The lame violin-player limped out of the ward; the shadows of the early
winter twilight settled down. At five o'clock Carlotta sent Miss Wardwell
to first supper, to the surprise of that seldom surprised person. The ward
lay still or shuffled abut quietly. Christmas was over, and there were no
evening papers to look forward to.
Carlotta gave the five-o'clock medicines. Then she sat down at the table
near the door, with the tray in front of her. There are certain thoughts
that are at first functions of the brain; after a long time the spinal cord
takes them up and converts them into acts almost automatically. Perhaps
because for the last month she had done the thing so often in her mind, its
actual performance was almost without conscious thought.
Carlotta took a bottle from her medicine cupboard, and, writing a new label
for it, pasted it over the old one. Then she exchanged it for one of the
same size on the medicine tray.
In the dining-room, at the probationers' table, Miss Wardwell was talking.
"Believe me," she said, "me for the country and the simple life after this.
They think I'm only a probationer and don't see anything, but I've got eyes
in my head. Harrison is stark crazy over Dr. Wilson, and she thinks I
don't see it. But never mind; I paid, her up to-day for a few of the jolts
she has given me."
Throughout the dining-room busy and competent young women came and ate,
hastily or leisurely as their opportunity was, and went on their way again.
In their hands they held the keys, not always of life and death perhaps,
but of ease from pain, of tenderness, of smooth pillows, and cups of water
to thirsty lips. In their eyes, as in Sidney's, burned the light of
service.
But here and there one found women, like Carlotta and Miss Wardwell, who
had mistaken their vocation, who railed against the monotony of the life,
its limitations, its endless sacrifices. They showed it in their eyes.
Fifty or so against two--fifty who looked out on the world with the
fearless glance of those who have seen life to its depths, and, with the
broad understanding of actual contact, still found it good. Fifty who were
learning or had learned not to draw aside their clean starched skirts from
the drab of the streets. And the fifty, who found the very scum of the
gutters not too filthy for tenderness and care, let Carlotta and, in lesser
measure, the new probationer alone. They could not have voiced their
reasons.
The supper-room was filled with their soft voices, the rustle of their
skirts, the gleam of their stiff white caps.