The little world; a hospital romance

CHAPTER XXIX. The End of the Rainbow

PROLOGUE.

The Hospital stood on a hill overlooking the City. It was a large, white stone building, against a background of smooth green lawns, and ornamental trees, a picture of quiet peace, still and stem and solemn, beautiful in its sober way, covering with a cloak of immobility the sickness and pain, and ofttimes death, within. Alone it stood, above the sin-racked, storm-tossed, heaving sea of human life, the smoky, dust-grimed City, like a gleaming white coral rock, rising above the ever restless bosom of the ocean. Perhaps it meant something the same to pain-wrecked humanity, as that coral strand to a shipwrecked sailor — a place of rest for a time at least.

Within, all was white also, from the spotless wards and white surgeries to the white-garbed nurses and doctors who reminded one of angels soothing away pain, when one was sailing away peacefully on the wings of an anesthetic, and who turned out to be very ordinary human beings, when one wanted a drink in the middle of the night, or disturbed a bit of corridor gossip, by ringing one’s bell.

Everywhere one looked was the same dazzling white cleanliness, for here the dust of the city did not enter, shut out as it was with all else of the outer world, for this was a world apart, where none came save those who were a part of it.

As without, the idea of peace pervaded, and quiet reigned within. As the white paint covered up the darkness of wood and iron, so did the white sheets cover the pain-darkened soul beneath. As the false white quietude covered up and hushed the smothered moan and sob-drawn breath, so did the white uniforms of the nurses cover the human heart of the wearer.

Wards, with rows of beds that were never out of line, on which the sheets are magically kept straight even over the most restless shoulders. Private rooms, where the only glow of color came from flowers sent in from the outside world. Long corridors, spotless and empty save for the sheet-covered stretchers and the white figures that propelled them. Accident rooms, where tom and broken humanity, wrung with the tortures of the damned, spilled its life-blood on the tiled floor. Anesthetic rooms filled with sweetly sickening odors, where one found blessed sleep, and floated off with confused memories of stinging hypodermic needles, and soft soothing voices that made one believe there was no pain. Operating rooms, where nerve-racked surgeons swore beneath their breath at swift-moving nurses, calling for still greater swiftness in the place where Time battled with Death for the mastery. Receiving rooms, where alone the dust of the City entered, and where light, trained fingers tore and cut away the soiled, ragged, and bloodstained clothing, to replace it with gowns from the accident room closets. Linen closets, where tier upon tier of spotless linen, arranged in even piles, filled the shelves. Closets filled with linen-wrapped sterile goods, gowns, laperotomy sheets, towels, table slips, caps, all stained yellow from long hours in the sterilizers. Other closets, filled with more packages of sterile gauze sponges, pads and bandages. Sterilizing rooms, where shining nickel sterilizers steamed and bubbled. Darkened recovery rooms, where pain-darkened souls awakened to a tragic world of pain, that filled with mortal agony the body returning to life.

A mystic world of its own, where pain and delirium pushed aside the veneering of human nature, leaving it a naked quivering thing, at the mercy of the soft-footed, soft-voiced nurses, who saw, and knew, and heard, many strange things that they hid away within themselves, beneath the mask of their uniform, and never revealed, for their hospital world was a strange secret world that kept its own council, and the council of its inmates, and bitter indeed was the penalty to one who betrayed.

The Hospital was the result of a hobby, a wonderful brain and unlimited means. It was equipped with every arrangement of the science of modern surgery. There was nothing lacking in its operating rooms, its accident rooms, its wards, to make it other than one of the most perfect of later-day emergency hospitals. It was private only because it was owned by one man, but all the surgeons from the city brought to it their most interesting cases, so that the wards were always filled to overflowing, and many cases waiting for room.

For years the clever brain of one man had worked on the machinery of the great place, until it ran on oiled wheels, its owner’s pride and joy, the child of his brain and heart and soul, the product of great theories and the means to put them in practice. All that was in the man he had given to his hobby; outside of it he had neither heart nor soul. Human beings were to him only machines that sometimes got out of repair, to be mended in his workshop. Even his only child was to him only a cog in the machinery. He had first been disappointed that she was a girl, but he trained her to fit into her place in his great work, although aside from that it is doubtful if he ever thought of her.

He had his own training school, and trained his own nurses, so that the name of the hospital on any diploma opened the way to success to a nurse who carried it, for when one had drilled for four years under that rule of iron, she was as near a machine as a human being can be.

