Chapter I

Big Mary was sweeping the ward with a broom muffled in a white bag. In the breeze from the open windows, her blue calico wrapper ballooned about her and made ludicrous her frantic thrusts after the bits of fluff that formed eddies under the beds and danced in the spring air.

She finished her sweeping, and, with the joyous scraps captured in her dust-pan, stood in the doorway, critically surveying the ward. It was brilliantly clean and festive; on either side a row of beds, fresh white for the day; on the centre table a vase of Easter lilies, and on the record-table near the door a potted hyacinth. The Nurse herself wore a bunch of violets tucked in her apron-band. One of the patients had seen the Junior Medical give them to her. The Eastern sun, shining across the beds, made below them, on the polished floor, black islands of shadow in a gleaming sea of light.

And scattered here and there, rocking in chairs or standing at windows, enjoying the Sunday respite from sewing or the bandage-machine, women, grotesque and distorted of figure, in attitudes of weariness and expectancy, with patient eyes awaited their crucifixion. Behind them, in the beds, a dozen perhaps who had come up from death and held the miracle in their arms.

The miracles were small and red, and inclined to feeble and ineffectual wrigglings. Fists were thrust in the air and brought down on smiling, pale mother faces. With tight-closed eyes and open mouths, each miracle squirmed and nuzzled until the mother would look with pleading eyes at the Nurse. And the Nurse would look severe and say:

"Good gracious, Annie Petowski, surely you don't want to feed that infant again! Do you want the child to have a dilated stomach?"

Fear of that horrible and mysterious condition, a dilated stomach, would restrain Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara for a time. With the wisdom of the serpent, she would give the child her finger to suck--a finger so white, so clean, so soft in the last week that she was lost in admiration of it. And the child would take hold, all its small body set rigid in lines of desperate effort. Then it would relax suddenly, and spew out the finger, and the quiet hospital air would be rent with shrieks of lost illusion. Then Annie Petowski or Jennie Goldstein or Maggie McNamara would watch the Nurse with open hostility and defiance, and her rustling exit from the ward would be followed by swift cessation of cries, and, close to Annie or Jennie or Maggie's heart, there would be small ecstatic gurglings--and peace.

In her small domain the Nurse was queen. From her throne at the record-table, she issued proclamations of baths and fine combs, of clean bedding and trimmed nails, of tea and toast, of regular hours for the babies. From this throne, also, she directed periodic searches of the bedside stands, unearthing scraps of old toast, decaying fruit, candy, and an occasional cigarette. From the throne, too, she sent daily a blue-wrappered and pig-tailed brigade to the kitchen, armed with knives, to attack the dinner potatoes.

But on this Easter morning, the queen looked tired and worn. Her crown, a starched white cap, had slipped back on her head, and her blue-and-white dress was stained and spotted. Even her fresh apron and sleevelets did not quite conceal the damage. She had come in for a moment at the breakfast hour, and asked the Swede, Ellen Ollman, to serve the breakfast for her; and at half past eight she had appeared again for a moment, and had turned down one of the beds and put hot-water bottles in it.

The ward ate little breakfast. It was always nervous when a case was "on." Excursions down the corridor by one or another of the blue-wrappered brigade brought back bits of news:

"The doctor is smoking a cigarette in the hall;" or, "Miss Jones, the day assistant, has gone in;" and then, with bated breath, "The doctor with the red mustache has come"--by which it was known that things were going badly, the staff man having been summoned.

Suggestions of Easter began to appear even in this isolated ward, denied to all visitors except an occasional husband, who was usually regarded with a mixture of contempt and scepticism by the other women. But now the lilies came, and after them a lame young woman who played the organ in the chapel on Sundays, and who afterward went from ward to ward, singing little songs and accompanying herself on the mandolin she carried with her. The lame young woman seated herself in the throne-chair and sang an Easter anthem, and afterward limped around and placed a leaflet and a spray of lilies-of-the-valley on each bedside stand.

She was escorted around the ward by Elizabeth Miller, known as "Liz" in Our Alley, and rechristened Elizabeth by the Nurse. Elizabeth always read the tracts. She had been there four times, and knew all the nurses and nearly all the doctors. "Liz" had been known, in a shortage of nurses, to be called into the mysterious room down the hall to assist; and on those occasions, in an all-enveloping white gown over her wrapper, with her hair under a cap, she outranked the queen herself in regalness and authority.

The lame mandolin-player stopped at the foot of the empty bed. "Shall I put one here?" she asked, fingering a tract.

Liz meditated majestically.

"Well, I guess I would," she said. "Not that it'll do any good."

"Why?"

Liz jerked her head toward the corridor.

"She's not getting on very well," she said; "and, even if she gets through, she won't read the tract. She held her fingers in her ears last Sunday while the Bible-reader was here. She's young. Says she hopes she and the kid'll both die."

The mandolin-player was not unversed in the psychology of the ward.

"Then she--isn't married?" she asked, and because she was young, she flushed painfully.

Liz stared at her, and a faint light of amusement dawned in her eyes.

"Well, no," she admitted; "I guess that's what's worrying her. She's a fool, she is. She can put the kid in a home. That's what I do. Suppose she married the fellow that got her into trouble? Wouldn't he be always throwing it up to her?"

The mandolin-player looked at Liz, puzzled at this new philosophy of life.

"Have--have you a baby here?" she asked timidly.

"Have I!" said Liz, and, wheeling, led the way to her bed. She turned the blanket down with a practised hand, revealing a tiny red atom, so like the others that only mother love could have distinguished it.

"This is mine," she said airily. "Funny little mutt, isn't he?"

The mandolin-player gazed diffidently at the child.

"He--he's very little," she said.

"Little!" said Liz. "He holds the record here for the last six months--eleven pounds three ounces in his skin, when he arrived. The little devil!"

She put the blanket tenderly back over the little devil's sleeping form. The mandolin-player cast about desperately for the right thing to say.

"Does--does he look like his father?" she asked timidly. But apparently Liz did not hear. She had moved down the ward. The mandolin-player heard only a snicker from Annie Petowski's bed, and, vaguely uncomfortable, she moved toward the door.

Liz was turning down the cover of the empty bed, and the Nurse, with tired but shining eyes, was wheeling in the operating table.

The mandolin-player stepped aside to let the table pass. From the blankets she had a glimpse of a young face, bloodless and wan--of hurt, defiant blue eyes. She had never before seen life so naked, so relentless. She shrank back against the wall, a little sick. Then she gathered up her tracts and her mandolin, and limped down the hall.

The door of the mysterious room was open, and from it came a shrill, high wail, a rising and falling note of distress--the voice of a new soul in protest. She went past with averted face.

Back in the ward Liz leaned over the table and, picking the girl up bodily, deposited her tenderly in the warm bed. Then she stood back and smiled down at her, with her hands on her hips.

"Well," she said kindly, "it's over, and here you are! But it's no picnic, is it?"

The girl on the bed turned her head away. The coarsening of her features in the last month or two had changed to an almost bloodless refinement. With her bright hair, she looked as if she had been through the furnace of pain and had come out pure gold. But her eyes were hard.

"Go away," she said petulantly.

Liz leaned down and pulled the blanket over her shoulders.

"You sleep now," she said soothingly. "When you wake up you can have a cup of tea."

The girl threw the cover off and looked up despairingly into Liz's face.

"I don't want to sleep," she said. "My God, Liz, it's going to live and so am I!"