Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 5 (1925-11).djvu/17

building. To enter my room, one had to pass through this ward, crowded with beds filled with girls and women ranging in age from three and four years up.

The "starvation" treatment for typhoid was still in use among the physicians in the town, and from early morning until the hour when the lights were extinguished in the evening, a constant source of annoyance was the incessant conversation of the younger patients in connection with what they were going to eat when they got better. Restricted in diet as they were, this was only natural; but the repeated discussion of their gastronomic abilities and inclinations, which had, at first, been highly diverting, was beginning to get on my nerves. Every sound from this outer ward was distinctly audible in my room, whereas I had to call pretty loudly if, instead of merely ringing the bell on the cord at the head of my bed, I wished to summon a nurse. Finally, since there was no escape from it, I grew resigned to the situation, and tried to read without noticing them.

Then, about a week before the day which had been set for my operation arrived, this child of whom I have spoken, Martha Walton, was brought into the ward. Her parents were poor people, and very ignorant. As the night nurse, Miss Eichards, remarked to me, their idea of taking care of a sick child evidently was to be as "good" to it as they knew how, and to indulge its every wish so far as lay in their power. Consequently—the nurse had learned from the doctor—when the parents discovered that the little one was very ill, before calling in medical aid they had stuffed her with all the "goodies" for which she cried, and had done a dozen other things to heighten the fever and hurry the case to a crisis. The result was that when the child was admitted to the hospital, she was in a much more critical condition than any of the others. Added to this, she was but ten years old, with no understanding of her trouble; a child who, constantly petted and "given in to" at home, made the very worst kind of a typhoid patient.

Now, hospital romances have been one of the interesting features of the Great War; but my hospital romance was not a part of my experience in France. I had loved my present little day nurse, Viola Manning, ever since she first came into my room with a few sympathetic words which were the preliminary to another of those abominable ice-caps beneath which the doctor insisted I was to be kept half buried. She had agreed with me that it was pretty tough to have to take the count with an attack of appendicitis after pulling through an operation on my head, where the shrapnel splinter had "got" me, and also recovering from the effects of a gassing—between which and appendicitis I felt there was little choice—administered by the ever attentive Huns. "She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them." She was—well, just a real, old-fashioned, womanly girl who understood her chosen work and carried it on with the alertness and expedition of an army nurse combined with the tenderness of a woman who is born to "mother." To paraphrase another and more up-to-date dramatist, who is also a song writer, "if I came out (of the ether, after the operation), and I would come out, there'd be a real girl waiting for me."

On the day following Martha's arrival, Viola had come into my room and opened the door wide, so that I could see out into the women's ward.

"There's the little nuisance—poor little thing!—who's been giving us all so much trouble since yesterday after-