But when the glory of his work was at its height, the great surgeon was stricken with a mortal illness and died, leaving the burden of his hobby on the shoulders of his child, who was only a slip of a girl. Bound by promises to the dying man, she tied herself to that inheritance with a thousand bands of steel.

CHAPTER ONE. Joan Murray

Joan Murray sat in the bow-window of her sitting room and watched a band of nurses, playing tennis on the beautiful lawns of the Nurses’ Home.

She was small, scarcely larger than a child, and her hair worn in short curls around her head, gave her the appearance of one. She was neither dark nor fair, but her face was tinted like the inside of a shell, her features were straight and delicate, yet the real beauty of her face lay in her eyes. Looking into them one forgot to notice their color, for in their unfathomable depth lay the warm passion of the South, the wisdom and mystery of the East, the bright freedom and frankness of the West, and the coldness of the North. They were, in spite of her evident youth, the eyes of a woman who had looked upon many kinds of life and had learned to understand.

She turned her head to call “Come in,” at a light tap on her door, and Dr. Lessing Jones, junior surgeon on the staff, walked into the room. He came over and laid some papers on the desk in front of her, and drew a chair up near her.

“Why aren’t you out, this wonderful day?” he asked, smiling, his very dark attractive face lighting up in a flash of white teeth.

“I was busy — different people were in, looking over the Hospital. They were strangers in the City, so I went around with them myself. Very old friends of father’s, whom I dare say he had forgotten years ago, but they remembered him— he saved their child, I believe. Poor father, at least his patients found him kind.”

“He was — in the sick room. I think it is the only place he ever was known to smile.”

“I wish he were here now ; I get so confused with it all sometimes, without him to turn to when things go wrong,” the girl said with a sigh. There was no sorrow in her voice or face over a loved parent who was dead; she spoke impersonally, for it was the surgeon that she wished back, not the father she had never known.

“That is not strange, Joan. This work and care is too heavy for you — ^too much for those little hands. If you would but give me the right to help!” He came to his feet suddenly, and leaned over her desk.

“You are a very great help. Less, but you are too good a man to marry, just to help me. WTien I marry, the man must come first. I cannot divide my attention. I do not think that I will ever marry. Besides, Less, you do not love me.”

“Love you? Why, Joan, I have loved you since you were a kid in short skirts.”

She smiled, and the smile lit up her face with so great a tenderness that it was transfigured. Joan Murray seldom smiled ; her lip would sometimes curve in a little sneer, or her silvery laugh ring out as sweet and cold as the chime of silver bells, but when she smiled, as now she smiled on Lessing Jones, one was suddenly lost in the beauty of her face.

“You have always loved me — yes, as I love you — and always will, but is that a love to base marriage on?”

“It looks pretty solid to me — Good Lord, Joan, you have not turned romantic, have you?”

She gave him a quizzical glance. “I do not know. Less; perhaps I am romantic in spite of the life I have led ; sometimes I do not know what I really want — I am not sure. Your love is solid and true, and I believe in it. It is a good foundation for partnership, but somehow I do not know how it would work out in marriage.”

“I had always been led to believe that marriage was a partnership,” Jones said quietly.

“Yes, perhaps it is, but Less — ” her face grew hard. “How can I know what marriage is ? What do I know of any of the beautiful things of life? What have I seen but the sordid, the false, the untrue? The life that has gradually unfolded before my eyes, tarnished, bitter, filled with misery, makes me wonder sometimes if there is any other side to it but the one I know. Is there a dream life that covers up this gruesome skeleton that I have known all my life? Dreams that fill the soul and keep it soft and young — ah. Less, what time have I had for dreams? Sometimes I wonder what I would have been like if I had had a chance like other girls, but I was only a bit of clay tossed into my father’s hands and molded to his will. When other girls were being told fairy tales, I was being told of surgery. When other girls were playing with their dolls, I was watching sharp and shining instruments, and learning their uses. When other girls were dreaming, I was under the iron rules of the training school. While other girls were enjoying life, I was studying under world-renowned surgeons and scientists in Germany, and when other girls were happy and gay and free, I was dissecting living human bodies in the operating room. I have seen only the one side of life. Less — I will never know the dream world that belongs to other girls. Always will it be the same. I was molded by my father’s hands into a living machine, and in the making, my dream life — the nourishment of my soul — ^has been left out, until it is too late — too late!”

