"When will you come?"
"When you please."
"Well, I will leave you your Sunday. Or rather, come with me now, that I may at once get you received by the head doctor, and find a provisional cap and blouse for you. The rest will be for to-morrow morning."
Odette saw the head doctor; she tried on the nurse's costume which her friend would lend to her until she could procure one; and at eight o'clock the next morning, after having signed an engagement, she entered the hospital, almost as if she was entering a convent.
At that hour the hired women were sponging the floors with wet cloths, and through the wards resounded the click of buckets set down, the metal handle falling against their sides. The floors exhaled moisture. The sea air, entering by the open windows, swept out the odor of the sick-room. Convalescent men were going to the lavatories; others were helping comrades with helpless arms to wash themselves upon their cots.
Odette asked for Mme. de Calouas, and found her before the twenty beds allotted to her. A dozen of them were occupied by seriously wounded men, who gazed upon the newcomer with embarrassing steadfastness. Mme. de Calouas led Odette to the room where dressings were done, passing through the whole ward, where sixty men were exchanging the morning greetings of the soldier, now rough, now amusing. She was, above all, surprised that the nurses paid them no attention.
While giving instructions to her pupil Mme. de Calouas was busy disinfecting mugs, unrolling pieces of cotton and tearing them into bits, counting piles of compresses, tubes, drains. The room exhaled an odor of antiseptics, sweet and insipid.
They returned to the ward, and Mme. de Calouas made known to her each patient by name, with certain indications as to his case; she begged Odette to wash this or that one, to make the bed of an unfortunate who, with only one arm, could not do it alone.
"Be careful what you say to them," she whispered in her ear. "Remember that their estimate of you will depend upon your first words."
Odette observed that the patients gazed at her without once turning away their eyes. She won their approval by the first words she uttered, and by the gentleness with which she washed the faces of two or three helpless men, and she saw their expressions change. Those eyes so full of agony, which make unpractised fingers tremble, were softened. Her hands were dexterous, her face attractive. There was one poor fellow whom she had to wash from head to foot, like a new-born baby, a difficult task for a beginner. When all was finished and he was wrapped in clean linen she was about to pass to another bed, when the patient said: "Wait, madame!" And she saw him painfully turn in his bed, raise his sheet, awkwardly stretch out a suffering arm in the attempt at any cost to reach the case that hung at the head of the bed. She held the linen bag within his reach, and he, hesitating, fumbling, blindly feeling among a litter of things, a knife, letters, bits of bread, succeeded in extracting two photographs, those of his wife and his two little children. He desired to reward the new nurse for her kind offices, and he did his best by introducing her to his little family. Deeply touched, Odette praised the wife and the two children, and thenceforward the poor fellow was her friend.