Edward writhed. The nurse took his hand. “She’s sorry,” thought Edward.
There was blood everywhere. Some blood on the white apron that was stretched across the surgeon’s stomach. Sweat was falling from the surgeon’s chin.
“Take him away,” said the surgeon suddenly and loudly. It was over. Full of shame because of his forlorn and hideous condition, Edward was wheeled quickly along the corridors. A man on crutches in a check woollen dressing-gown stared at his outraged and disordered face. Edward made feeble movements with his hands and the nurse covered his face with part of the sheet. “Now people will think I am dead. They will get quite a thrill,” thought Edward and lay very still. When they took the sheet away he was beside his bed in the long bleak ward. All the other patients were looking greedily at him. Edward wanted to tell the nurse of his horror and discomfort but the cocaine still blocked his utterance. He could not mould his voice into syllables.
He hoped intensely that Emily would not come to see him while he was padded with bloodstained cotton-wool. He made up little tests to find out whether she would come. “If the sunlight reaches the chin of the man opposite before a tram goes by outside I shall know that she will not come until I am really fit to let her see me.”
In answer to a croak from the man opposite, the nurse came and pulled the blind down with a peevish flounce. Most of the nurses in that ward visited on everyone who made a request the irritation they had accumulated by reason of scores of other requests. If Edward asked for anything he was made to feel as if he had asked for the same thing an unreasonable number of times. Only when the doctors were there the nurses spoke in soft optimistic voices and patted the patients’ shoulders genially and called them “This poor boy....”
Edward’s test was spoilt by the pulling down of the blind. He betted with himself on whether the facetious man with bristly hair would ring the bell for the nurse before the blind man next to him did so. The facetious man called the nurses, “Say, Saddie,” and asked them about their beaux. No nurse was ever irritable with him. Sometimes he rang the bell specially to tell the nurse that he was so hollow he could put himself outside a whole steer, and the nurses, though they gave him nothing, never seemed to be annoyed by his cheerful importunity.
Edward thought that no-one in the world cared that he was ill. He did not want Emily to come and see him in his undignified condition. But he would have liked her to come to the door of the ward with a great splendid tangle of salmon-colored roses and be stopped there by a grave sweetfaced nurse, who would tell her that Mr. Williams was too seriously ill to see anyone. Then Emily would ask, “Is there any danger?” in an anxious voice that he had never heard, and the nurse would shake her grave sweet head and say, “One never knows. He is suffering terribly. The surgeon had to operate within a third of an inch of his brain.” Edward fell into a half sleep imagining the roses that Emily would bring and lay against his lips.
When he awoke he saw Banner Hope walking away from him towards the door of the ward.
“Hey!” said Edward in a thick desperate voice. A week before he would have refused to believe that the sight of Banner Hope could ever give him pleasure.
“Why, why, why....” said Mr. Hope, turning round guiltily. Edward saw at once that the visitor had been glad to find the patient asleep. It had been to Mr. Hope an opportunity to acquire merit as a benevolent friend without the effort of expressing benevolence. “Why, why, why ... isn’t this just too bad?...”