Lessing Jones leaned nearer her, his dark face very tender. “Poor little girl, you got your life before you got your dreams. You were taught to beware, before the danger ever came, and yet, Joan, you have missed what most of us must suffer — the broken dreams and disillusionments, and the pain of finding that things are not what they seem.”

“Perhaps.” She was silent a moment, looking at Lessing Jones she wondered if he would not be a wonderful man with which to spend one’s life, and lean upon. He was so strong, so true, so much a part of her life, she could not imagine that life without him. And it was that alone, although neither of them realized it, that made things as they were. Jones was far too much a part of her life to be a figure of romance to her, and just at present Joan Murray’s starved heart was seeking romance. Jones, who had always been there to help when she needed help, ever present to guard her at every turn, seemed very little like the Prince Charming of her dreams.

“What have you there. Less ?” she said after a short time. “Another applicant ?’’ She glanced at the papers he had laid on her desk, with a little frown. “Why cannot I dispense with the training school altogether? It is getting to be a nuisance. Just when I get so that I can depend on a nurse, comes time for her to take her diploma and depart. Not that I blame her for wanting to shake the dust of this establishment from her feet, and breathe God’s clean air again. It must be like getting out of prison to them, into the warm sunshine of another world, sunshine that must surely melt the hardened crust from around their hearts and souls. I do not like this taking in of new girls out of that other world; there is so much for them to learn, so much for them to unlearn. If they have had their dreams, how must they be disillusioned in this world of ours ?”

“Dear Joan, the training school is not the only land of disillusion. Eventually life breaks us on the wheel, kills our dreams, and breaks our hearts.’’ He sighed as he looked at her, then with a shrug went back to the question at hand. “You have to have new girls, or whence would come our nurses? This girl — the one who has filled out the application blank here, is a nice little girl — a country doctor’s daughter. He is a friend of mine, and I wish you would give her a chance.”

“Protege ?”

“No, but I should like to see the girl have her chance. I have always been decent about the rules, Joan. I care nothing for the girl.”

“It isn’t you. Less, but the girl. It may seem a senseless thing, this rule regarding the nurses and doctors, but it has to be. There are only two people in a thousand who can keep the personal out of their work once it is established outside. Even you and I, in spite of our hard training, are not so perfect in our work because of our friendship. I wish I were more like my father. Do you remember. Less, that he recognized no one in his work, not even me? We were all alike, cogs in a machine.”

“Your father was not human,” Jones said briefly. “Don’t try to be like him, Joan. I should like you to take this girl into the training school.”

What is she like? You are no different from other surgeons. Less, when it comes to picking out material for nurses. You want perfect nurses, and also pretty ones — I am sorry to say they do not always mean the same thing. You take up any material that looks good to you and bring it to the training school to be made into good nurses.”

Jones laughed. “We want them efficient w'hen we need them, and pretty when we have the time to look at them.”

“And you spoil them when you have time, and expect them to be human machines when you have not. The only hospital that will ever be a success will have all women surgeons.”

“God forbid ! You would never get a probationer at all. You want a convent, not a hospital. Yet, surely, Joan, the girls enter the school with the idea of becoming good nurses.”

“You have answered your question before you asked it. Less. We would get very few nurses in a woman’s hospital. What their idea on entering the training school is I do not pretend to know, but it certainly, with the great majority, is not the hope of becoming a perfect nurse. Go ask the girls why they are here, why they have chosen this as a profession. I doubt if you will find two in the school prepared to answer your question, if they tell the truth. Half of them do not know why they are here. However, that is beside the point. What of the girl you ask me to take into the school ? Is she a doll-faced chit, with no more idea of what she is coming to than any child, or is she a strong-minded woman with more ideas of the duties of a nurse than we have? I prefer the former, for it takes more time and work to clean out and refill a vessel than to fill an empty one.”

“You do not seem to be in any mood to bother with probationers today, Joan. I never saw your theories so tattered. What you need is to get out into the fresh air for a time.”

“But I have not the time, so we may as well settle our discussion now.”

“But, Joan, what is the use? Here am I bringing you a nice little girl who is starting out to do good in the world, she has faith in herself, and in the world, so surely she cannot fail.”

“So surely will she fail. Less. Have you no pity for the girl? If you have, keep her away from the training school. Leave her in the country where she belongs. I should rather bring in a girl from off the streets of the city, for her disillusionment is complete at any rate, than a clean-minded country girl, her heart an open book for the writing of the hardest school on earth. Don’t you know. Less, that the cleaner the page the more can be written thereon?”

