“What kind of cases do you want? I told you I have a nice old woman—”
The nurse’s brown eyes were alight with a mixture of thoughts—the movie she had just seen about Pasteur and the book they had all read about Florence Nightingale when they were student nurses. And their pride, swinging across the streets in the cold weather at Philadelphia General, as proud of their new capes as debutantes in their furs going in to balls at the hotels.
“I—I think I would like to try the case again,” she said amid a cacophony of telephone bells. “I’d just as soon go back if you can’t find anybody else.”
“But one minute you say you’ll never go on an alcoholic case again and the next minute you say you want to go back to one.”
“I think I overestimated how difficult it was. Really, I think I could help him.”
“That’s up to you. But if he tried to grab your wrists.”
“But he couldn’t,” the nurse said. “Look at my wrists: I played basketball at Waynesboro High for two years. I’m quite able to take care of him.”
Mrs Hixson looked at her for a long minute. “Well, all right,” she said. “But just remember that nothing they say when they’re drunk is what they mean when they’re sober—I’ve been all through that; arrange with one of the servants that you can call on him, because you never can tell—some alcoholics are pleasant and some of them are not, but all of them can be rotten.”
“I’ll remember,” the nurse said.
It was an oddly clear night when she went out, with slanting particles of thin sleet making white of a blue-black sky. The bus was the same that had taken her into town, but there seemed to be more windows broken now and the bus driver was irritated and talked about what terrible things he would do if he caught any kids. She knew he was just talking about the annoyance in general, just as she had been thinking about the annoyance of an alcoholic. When she came up to the suite and found him all helpless and distraught she would despise him and be sorry for him.
Getting off the bus, she went down the long steps to the hotel, feeling a little exalted by the chill in the air. She was going to take care of him because nobody else would, and because the best people of her profession had been interested in taking care of the cases that nobody else wanted.
She knocked at his study door, knowing just what she was going to say.
He answered it himself. He was in dinner clothes even to a derby hat—but minus his studs and tie.
“Oh, hello,” he said casually. “Glad you’re back. I woke up a while ago and decided I’d go out. Did you get a night nurse?”
“I’m the night nurse too,” she said. “I decided to stay on twenty-four hour duty.”
He broke into a genial, indifferent smile.
“I saw you were gone, but something told me you’d come back. Please find my studs. They ought to be either in a little tortoise-shell box or—”
He shook himself a little more into his clothes, and hoisted the cuffs up inside his coat sleeves.
“I thought you had quit me,” he said casually.
“I thought I had, too.”
“If you look on that table,” he said, “you’ll find a whole strip of cartoons that I drew you.”
“Who are you going to see?” she asked.
“It’s the President’s secretary,” he said. “I had an awful time trying to get ready. I was about to give up when you came in. Will you order me some sherry?”
“One glass,” she agreed wearily.
From the bathroom he called presently:
“Oh, Nurse, Nurse, Light of my Life, where is another stud?”
“I’ll put it in.”
In the bathroom she saw the pallor and the fever on his face and smelled the mixed peppermint and gin on his breath.
“You’ll come up soon ?” she asked. “Dr Carter’s coming at ten.”
“What nonsense! You’re coming down with me.”
“Me?” she exclaimed. “In a sweater and skirt ? Imagine!”
“Then I won’t go.”
“All right then, go to bed. That’s where you belong anyhow. Can’t you see these people to-morrow?”
“No, of course not!”
She went behind him and reaching over his shoulder tied his tie—his shirt was already thumbed out of press where he had put in the studs, and she suggested:
“Won’t you put on another one, if you’ve got to meet some people you like?”
“All right, but I want to do it myself.”
“Why can’t you let me help you?” she demanded in exasperation. “Why can’t you let me help you with your clothes ? What’s a nurse for—what good am I doing?”
He sat down suddenly on the toilet seat.
“All right—go on.”
“Now don’t grab my wrist,” she said, and then, “Excuse me.”
“Don’t worry. It didn’t hurt. You’ll see in a minute.”
She had the coat, vest and stiff shirt off him but before she could pull his undershirt over his head he dragged at his cigarette, delaying her.
“Now watch this,” he said. “One—two—three.”
She pulled up the undershirt; simultaneously he thrust the crimson-grey point of the cigarette like a dagger against his heart. It crushed out against a copper plate on his left rib about the size of a silver dollar, and he said “Ouch!” as a stray spark fluttered down against his stomach.
Now was the time to be hard-boiled, she thought. She knew there were three medals from the war in his jewel box, but she had risked many things herself: tuberculosis among them and one time something worse, though she had not known it and had never quite forgiven the doctor for not telling her.
“You’ve had a hard time with that, I guess,” she said lightly as she sponged him. “Won’t it ever heal?”
“Never. That’s a copper plate.”
“Well, it’s no excuse for what you’re doing to yourself.”
He bent his great brown eyes on her, shrewd—aloof, confused. He signalled to her, in one second, his Will to Die, and for all her training and experience she knew she could never do anything constructive with him. He stood up,steadying himself on the wash-basin and fixing his eyes on some place just ahead.
“Now, if I’m going to stay here you’re not going to get at that liquor,” she said.
Suddenly she knew he wasn’t looking for that. He was looking at the corner where he had thrown the bottle the night before. She stared at his handsome face, weak and defiant—afraid to turn even halfway because she knew that death was in that corner where he was looking. She knew death—she had heard it, smelt its unmistakable odour, but she had never seen it before it entered into anyone, and she knew this man saw it in the corner of his bathroom; that it was standing there looking at him while he spat from a feeble cough and rubbed the result into the braid of his trousers. It shone there crackling for a moment as evidence of the last gesture he ever made.
She tried to express it next day to Mrs Hixson:
“It’s not like anything you can beat—no matter how hard you try. This one could have twisted my wrists until he strained them and that wouldn’t matter so much to me. It’s just that you can’t really help them and it’s so discouraging—it’s all for nothing.”
