I was sure he was dead. He did not move, and when I caught his hands and
called him frantically, he did not hear me. And so, with the horror over
me, I half fell down the stairs and roused Jim in the studio.
They all came with lights and blankets, and they carried him into the
tent and put him on the couch and tried to put whisky in his mouth. But
he could not swallow. And the silence became more and more ominous until
finally Anne got hysterical and cried, "He is dead! Dead!" and collapsed
on the roof.
But he was not. Just as the lights in the tent began to have red rings
around them and Jim's voice came from away across the river, somebody
said, "There, he swallowed that," and soon after, he opened his eyes. He
muttered something that sounded like "Andean pinnacle" and lapsed into
unconsciousness again. But he was not dead! He was not dead!
When the doctor came they made a stretcher out of one of Jim's six-foot
canvases--it had a picture on it, and Jim was angry enough the next
day--and took him down to the studio. We made it as much like a
sick-room as we could, and we tried to make him comfortable. But he lay
without opening his eyes, and at dawn the doctor brought a consultant
and a trained nurse.
The nurse was an offensively capable person. She put us all out, and
scolded Anne for lighting Japanese incense in the room--although Anne
explained that it is very reviving. And she said that it was unnecessary
to have a dozen people breathing up all the oxygen and asphyxiating
the patient. She was good-looking, too. I disliked her at once. Any
one could see by the way she took his pulse--just letting his poor hand
hang, without any support--that she was a purely mechanical creature,
without heart.
Well, as I said before, she put us all out, and shut the door, and asked
us not to whisper outside. Then, too, she refused to allow any flowers
in the room, although Betty had got a florist out of bed to order some.
The consultant came, stayed an hour, and left. Aunt Selina, who proved
herself a trump in that trying time, waylaid him in the hall, and
he said it might be a fractured skull, although it was possibly only
concussion.
The men spent most of the morning together in the den, with the door
shut. Now and then one of them would tiptoe upstairs, ask the nurse how
her patient was doing, and creak down again. Just before noon they all
went to the roof and examined again the place where he had been found.
I know, for I was in the upper hall outside the studio. I stayed there
almost all day, and after a while the nurse let me bring her things as
she needed them. I don't know why mother didn't let me study nursing--I
always wanted to do it. And I felt helpless and childish now, when there
were things to be done.