“Joan, what is the matter with you today? I never heard you talk so before.”

“I have been thinking. Less. I am tied to an inheritance for which I have no love, but I can never give it up now, for I am bound to it by a promise to the dead. Never mind, I will give your girl a chance, perhaps because you ask, perhaps because I am in need of a probationer. But, Less, I refuse to take the blame if she fails.”

“Joan—”

Again she smiled, but she said gravely enough, “My name is Miss Murray to the staff when on duty. Dr. Jones,” and Jones knew that he was being quietly dismissed.

Smiling he threw the application on the desk again and with a parting word left the room, but once in the corridor his face grew grave. He had suddenly remembered that Joan Murray was alone, and in a very hard position, so that he must not add to her burden by showing the friendship that lay so close to his heart. For now that the rigid rule of the great surgeon had been withdrawn, a certain tension of waiting lay over all for the young head to fail. More than ever he wished that he might have the right to help.

CHAPTER TWO. The Accident Case

The Convent bells nearby tolled out the hour of six. In the distance the whistles and gongs, bells and clocks from the City raised clarion voices above the smoky air, calling forth to those that labored by day, telling them the workday was over at last, and weary hands and feet might rest. Only in the Hospital was there no end to the day; round and round the clocks crept, yet never did that slow machinery that moved to the tune of human lives cease its endless grind.

The nurses had disappeared from the grounds, for it was dinner hour, and each patient having been served with whatever portion was his or her due, the nurses had trooped into the large dining room. Dinner was served from 6:30 to 8:30. The senior nurses dined from 6 :30 to 7 :30, while the first-year nurses and probationers hurried through the last duties of the day. They went into dinner when the seniors came out, and their work was done for the day. The seniors after dinner gave one last survey of the wards and wrote their day records, and at 8 o’clock the night nurses came on duty, so that all others excepting those assigned special duty were free for the night.

The dining room was a great white-tiled room, an ell joining the hospital to the Nurses’ Home. There was a small private room attached that Dr. Murray had used when he was alive, but now Joan chose to eat in a comer of the big room. She loved it, with its small tables, its wicker chairs designed to rest in while one ate, its wide mirrors, its screening palms, its soft-voiced, soft-footed little maids, but best of all she loved to watch the bevy of white-clad figures, laughing, talking gaily, as though the white walls had placed them far, far beyond the tragedies of life that lay on the other side.

Tonight, just as Joan was about to do down, the telephone on the desk beside her rang shrilly, and she turned back to answer it. One of the staff surgeons was calling.

“Miss Murray? Doctor Gerry speaking. Have you a private room? I have an accident case — pretty serious — will have to operate — concussion.”

“Number Sixteen is empty, but it is engaged for one of your own patients. Doctor. It is the only one in the house,” Joan answered quietly.

“That will do — ^will have to — can’t take the case anywhere else. Have the surgery ready for trephine, please. I will be out in less than an hour. Call Dr. Jones — I will want him to assist. All right? Thank you.”

Joan Murray hung up the receiver with a little sigh, and pressed a button on her desk; there never seemed to be any escape night or day. With the wards filled to overflowing and the private rooms all engaged, she had hoped for at least one night of quiet. But now the surgery nurses would be kept on duty until all hours, and tomorrow’s rush would never give them the required hours of extra off-duty.

The nurse who answered the bell tapped on the half-open door, and stood waiting. She was a pretty girl, the pink and white and gold type that needed only the white uniform and kerchief cap to make her look like an angel. But Clare Norton was no angel ; she was less of one perhaps that any of the others.

Joan looked up at her. “You may tell Miss Grey to get the surgery ready for trephine. I will come down shortly.”

“Yes, Miss Murray.” The girl’s fair face clouded, she had but lately been transferred to the surgery, and this meant the loss of her evening. With the unreasonableness of a thoughtless mind, she blamed it, not on the uncertainty of the hospital life, but to the girl on whose slim shoulders rested this little world.

Joan went down the corridor presently, a little figure in her plain white dress, down the wide stairs and into the large outer office where a number of senior nurses sat at a long table writing records. They rose to their feet at sight of her, but she only paused for a moment to speak a word to the head nurse before she went on through.

“Miss Corey, I will not have time to go over the night orders with you. You will go over them please, with Miss Smith, and you need not remain on duty, as I shall be in the surgery myself.” She went out without waiting for the head nurse’s murmured “Thank you. Miss Murray,” and on down the corridor to where the sterilizing rooms, anesthetic room, recovery rooms and operating rooms were apart from the wards.

Already the machinery of the operating room had been set in motion, the tanks for the basins and instruments filling with water, automatically, the sterile water tanks beginning to bubble and steam. The operating room nurse. Miss Grey, in surgery cap and gown, going about her work swiftly and silently, her needle nurses already “scrubbing up” in the “washup” room. With her soft curls tied under a cap, and a gown over her white dress, Joan Murray went to work, too, sorting out instruments, gloves, sutures, needles.

The nurses as a rule, especially the younger ones, stood a little in awe of Joan. She was so swift, so quick to see a mistake, so small and silent. She had little patience with stupidity, but the girls who were well up in their work found pleasure in working with her, for things under her guidance seemed to go more smoothly.

“You need new gloves. Miss Grey ; these look as though they had been used. That last shipment was not good, I will have to look into the matter. Send Miss Norton to the dispensary — ^no, she is scrubbing up, I will go myself, these can go to the accident room.” She went out, and hearing the receiving room bell ring, kept on there.

The ambulance doctor. Dr. Gerry, and Dr. Jones were there with two nurses. On a stretcher just being wheeled in lay the figure of a woman covered with a long cloak. Dr. Gerry turned as she came in. “Miss Murray, I want this patient prepared for trephine at once. Have her prepared and etherized in the accident room, will you ?”

“Yes, Dr. Gerry. Dr. Maher has not arrived yet, although I telephoned him at once — I think I hear him now in the corridor. Miss Anson, take the patient to the accident room please, and tell Dr. Maher that Dr. Gerry has given orders that she be' etherized there.” She shrugged her shoulders. “He will hate it I know, but there is no accounting for Dr. Gerry’s whims.”

Dr. Gerry drew her aside. “This is rather a strange case. Miss Murray. About 6, or a little before, I received a telephone call that there had been an accident on the River Road. The man who telephoned said he was a chauffeur, and that there was a woman with him when his car had overturned. The woman was pinned under the car. He did not give his name — in fact I believe I neglected to ask, but I went at once of course.” He gave Joan a quick glance. It was more or less of a joke among the staff that Gerry answered calls without waiting for any particulars, so that he was often wild goose chasing over the countryside, and bringing in accidents of all kinds and descriptions, at any hour of the day or night. But Joan knew that Dr. Gerry was a kind as well as a clever surgeon, for all of his many peculiar ways, and her face was perfectly grave as she answered quietly, “Of course.”

“I drove out the River Road and found the car all right — had the devil’s own time getting it off the woman, too, my chauffeur and I! but there was not a sign of the man, and the car was stripped of everything that might identify the owner — ^license card, number, everything. Oh, I say, nurse,” as the stretcher passed them on the way to the accident room. “Make a clean preparation there, shave all the head — don’t leave any hair,” and as the nurse passed on with a murmured “Yes, Doctor,” he turned again to Joan. “If there is one thing I do detest, it is trying to do trephine through a bunch of hair. As I was saying, the fellow, whoever he was, got off with everything that would let us know who he was. There was only one place he could have gone, and that was the Inn, three miles back, but we couldn’t get a word out of them. Must have thought she was dead, and skipped out — no business on that River Road anyway — only a death trap at best. Oh, by the way, I brought Dr. Chang with me tonight ; you have not met him, I think ; he has just returned from France. He will be interested in the case, I suppose, and will be in the surgery, too.”

They went into the accident room, and Joan went over to glance at the patient as she lay there with quantities of beautiful fair hair spread out over the pillow ready for clipping. Joan looked down casually, making some remark on the pity of the sacrifice, then suddenly her eyes darkened with interest.

“Dr. Gerry,” she said quickly in a low tone, that called him to her side at once, but she took him out of earshot of the nurse before she spoke her thought. “Dr. Gerry, is it possible that you have not recognized your patient?”

He gave her an astonished glance. “Recognized her? No, I never saw her before, of course — at least I don’t think I did.”

“It is Mrs. Godwin. Oh, Doctor, how like you not to have recognized one whom you have seen so often!”

“Impossible !”

“But nevertheless true.”

“But Mrs. Godwin is in the White Mountains. Only yesterday the Doctor told me himself.” He went over to the figure on the stretcher and looked down on it intently. There was no mistake; Joan had been right; he might have known that, he told himself. Joan was not one to make such an assertion without knowing whereof she spoke. It was only that the hospital had gathered into its sheltering walls another little mystery, another little tragedy.