After a time Sidney would doze fitfully. But by three o'clock she was
always up and dressing. After a time the strain told on her. Lack of
sleep wrote hollows around her eyes and killed some of her bright color.
Between three and four o'clock in the morning she was overwhelmed on duty
by a perfect madness of sleep. There was a penalty for sleeping on duty.
The old night watchman had a way of slipping up on one nodding. The night
nurses wished they might fasten a bell on him!
Luckily, at four came early-morning temperatures; that roused her. And
after that came the clatter of early milk-wagons and the rose hues of dawn
over the roofs. Twice in the night, once at supper and again toward dawn,
she drank strong black coffee. But after a week or two her nerves were
stretched taut as a string.
Her station was in a small room close to her three wards. But she sat very
little, as a matter of fact. Her responsibility was heavy on her; she made
frequent rounds. The late summer nights were fitful, feverish; the
darkened wards stretched away like caverns from the dim light near the
door. And from out of these caverns came petulant voices, uneasy
movements, the banging of a cup on a bedside, which was the signal of
thirst.
The older nurses saved themselves when they could. To them, perhaps just a
little weary with time and much service, the banging cup meant not so much
thirst as annoyance. They visited Sidney sometimes and cautioned her.
"Don't jump like that, child; they're not parched, you know."
"But if you have a fever and are thirsty--"
"Thirsty nothing! They get lonely. All they want is to see somebody."
"Then," Sidney would say, rising resolutely, "they are going to see me."
Gradually the older girls saw that she would not save herself. They liked
her very much, and they, too, had started in with willing feet and tender
hands; but the thousand and one demands of their service had drained them
dry. They were efficient, cool-headed, quick-thinking machines, doing
their best, of course, but differing from Sidney in that their service was
of the mind, while hers was of the heart. To them, pain was a thing to be
recorded on a report; to Sidney, it was written on the tablets of her soul.
Carlotta Harrison went on night duty at the same time--her last night
service, as it was Sidney's first. She accepted it stoically. She had
charge of the three wards on the floor just below Sidney, and of the ward
into which all emergency cases were taken. It was a difficult service,
perhaps the most difficult in the house. Scarcely a night went by without
its patrol or ambulance case. Ordinarily, the emergency ward had its own
night nurse. But the house was full to overflowing. Belated vacations and
illness had depleted the training-school. Carlotta, given double duty,
merely shrugged her shoulders.