“No, say it and get it out of your system. Getting well always seems a terrible undertaking; and the stronger you’ve been the harder it seems.” Sheila turned to her chart and preparations for the night.
Lights out, she sat down by the open window to wait for Peter to sleep. An hour passed, two hours, and sleep did not come. She fed him hot milk and he still lay open-eyed, almost rigid, staring straight at the ceiling. At midnight she stole out for her own supper in the diet-kitchen and found him still awake when she returned, the haunting eyes looking more child’s than man’s in the dimness of the night lamp. Had she been free to follow her most vagrant impulse, she would have climbed on the head of the bed, taken the bandaged head on her lap, and plunged into the most enthralling tale of boy adventure her imagination could compass. But she hounded off the impulse, after the fashion of treating all vagrants, and went back to the window to wait and wonder. Peter was still awake when the gray of the morning crept down the corridors of the Surgical.
Sheila questioned Tyler, the day nurse, as she came off duty the next evening, “Number Three sleep any to boast of?”
“Why, no! Didn’t he sleep well last night?”
She gave a non-committal shrug and passed into the room. He was watching for her coming, and a ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. She couldn’t remember having seen even so much of a smile before.
“It’s—it’s Leerie.” He said it just as he had the night before. But there was a strange, wistful appeal in the voice which set Sheila wondering afresh.
“Gorgeous night, full of stars, and air like wine. Smell the verbena and thyme from the San gardens?” Sheila threw back her head and sniffed the air like a wild thing. “Took me a month to trail that smell—be sure of it. You only get it at night after a light rain. Take some long breaths of it and you’ll be asleep before lights are out.”
But he was not. He lay rigid as the night before, his eyes staring straight before him. Sheila remembered a description she had read once of a mountain guide who had been caught on the edge of a landslide and hung for hours over the abyss, clutching a half-felled tree and trying to keep awake until help came. The man she was nursing might almost be living through such an agony of mind and body, afraid to yield up his consciousness lest he should go plunging off into some horrible abyss. What did he fear? Was it sleep? Was somnophobia what lay behind the wrecking of this fine, clean manhood? The thing seemed incredible, and yet—and yet—
Before dawn crept again into the Surgical, the mind of Sheila O’Leary was made up. Peter was suddenly aware that the nurse was close at his bedside, chafing the clenched fingers free. It was that mysterious hour that hangs between the going night and coming day, the most non-resisting time for body and mind, when the human will gives up the struggle if it gives it up at all. And Sheila O’Leary, being well aware of this, rubbed the tense nerves into a comfortable state of relaxation and talked.
First she talked of the city, and found he was not city-born. Then she talked of the country—of South, East, and West—and located his birthplace in a small New England village. She talked of the outdoor freedom of a country boy, of the wholesome work and fun on a farm with a large family and good old-fashioned parents, and she found that he had been an only child, motherless, with a family consisting of a misanthropic, grief-stricken father and a hired girl. His voice sounded toneless and more tired than ever as he spoke of his childhood.