Sidney went on night duty shortly after her acceptance. All of her orderly
young life had been divided into two parts: day, when one played or worked,
and night, when one slept. Now she was compelled to a readjustment: one
worked in the night and slept in the day. Things seemed unnatural,
chaotic. At the end of her first night report Sidney added what she could
remember of a little verse of Stevenson's. She added it to the end of her
general report, which was to the effect that everything had been quiet
during the night except the neighborhood.
"And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?"
The day assistant happened on the report, and was quite scandalized.
"If the night nurses are to spend their time making up poetry," she said
crossly, "we'd better change this hospital into a young ladies' seminary.
If she wants to complain about the noise in the street, she should do so in
proper form."
"I don't think she made it up," said the Head, trying not to smile. "I've
heard something like it somewhere, and, what with the heat and the noise of
traffic, I don't see how any of them get any sleep."
But, because discipline must be observed, she wrote on the slip the
assistant carried around: "Please submit night reports in prose."
Sidney did not sleep much. She tumbled into her low bed at nine o'clock in
the morning, those days, with her splendid hair neatly braided down her
back and her prayers said, and immediately her active young mind filled
with images--Christine's wedding, Dr. Max passing the door of her old ward
and she not there, Joe--even Tillie, whose story was now the sensation of
the Street. A few months before she would not have cared to think of
Tillie. She would have retired her into the land of things-one-must-forget.
But the Street's conventions were not holding Sidney's thoughts now. She
puzzled over Tillie a great deal, and over Grace and her kind.
On her first night on duty, a girl had been brought in from the Avenue.
She had taken a poison--nobody knew just what. When the internes had tried
to find out, she had only said: "What's the use?"
And she had died.
Sidney kept asking herself, "Why?" those mornings when she could not get to
sleep. People were kind--men were kind, really,--and yet, for some reason
or other, those things had to be. Why?