’t lose your nerves,” was what Tony always said.
Ridiculous to be feeling like this. Crazy. Perhaps if she tried to think about something else, then her feet would quit perspiring. Think about the way Dr. MacArthur had looked when she offered to come ... Galsworthy said that your mouth was what you had become but your eyes were what you were.... Dr. MacArthur’s eyes were like wave crests against a blue, blue sky. Clean and deep and clear, when he had turned them into her, stood up, and said:
“You have done more for me in fifteen minutes than anybody in the hospital has ever done. You have picked me out of despair.”
She began to tremble again and then she realized that it was the way he had looked when he said it that made her tremble. That look was the grandest thing that had happened to her since Tony kissed her the day he died.
Of course she must expect to be jumpy, to feel fidgetty, to get dry in the throat; good heavens, all of that was perfectly natural under the circumstances! Dr. MacArthur had even told her to expect it, and he had said:
“If you get scared, shift your mind to something else. You are like a doctor observing an operation, you are like an important actress watching a play of which she knows all of the lines being enacted by amateurs. Remember what you used to do as a student nurse and see,” and then he smiled wryly, “if the routine has changed one second’s worth. I bet it hasn’t.”
She opened her eyes and felt better. She looked at her watch and found it was four forty-five. Time to bring the patients in off the porch and prepare for supper. Behind her she heard a voice and turned over. The woman, whose bed stood next to Mrs. Witherspoon’s, had been rolled into place already!
She was as insignificant as a dried corn stalk. Heart case probably. That queer revived look a wilted flower has when you stick the stem in hot aspirin water. She was saying: