Chapter II

Considering that he could not get out anyhow, Twenty-two took the news of the quarantine calmly. He reflected that, if he was shut in, Jane Brown was shut in also. He had a wicked hope, at the beginning, that the Senior Surgical Interne had been shut out, but at nine o'clock that evening that young gentleman showed up at the door of his room, said "Cheer-o," came in, helped himself to a cigarette, gave a professional glance at Twenty-two's toes, which were all that was un-plastered of the leg, and departing threw back over his shoulder his sole conversational effort:

"Hell of a mess, isn't it?"

Twenty-two took up again gloomily the book he was reading, which was on Diseases of the Horse, from the hospital library. He was in the midst of Glanders.

He had, during most of that day, been making up his mind to let his family know where he was. He did not think they cared, particularly. He had no illusions about that. But there was something about Jane Brown which made him feel like doing the decent thing. It annoyed him frightfully, but there it was. She was so eminently the sort of person who believed in doing the decent thing.

So, about seven o'clock, he had sent the orderly out for stamps and paper. He imagined that Jane Brown would not think writing home on hospital stationery a good way to break bad news. But the orderly had stopped for a chat at the engine house, and had ended by playing a game of dominoes. When, at ten o'clock, he had returned to the hospital entrance, the richer by a quarter and a glass of beer, he had found a strange policeman on the hospital steps, and the doors locked.

The quarantine was on.

Now there are different sorts of quarantines. There is the sort where a trained nurse and the patient are shut up in a room and bath, and the family only opens the door and peers in. And there is the sort where the front door has a placard on it, and the family goes in and out the back way, and takes a street-car to the office, the same as usual. And there is the hospital quarantine, which is the real thing, because hospitals are expected to do things thoroughly.

So our hospital was closed up as tight as a jar of preserves. There were policemen at all the doors, quite suddenly. They locked the doors and put the keys in their pockets, and from that time on they opened them only to pass things in, such as newspapers or milk or groceries or the braver members of the Staff. But not to let anything out--except the Staff. Supposedly Staffs do not carry germs.

And, indeed, even the Staff was not keen about entering. It thought of a lot of things it ought to do about visiting time, and prescribed considerably over the telephone.

At first there was a great deal of confusion, because quite a number of people had been out on various errands when it happened. And they came back, and protested to the office that they had only their uniforms on under their coats, and three dollars; or their slippers and no hats. Or that they would sue the city. One or two of them got quite desperate and tried to crawl up the fire-escape, but failed.

This is of interest chiefly because it profoundly affected Jane Brown. Miss McAdoo, her ward nurse, had debated whether to wash her hair that evening, or to take a walk. She had decided on the walk, and was therefore shut out, along with the Junior Medical, the kitchen cat, the Superintendent's mother-in-law and six other nurses.

The next morning the First Assistant gave Jane Brown charge of H ward.

"It's very irregular," she said. "I don't exactly know--you have only one bad case, haven't you?"

"Only Johnny."

The First Assistant absent-mindedly ran a finger over the top of a table, and examined it for dust.

"Of course," she said, "it's a great chance for you. Show that you can handle this ward, and you are practically safe."

Jane Brown drew a long breath and stood up very straight. Then she ran her eye over the ward. There was something vaguely reminiscent of Miss McAdoo in her glance.

Twenty-two made three brief excursions back along the corridor that first day of the quarantine. But Jane Brown was extremely professional and very busy. There was an air of discipline over the ward. Let a man but so much as turn over in bed and show an inch of blanket, and she pounced on the bed and reduced it to the most horrible neatness. All the beds looked as if they had been made up with a carpenter's square.

On the third trip, however, Jane Brown was writing at the table. Twenty-two wheeled himself into the doorway and eyed her with disapproval.

"What do you mean by sitting down?" he demanded sarcastically. "Don't you know that now you are in charge you ought to keep moving?"

To which she replied, absently:

"Three buttered toasts, two dry toasts, six soft boiled eggs, and twelve soups." She was working on the diet slips.

Then she smiled at him. They were quite old friends already. It is curious about love and friendship and all those kindred emotions. They do not grow nearly so fast when people are together as when they are apart. It is an actual fact that the growth of many an intimacy is checked by meetings. Because when people are apart it is what they _are_ that counts, and when they are together it is what they do and say and look like. Many a beautiful affair has been ruined because, just as it was going along well, the principals met again.

However, all this merely means that Twenty-two and Jane Brown were infinitely closer friends than four or five meetings really indicates.

The ward was very quiet on this late afternoon call of his save for Johnny's heavy breathing. There is a quiet hour in a hospital, between afternoon temperatures and the ringing of the bell which means that the suppers for the wards are on their way--a quiet hour when over the long rows of beds broods the peace of the ending day.

It is a melancholy hour, too, because from the streets comes faintly the echo of feet hurrying home, the eager trot of a horse bound stableward. To those in the eddy that is the ward comes at this time a certain heaviness of spirit. Poor thing though home may have been, they long for it.

In H ward that late afternoon there was a wave of homesickness in the air, and on the part of those men who were up and about, who shuffled up and down the ward in flapping carpet slippers, an inclination to mutiny.

"How did they take it?" Twenty-two inquired. She puckered her eyebrows.

"They don't like it," she confessed. "Some of them were about ready to go home and it--_Tony!_" she called sharply.

For Tony, who had been cunningly standing by the window leading to a fire-escape, had flung the window up and was giving unmistakable signs of climbing out and returning to the other man's wife.

"Tony!" she called, and ran. Tony scrambled up on the sill. A sort of titter ran over the ward and Tony, now on the platform outside, waved a derisive hand through the window.

"Good-bye, mees!" he said, and--disappeared.

It was not a very dramatic thing, after all. It is chiefly significant for its effect on Twenty-two, who was obliged to sit frozen with horror and cursing his broken leg, while Jane Brown raced a brown little Italian down the fire-escape and caught him at the foot of it. Tony took a look around. The courtyard gates were closed and a policeman sat outside on a camp-stool reading the newspaper. Tony smiled sheepishly and surrendered.

Some seconds later Tony and Jane Brown appeared on the platform outside. Jane Brown had Tony by the ear, and she stopped long enough outside to exchange the ear for his shoulder, by which she shook him, vigorously.

Twenty-two turned his chair around and wheeled himself back to his room. He was filled with a cold rage--because she might have fallen on the fire-escape and been killed; because he had not been able to help her; because she was there, looking after the derelicts of life, when the world was beautiful outside, and she was young; because to her he was just Twenty-two and nothing more.

He had seen her exactly six times.

Jane Brown gave the ward a little talk that night before the night nurse reported. She stood in the centre of the long room, beside the tulips, and said that she was going to be alone there, and that she would have to put the situation up to their sense of honour. If they tried to escape, they would hurt her. Also they would surely be caught and brought back. And, because she believed in a combination of faith and deeds, she took three nails and the linen-room flatiron, and nailed shut the window onto the fire-escape.

After that, she brushed crumbs out of the beds with a whiskbroom and rubbed a few backs with alcohol, and smoothed the counterpanes, and hung over Johnny's unconscious figure for a little while, giving motherly pats to his flat pillow and worrying considerably because there was so little about him to remind her of the Johnny she knew at home.

After that she sat down and made up her records for the night nurse. The ward understood, and was perfectly good, trying hard not to muss its pillows or wrinkle the covers. And struggling, too, with a new idea. They were prisoners. No more release cards would brighten the days. For an indefinite period the old Frenchman would moan at night, and Bader the German would snore, and the Chinaman would cough. Indefinitely they would eat soft-boiled eggs and rice and beef-tea and cornstarch.

The ward felt extremely low in its mind.

* * * * *

That night the Senior Surgical Interne went in to play cribbage with Twenty-two, and received a lecture on leaving a young girl alone in H with a lot of desperate men. They both grew rather heated over the discussion and forgot to play cribbage at all. Twenty-two lay awake half the night, because he had seen clearly that the Senior Surgical Interne was interested in Jane Brown also, and would probably loaf around H most of the time since there would be no new cases now. It was a crowning humiliation to have the night nurse apply to the Senior Surgical Interne for a sleeping powder for him!

Toward morning he remembered that he had promised to write out from memory one of the Sonnets from the Portuguese for the First Assistant, and he turned on the light and jotted down two lines of it. He wrote:

"_For we two look two ways, and cannot shine
With the same sunlight on our brow and hair._"--

And then sat up in bed for half an hour looking at it because he was so awfully afraid it was true of Jane Brown and himself. Not, of course, that he wanted to shine at all. It was the looking two ways that hurt.

The next evening the nurses took their airing on the roof, which was a sooty place with a parapet, and in the courtyard, which was an equally sooty place with a wispy fountain. And because the whole situation was new, they formed in little groups on the wooden benches and sang, hands folded on white aprons, heads lifted, eyes upturned to where, above the dimly lighted windows, the stars peered palely through the smoke.

The S.S.I. sauntered out. He had thought he saw the Probationer from his window, and in the new relaxation of discipline he saw a chance to join her. But the figure he had thought he recognised proved to be some one else, and he fell to wandering alone up and down the courtyard.

He was trying to work out this problem: would the advantage of marrying early and thus being considered eligible for certain cases, offset the disadvantage of the extra expense?

He decided to marry early and hang the expense.

The days went by, three, then four, and a little line of tension deepened around Jane Brown's mouth. Perhaps it has not been mentioned that she had a fighting nose, short and straight, and a wistful mouth. For Johnny Fraser was still lying in a stupor.

Jane Brown felt that something was wrong. Doctor Willie came in once or twice, making the long trip without complaint and without hope of payment. All his busy life he had worked for the sake of work, and not for reward. He called her "Nellie," to the delight of the ward, which began to love him, and he spent a long hour each time by Johnny's bed. But the Probationer was quick to realise that the Senior Surgical Interne disapproved of him.

That young man had developed a tendency to wander into H at odd hours, and sit on the edge of a table, leaving Jane Brown divided between proper respect for an _interne_ and fury over the wrinkling of her table covers. It was during one of these visits that she spoke of Doctor Willie.

"Because he is a country practitioner," she said, "you--you patronise him."

"Not at all," said the Senior Surgical Interne. "Personally I like him immensely."

"Personally!"

The Senior Surgical Interne waved a hand toward Johnny's bed.

"Look there," he said. "You don't think that chap's getting any better, do you?"

"If," said Jane Brown, with suspicious quiet, "if you think you know more than a man who has practised for forty years, and saved more people than you ever saw, why don't you tell him so?"

There is really no defence for this conversation. Discourse between a probationer and an _interne_ is supposed to be limited to yea, yea, and nay, nay. But the circumstances were unusual.

"Tell him!" exclaimed the Senior Surgical Interne, "and be called before the Executive Committee and fired! Dear girl, I am inexpressibly flattered, but the voice of an _interne_ in a hospital is the voice of one crying in the wilderness."

Twenty-two, who was out on crutches that day for the first time, and was looking very big and extremely awkward, Twenty-two looked back from the elevator shaft and scowled. He seemed always to see a flash of white duck near the door of H ward.

To add to his chagrin, the Senior Surgical Interne clapped him on the back in congratulation a moment later, and nearly upset him. He had intended to go back to the ward and discuss a plan he had, but he was very morose those days and really not a companionable person. He stumped back to his room and resolutely went to bed.

There he lay for a long time looking at the ceiling, and saying, out of his misery, things not necessary to repeat.

So Twenty-two went to bed and sulked, refusing supper, and having the word "Vicious" marked on his record by the nurse, who hoped he would see it some time. And Jane Brown went and sat beside a strangely silent Johnny, and worried. And the Senior Surgical Interne went down to the pharmacy and thereby altered a number of things.

The pharmacy clerk had been shaving--his own bedroom was dark--and he saw the Senior Surgical Interne in the little mirror hung on the window frame.

"Hello," he said, over the soap. "Shut the door."

The Senior Surgical Interne shut the door, and then sniffed. "Smells like a bar-room," he commented.

The pharmacy clerk shaved the left angle of his jaw, and then turned around.

"Little experiment of mine," he explained. "Simple syrup, grain alcohol, a dash of cochineal for colouring, and some flavouring extract. It's an imitation cordial. Try it."

The Senior Surgical Interne was not a drinker, but he was willing to try anything once. So he secured a two-ounce medicine glass, and filled it.

"Looks nice," he commented, and tasted it. "It's not bad."

"Not bad!" said the pharmacy clerk. "You'd pay four dollars a bottle for that stuff in a hotel. Actual cost here, about forty cents."

The Senior Surgical Interne sat down and stretched out his legs. He had the glass in his hand.

"It's rather sweet," he said. "But it looks pretty." He took another sip.

After he had finished it, he got to thinking things over. He felt about seven feet tall and very important, and not at all like a voice crying in the wilderness. He had a strong inclination to go into the Superintendent's office and tell him where he went wrong in running the institution--which he restrained. And another to go up to H and tell Jane Brown the truth about Johnny Fraser--which he yielded to.

On the way up he gave the elevator man a cigar.

He was very explicit with Jane Brown.

"Your man's wrong, that's all there is about it," he said. "I can't say anything and you can't. But he's wrong. That's an operative case. The Staff knows it."

"Then, why doesn't the Staff do it?"

The Senior Surgical Interne was still feeling very tall. He looked down at her from a great distance.

"Because, dear child," he said, "it's your man's case. You ought to know enough about professional ethics for that."

He went away, then, and had a violent headache, which he blamed on confinement and lack of exercise. But he had sowed something in the Probationer's mind.

For she knew, suddenly, that he had been right. The Staff had meant that, then, when they looked at Johnny and shook their heads. The Staff knew, the hospital knew. Every one knew but Doctor Willie. But Doctor Willie had the case. Back in her little town Johnny's mother was looking to Doctor Willie, believing in him, hoping through him.

That night Twenty-two slept, and Jane Brown lay awake. And down in H ward Johnny Fraser had a bad spell at that hour toward dawn when the vitality is low, and men die. He did not die, however. But the night nurse recorded, "Pulse very thin and iregular," at four o'clock.

She, too, was not a famous speller.

During the next morning, while the ward rolled bandages, having carefully scrubbed its hands first, Jane Brown wrote records--she did it rather well now--and then arranged the pins in the ward pincushion. She made concentric circles of safety-pins outside and common pins inside, with a large H in the centre. But her mind was not on this artistic bit of creation. It was on Johnny Fraser.

She made up her mind to speak to Doctor Willie.

Twenty-two had got over his sulking or his jealousy, or whatever it was, and during the early hours, those hours when Johnny was hardly breathing, he had planned something. He thought that he did it to interest the patients and make them contented, but somewhere in the back of his mind he knew it was to see more of Jane Brown. He planned a concert in the chapel.

So that morning he took Elizabeth, the plaster cast, back to H ward, where Jane Brown was fixing the pincushion, and had a good minute of feasting his eyes on her while she was sucking a jabbed finger. She knew she should have dipped the finger in a solution, but habit is strong in most of us.

Twenty-two had a wild desire to offer to kiss the finger and make it well. This, however, was not habit. It was insanity. He recognised this himself, and felt more than a trifle worried about it, because he had been in love quite a number of times before, but he had never had this sort of feeling.

He put the concert up to her with a certain amount of anxiety. If she could sing, or play, or recite--although he hoped she would not recite--all would be well. But if she refused to take any part, he did not intend to have a concert. That was flat.

"I can play," she said, making a neat period after the H on the pincushion.

He was awfully relieved.

"Good," he said. "You know, I like the way you say that. It's so--well, it's so competent." He got out a notebook and wrote "Miss Brown, piano selections."

It was while he was writing that Jane Brown had a sort of mental picture--the shabby piano at home, kicked below by many childish feet, but mellow and sweet, like an old violin, and herself sitting practising, over and over, that part of Paderewski's Minuet where, as every one knows, the fingering is rather difficult, and outside the open window, leaning on his broom, worthless Johnny Fraser, staring in with friendly eyes and an extremely dirty face. To Twenty-two's unbounded amazement she flung down the cushion and made for the little ward linen room.

He found her there a moment later, her arms outstretched on the table and her face buried in them. Some one had been boiling a rubber tube and had let the pan go dry. Ever afterward Twenty-two was to associate the smell of burning rubber with Jane Brown, and with his first real knowledge that he was in love with her.

He stumped in after her and closed the door, and might have ruined everything then and there by taking her in his arms, crutch and all. But the smell of burning rubber is a singularly permeating one, and he was kept from one indiscretion by being discovered in another.

It was somewhat later that Jane Brown was reprimanded for being found in the linen room with a private patient. She made no excuse, but something a little defiant began to grow in her eyes. It was not that she loved her work less. She was learning, day by day, the endless sacrifices of this profession she had chosen, its unselfishness, its grinding hard work, the payment that may lie in a smile of gratitude, the agony of pain that cannot be relieved. She went through her days with hands held out for service, and at night, in the chapel, she whispered soundless little prayers to be accepted, and to be always gentle and kind. She did not want to become a machine. She knew, although she had no words for it, the difference between duty and service.

But--a little spirit of rebellion was growing in her breast. She did not understand about Johnny Fraser, for one thing. And the matter of the linen room hurt. There seemed to be too many rules.

Then, too, she began to learn that hospitals had limitations. Jane Brown's hospital had no social worker. Much as she loved the work, the part that the hospital could not do began to hurt her. Before the quarantine women with new babies had gone out, without an idea of where to spend the night. Ailing children had gone home to such places as she could see from the dormitory windows, where the work the hospital had begun could not be finished.

From the roof of the building at night she looked out over a city that terrified her. The call of a playing child in the street began to sound to her like the shriek of accident. The very grinding of the trolley cars, the smoke of the mills, began to mean the operating room. She thought a great deal, those days, about the little town she had come from, with its peace and quiet streets. The city seemed cruel. But now and then she learned that if cities are cruel, men are kind.

Thus, on the very day of the concert, the quarantine was broken for a few minutes. It was broken forcibly, and by an officer of the law. A little newsie, standing by a fire at the next corner, for the spring day was cold, had caught fire. The big corner man had seen it all. He stripped off his overcoat, rolled the boy in it, and ran to the hospital. Here he was confronted by a brother officer, who was forbidden to admit him. The corner man did the thing that seemed quickest. He laid the newsie on the ground, knocked out the quarantine officer in two blows, broke the glass of the door with a third, slipped a bolt, and then, his burden in his arms, stalked in.

It did not lessen the majesty of that entrance that he was crying all the time.

The Probationer pondered that story when she heard it. After all, laws were right and good, but there were higher things than laws. She went and stood by Johnny's bed for a long time, thinking.

In the meantime, unexpected talent for the concert had developed. The piano in the chapel proving out of order, the elevator man proved to have been a piano tuner. He tuned it with a bone forceps. Strange places, hospitals, into which drift men from every walk of life, to find a haven and peace within their quiet walls. Old Tony had sung, in his youth, in the opera at Milan. A pretty young nurse went around the corridors muttering bits of "Orphant Annie" to herself. The Senior Surgical Interne was to sing the "Rosary," and went about practising to himself. He came into H ward and sang it through for Jane Brown, with his heart in his clear young eyes. He sang about the hours he had spent with her being strings of pearls, and all that, but he was really asking her if she would be willing to begin life with him in a little house, where she would have to answer the door-bell and watch telephone calls while he was out.

Jane Brown felt something of this, too. For she said: "You sing it beautifully," although he had flatted at least three times.

He wrote his name on a medicine label and glued it to her hand. It looked alarmingly possessive.

Twenty-two presided at the concert that night. He was extravagantly funny, and the sort of creaking solemnity with which things began turned to uproarious laughter very soon.

Everything went off wonderfully. Tony started his selection too high, and was obliged to stop and begin over again. And the two Silversteins, from the children's ward, who were to dance a Highland fling together, had a violent quarrel at the last moment and had to be scratched. But everything else went well. The ambulance driver gave a bass solo, and kept a bar or two ahead of the accompaniment, dodging chords as he did wagons on the street, and fetching up with a sort of garrison finish much as he brought in the ambulance.

But the real musical event of the evening was Jane Brown's playing. She played Schubert without any notes, because she had been taught to play Schubert that way.

And when they called her back, she played little folk songs of the far places of Europe. Standing around the walls, in wheeled chairs, on crutches, pale with the hospital pallor, these aliens in their eddy listened and thrilled. Some of them wept, but they smiled also.

At the end she played the Minuet, with a sort of flaming look in her eyes that puzzled Twenty-two. He could not know that she was playing it to Johnny Fraser, lying with closed eyes in the ward upstairs. He did not realise that there was a passion of sacrifice throbbing behind the dignity of the music.

Doctor Willie had stayed over for the concert. He sat, beaming benevolently, in the front row, and toward the end he got up and told some stories. After all, it was Doctor Willie who was the real hit of the evening. The convalescents rocked with joy in their roller chairs. Crutches came down in loud applause. When he sat down he slipped a big hand over Jane Brown's and gave hers a hearty squeeze.

"How d'you like me as a parlour entertainer, Nellie?" he whispered.

She put her other hand over his. Somehow she could not speak.

The First Assistant called to the Probationer that night as she went past her door. Lights were out, so the First Assistant had a candle, and she was rubbing her feet with witch hazel.

"Come in," she called. "I have been looking for you. I have some news for you."

The exaltation of the concert had died away. Jane Brown, in the candle light, looked small and tired and very, very young.

"We have watched you carefully," said the First Assistant, who had her night garments on but had forgotten to take off her cap. "Although you are young, you have shown ability, and--you are to be accepted."

"Thank you, very much," replied Jane Brown, in a strangled tone.

"At first," said the First Assistant, "we were not sure. You were very young, and you had such odd ideas. You know that yourself now."

She leaned down and pressed a sore little toe with her forefinger. Then she sighed. The mention of Jane Brown's youth had hurt her, because she was no longer very young. And there were times when she was tired, when it seemed to her that only youth counted. She felt that way to-night.

When Jane Brown had gone on, she blew out her candle and went to bed, still in her cap.

Hospitals do not really sleep at night. The elevator man dozes in his cage, and the night watchman may nap in the engineer's room in the basement. But the night nurses are always making their sleepless rounds, and in the wards, dark and quiet, restless figures turn and sigh.

Before she went to bed that night, Jane Brown, by devious ways, slipped back to her ward. It looked strange to her, this cavernous place, filled with the unlovely noises of sleeping men. By the one low light near the doorway she went back to Johnny's bed, and sat down beside him. She felt that this was the place to think things out. In her room other things pressed in on her; the necessity of making good for the sake of those at home, her love of the work, and cowardice. But here she saw things right.

The night nurse found her there some time later, asleep, her hunting-case watch open on Johnny's bed and her fingers still on his quiet wrist. She made no report of it.

Twenty-two had another sleepless night written in on his record that night. He sat up and worried. He worried about the way the Senior Surgical Interne had sung to Jane Brown that night. And he worried about things he had done and shouldn't have, and things he should have done and hadn't. Mostly the first. At five in the morning he wrote a letter to his family telling them where he was, and that he had been vaccinated and that the letter would be fumigated. He also wrote a check for an artificial leg for the boy in the children's ward, and then went to bed and put himself to sleep by reciting the "Rosary" over and over. His last conscious thought was that the hours he had spent with a certain person would not make much of a string of pearls.

The Probationer went to Doctor Willie the next day. Some of the exuberance of the concert still bubbled in him, although he shook his head over Johnny's record.

"A little slow, Nellie," he said. "A little slow."

Jane Brown took a long breath.

"Doctor Willie," she said, "won't you have him operated on?"

He looked up at her over his spectacles.

"Operated on? What for?"

"Well, he's not getting any better," she managed desperately. "I'm--sometimes I think he'll die while we're waiting for him to get better."

He was surprised, but he was not angry.

"There's no fracture, child," he said gently. "If there is a clot there, nature is probably better at removing it than we are. The trouble with you," he said indulgently, "is that you have come here, where they operate first and regret afterward. Nature is the best surgeon, child."

She cast about her despairingly for some way to tell him the truth. But even when she spoke she knew she was foredoomed to failure.

"But--suppose the Staff thinks that he should be?"

Doctor Willie's kindly mouth set itself into grim lines.

"The Staff!" he said, and looked at her searchingly. Then his jaws set at an obstinate angle.

"Well, Nellie," he said, "I guess one opinion's as good as another in these cases. And I don't suppose they'll do any cutting and hacking without my consent." He looked at Johnny's unconscious figure. "He never amounted to much," he added, "but it's surprising the way money's been coming in to pay his board here. Your mother sent five dollars. A good lot of people are interested in him. I can't see myself going home and telling them he died on the operating table."

He patted her on the arm as he went out.

"Don't get an old head on those young shoulders yet, Nellie," he said as he was going. "Leave the worrying to me. I'm used to it."

She saw then that to him she was still a little girl. She probably would always be just a little girl to him. He did not take her seriously, and no one else would speak to him. She was quite despairing.

The ward loved Doctor Willie since the night before. It watched him out with affectionate eyes. Jane Brown watched him, too, his fine old head, the sturdy step that had brought healing and peace to a whole county. She had hurt him, she knew that. She ached at the thought of it. And she had done no good.

That afternoon Jane Brown broke another rule. She went to Twenty-two on her off duty, and caused a mild furore there. He had been drawing a sketch of her from memory, an extremely poor sketch, with one eye larger than the other. He hid it immediately, although she could not possibly have recognised it, and talked very fast to cover his excitement.

"Well, well!" he said. "I knew I was going to have some luck to-day. My right hand has been itching--or is that a sign of money?" Then he saw her face, and reduced his speech to normality, if not his heart.

"Come and sit down," he said. "And tell me about it."

But she would not sit down. She went to the window and looked out for a moment. It was from there she said:

"I have been accepted."

"Good." But he did not, apparently, think it such good news. He drew a long breath. "Well, I suppose your friends should be glad for you."

"I didn't come to talk about being accepted," she announced.

"I don't suppose, by any chance, you came to see how I am getting along?" he inquired humbly.

"I can see that."

"You can't see how lonely I am." When she offered nothing to this speech, he enlarged on it. "When it gets unbearable," he said, "I sit in front of the mirror and keep myself company. If that doesn't make your heart ache, nothing will."

"I'm afraid I have a heart-ache, but it is not that." For a terrible moment he thought of that theory of his which referred to a disappointment in love. Was she going to have the unbelievable cruelty to tell him about it?

"I have to talk to somebody," she said simply. "And I came to you, because you've worked on a newspaper, and you have had a lot of experience. It's--a matter of ethics. But really it's a matter of life and death."

He felt most horribly humble before her, and he hated the lie, except that it had brought her to him. There was something so direct and childlike about her. The very way she drew a chair in front of him, and proceeded, talking rather fast, to lay the matter before him, touched him profoundly. He felt, somehow, incredibly old and experienced.

And then, after all that, to fail her!

"You see how it is," she finished. "I can't go to the Staff, and they wouldn't do anything if I did--except possibly put me out. Because a nurse really only follows orders. And--I've got to stay, if I can. And Doctor Willie doesn't believe in an operation and won't see that he's dying. And everybody at home thinks he is right, because--well," she added hastily, "he's been right a good many times."

He listened attentively. His record, you remember, was his own way some ninety-seven per cent of the time, and at first he would not believe that this was going to be the three per cent, or a part of it.

"Well," he said at last, "we'll just make the Staff turn in and do it. That's easy."

"But they won't. They can't."

"We can't let Johnny die, either, can we?"

But when at last she was gone, and the room was incredibly empty without her,--when, to confess a fact that he was exceedingly shame-faced about, he had wheeled over to the chair she had sat in and put his cheek against the arm where her hand had rested, when he was somewhat his own man again and had got over the feeling that his arms were empty of something they had never held--then it was that Twenty-two found himself up against the three per cent.

The hospital's attitude was firm. It could not interfere. It was an outside patient and an outside doctor. Its responsibility ended with providing for the care of the patient, under his physician's orders. It was regretful--but, of course, unless the case was turned over to the Staff----

He went back to the ward to tell her, after it had all been explained to him. But she was not surprised. He saw that, after all, she had really known he was going to fail her.

"It's hopeless," was all she said. "Everybody is right, and everybody is wrong."

It was the next day that, going to the courtyard for a breath of air, she saw a woman outside the iron gate waving to her. It was Johnny's mother, a forlorn old soul in what Jane Brown recognised as an old suit of her mother's.

"Doctor Willie bought my ticket, Miss Nellie," she said nervously. "It seems like I had to come, even if I couldn't get in. I've been waiting around most all afternoon. How is he?"

"He is resting quietly," said Jane Brown, holding herself very tense, because she wanted to scream. "He isn't suffering at all."

"Could you tell me which window he's near, Miss Nellie?"

She pointed out the window, and Johnny Fraser's mother stood, holding to the bars, peering up at it. Her lips moved, and Jane Brown knew that she was praying. At last she turned her eyes away.

"Folks have said a lot about him," she said, "but he was always a good son to me. If only he'd had a chance--I'd be right worried, Miss Nellie, if he didn't have Doctor Willie looking after him."

Jane Brown went into the building. There was just one thing clear in her mind. Johnny Fraser must have his chance, somehow.

In the meantime things were not doing any too well in the hospital. A second case, although mild, had extended the quarantine. Discontent grew, and threatened to develop into mutiny. Six men from one of the wards marched _en masse_ to the lower hall, and were preparing to rush the guards when they were discovered. The Senior Surgical Interne took two prisoners himself, and became an emergency case for two stitches and arnica compresses.

Jane Brown helped to fix him up, and he took advantage of her holding a dressing basin near his cut lip to kiss her hand, very respectfully. She would have resented it under other circumstances, but the Senior Surgical Interne was, even if temporarily, a patient, and must be humoured. She forgot about the kiss immediately, anyhow, although he did not.

Her three months of probation were drawing to a close now, and her cap was already made and put away in a box, ready for the day she should don it. But she did not look at it very often.

And all the time, fighting his battle with youth and vigour, but with closed eyes, and losing it day by day, was Johnny Fraser.

Then, one night on the roof, Jane Brown had to refuse the Senior Surgical Interne. He took it very hard.

"We'd have been such pals," he said, rather wistfully, after he saw it was no use.

"We can be, anyhow."

"I suppose," he said with some bitterness, "that I'd have stood a better chance if I'd done as you wanted me to about that fellow in your ward, gone to the staff and raised hell."

"I wouldn't have married you," said Jane Brown, "but I'd have thought you were pretty much of a man."

The more he thought about that the less he liked it. It almost kept him awake that night.

It was the next day that Twenty-two had his idea. He ran true to form, and carried it back to Jane Brown for her approval. But she was not enthusiastic.

"It would help to amuse them, of course, but how can you publish a newspaper without any news?" she asked, rather listlessly, for her.

"News! This building is full of news. I have some bits already. Listen!" He took a notebook out of his pocket. "The stork breaks quarantine. New baby in O ward. The chief engineer has developed a boil on his neck. Elevator Man arrested for breaking speed limit. Wanted, four square inches of cuticle for skin grafting in W. How's that? And I'm only beginning."

Jane Brown listened. Somehow, behind Twenty-two's lightness of tone, she felt something more earnest. She did not put it into words, even to herself, but she divined something new, a desire to do his bit, there in the hospital. It was, if she had only known it, a milestone in a hitherto unmarked career. Twenty-two, who had always been a man, was by way of becoming a person.

He explained about publishing it. He used to run a typewriter in college, and the convalescents could mimeograph it and sell it. There was a mimeographing machine in the office.

The Senior Surgical Interne came in just then. Refusing to marry him had had much the effect of smacking a puppy. He came back, a trifle timid, but friendly. So he came in just then, and elected himself to the advertising and circulation department, and gave the Probationer the society end, although it was not his paper or his idea, and sat down at once at the table and started a limerick, commencing:

"_We're here in the city, marooned_"

However, he never got any further with it, because there are, apparently, no rhymes for "marooned." He refused "tuned" which several people offered him, with extreme scorn.

Up to this point Jane Brown had been rather too worried to think about Twenty-two. She had grown accustomed to seeing him coming slowly back toward her ward, his eyes travelling much faster than he did. Not, of course, that she knew that. And to his being, in a way, underfoot a part of every day, after the Head had made rounds and was safely out of the road for a good two hours.

But two things happened that day to turn her mind in onto her heart. One was when she heard about the artificial leg. The other was when she passed the door of his room, where a large card now announced "Office of the _Quarantine Sentinel_." She passed the door, and she distinctly heard most un-hospital-like chatter within. Judging from the shadows on the glass door, too, the room was full. It sounded joyous and carefree.

Something in Jane Brown--her mind, probably--turned right around and looked into her heart, and made an odd discovery. This was that Jane Brown's heart had sunk about two inches, and was feeling very queer.

She went straight on, however, and put on a fresh collar in her little bedroom, and listed her washing and changed her shoes, because her feet still ached a lot of the time. But she was a brave person and liked to look things in the face. So before she went back to the ward, she stood in front of her mirror and said:

"You're a nice nurse, Nell Brown. To--to talk about duty and brag about service, and then to act like a fool."

She went back to the ward and sat beside Johnny. But that night she went up on the roof again, and sat on the parapet. She could see, across the courtyard, the dim rectangles of her ward, and around a corner in plain view, "room Twenty-two." Its occupant was sitting at the typewriter, and working hard. Or he seemed to be. It was too far away to be sure. Jane Brown slid down onto the roof, which was not very clean, and putting her elbows on the parapet, watched him for a long time. When he got up, at last, and came to the open window, she hardly breathed. However, he only stood there, looking toward her but not seeing her.

Jane Brown put her head on the parapet that night and cried. She thought she was crying about Johnny Fraser. She might have felt somewhat comforted had she known that Twenty-two, being tired with his day's work, had at last given way to most horrible jealousy of the Senior Surgical Interne, and that his misery was to hers as five is to one.

The first number of the _Quarantine Sentinel_ was a great success. It served in the wards much the same purpose as the magazines published in the trenches. It relieved the monotony, brought the different wards together, furnished laughter and gossip. Twenty-two wrote the editorials, published the paper, with the aid of a couple of convalescents, and in his leisure drew cartoons. He drew very well, but all his girls looked like Jane Brown. It caused a ripple of talk.

The children from the children's ward distributed them, and went back from the private rooms bearing tribute of flowers and fruit. Twenty-two himself developed a most reprehensible habit of concealing candy in the _Sentinel_ office and smuggling it to his carriers. Altogether a new and neighbourly feeling seemed to follow in the wake of the little paper. People who had sulked in side-by-side rooms began, in the relaxed discipline of convalescence, to pay little calls about. Crotchety dowagers knitted socks for new babies. A wave of friendliness swept over every one, and engulfed particularly Twenty-two.

In the glow of it he changed perceptibly. This was the first popularity he had ever earned, and the first he had ever cared a fi-penny bit about. And, because he valued it, he felt more and more unworthy of it.

But it kept him from seeing Jane Brown. He was too busy for many excursions to the ward, and when he went he was immediately the centre of an animated group. He hardly ever saw her alone, and when he did he began to suspect that she pretended duties that might have waited.

One day he happened to go back while Doctor Willie was there, and after that he understood her problem better.

Through it all Johnny lived. His thin, young body was now hardly an outline under the smooth, white covering of his bed. He swallowed, faintly, such bits of liquid as were placed between his lips, but there were times when Jane Brown's fingers, more expert now, could find no pulse at all. And still she had found no way to give him his chance.

She made a last appeal to Doctor Willie that day, but he only shook his head gravely.

"Even if there was an operation now, Nellie," said Doctor Willie that day, "he could not stand it."

It was the first time that Twenty-two had known her name was Nellie.

That was the last day of Jane Brown's probation. On the next day she was to don her cap. The _Sentinel_ came out with a congratulatory editorial, and at nine o'clock that night the First Assistant brought an announcement, in the Head's own writing, for the paper.

"The Head of the Training School announces with much pleasure the acceptance of Miss N. Jane Brown as a pupil nurse."

Twenty-two sat and stared at it for quite a long time.

That night Jane Brown fought her battle and won. She went to her room immediately after chapel, and took the family pictures off her little stand and got out ink and paper. She put the photographs out of sight, because she knew that they were counting on her, and she could not bear her mother's eyes. And then she counted her money, because she had broken another thermometer, and the ticket home was rather expensive. She had enough, but very little more.

After that she went to work.

It took her rather a long time, because she had a great deal to explain. She had to put her case, in fact. And she was not strong on either ethics or logic. She said so, indeed, at the beginning. She said also that she had talked to a lot of people, but that no one understood how she felt--that there ought to be no professional ethics, or etiquette, or anything else, where it was life or death. That she felt hospitals were to save lives and not to save feelings. It seemed necessary, after that, to defend Doctor Willie--without naming him, of course. How much good he had done, and how he came to rely on himself and his own opinion because in the country there was no one to consult with.

However, she was not so gentle with the Staff. She said that it was standing by and letting a patient die, because it was too polite to interfere, although they had all agreed among themselves that an operation was necessary. And that if they felt that way, would they refuse to pull a child from in front of a locomotive because it was its mother's business, and she didn't know how to do it?

_Then she signed it._

She turned it in at the _Sentinel_ office the next morning while the editor was shaving. She had to pass it through a crack in the door. Even that, however, was enough for the editor in question to see that she wore no cap.

"But--see here," he said, in a rather lathery voice, "you're accepted, you know. Where's the--the visible sign?"

Jane Brown was not quite sure she could speak. However, she managed.

"After you read that," she said, "you'll understand."

He read it immediately, of course, growing more and more grave, and the soap drying on his chin. Its sheer courage made him gasp.

"Good girl," he said to himself. "Brave little girl. But it finishes her here, and she knows it."

He was pretty well cut up about it, too, because while he was getting it ready he felt as if he was sharpening a knife to stab her with. Her own knife, too. But he had to be as brave as she was.

The paper came out at two o'clock. At three the First Assistant, looking extremely white, relieved Jane Brown of the care of H ward and sent her to her room.

Jane Brown eyed her wistfully.

"I'm not to come back, I suppose?"

The First Assistant avoided her eyes.

"I'm afraid not," she said.

Jane Brown went up the ward and looked down at Johnny Fraser. Then she gathered up her bandage scissors and her little dressing forceps and went out.

The First Assistant took a step after her, but stopped. There were tears in her eyes.

Things moved very rapidly in the hospital that day, while the guards sat outside on their camp-stools and ate apples or read the newspapers, and while Jane Brown sat alone in her room.

First of all the Staff met and summoned Twenty-two. He went down in the elevator--he had lost Elizabeth a few days before, and was using a cane--ready for trouble. He had always met a fight more than halfway. It was the same instinct that had taken him to the fire.

But no one wanted to fight. The Staff was waiting, grave and perplexed, but rather anxious to put its case than otherwise. It felt misunderstood, aggrieved, and horribly afraid it was going to get in the newspapers. But it was not angry. On the contrary, it was trying its extremely intelligent best to see things from a new angle.

The Senior Surgical Interne was waiting outside. He had smoked eighteen cigarettes since he received his copy of the _Sentinel_, and was as unhappy as an _interne_ can be.

"What the devil made you publish it?" he demanded.

Twenty-two smiled.

"Because," he said, "I have always had a sneaking desire to publish an honest paper, one where public questions can be discussed. If this isn't a public question, I don't know one when I see it."

But he was not smiling when he went in.

An hour later Doctor Willie came in. He had brought some flowers for the children's ward, and his arms were bulging. To his surprise, accustomed as he was to the somewhat cavalier treatment of the country practitioner in a big city hospital, he was invited to the Staff room.

To the eternal credit of the Staff Jane Brown's part in that painful half hour was never known. The Staff was careful, too, of Doctor Willie. They knew they were being irregular, and were most wretchedly uncomfortable. Also, there being six of them against one, it looked rather like force, particularly since, after the first two minutes, every one of them liked Doctor Willie.

He took it so awfully well. He sat there, with his elbows on a table beside a withering mass of spring flowers, and faced the white-coated Staff, and said that he hoped he was man enough to acknowledge a mistake, and six opinions against one left him nothing else to do. The Senior Surgical Interne, who had been hating him for weeks, offered him a cigar.

He had only one request to make. There was a little girl in the training school who believed in him, and he would like to go to the ward and write the order for the operation himself.

Which he did. But Jane Brown was not there.

Late that evening the First Assistant, passing along the corridor in the dormitory, was accosted by a quiet figure in a blue uniform, without a cap.

"How is he?"

The First Assistant was feeling more cheerful than usual. The operating surgeon had congratulated her on the way things had moved that day, and she was feeling, as she often did, that, after all, work was a solace for many troubles.

"Of course, it is very soon, but he stood it well." She looked up at Jane Brown, who was taller than she was, but who always, somehow, looked rather little. There are girls like that. "Look here," she said, "you must not sit in that room and worry. Run up to the operating-room and help to clear away."

She was very wise, the First Assistant. For Jane Brown went, and washed away some of the ache with the stains of Johnny's operation. Here, all about her, were the tangible evidences of her triumph, which was also a defeat. A little glow of service revived in her. If Johnny lived, it was a small price to pay for a life. If he died, she had given him his chance. The operating-room nurses were very kind. They liked her courage, but they were frightened, too. She, like the others, had been right, but also she was wrong.

They paid her tribute of little kindnesses, but they knew she must go.

It was the night nurse who told Twenty-two that Jane Brown was in the operating-room. He was still up and dressed at midnight, but the sheets of to-morrow's editorial lay blank on his table.

The night nurse glanced at her watch to see if it was time for the twelve o'clock medicines.

"There's a rumour going about," she said, "that the quarantine's to be lifted to-morrow. I'll be rather sorry. It has been a change."

"To-morrow," said Twenty-two, in a startled voice.

"I suppose you'll be going out at once?"

There was a wistful note in her voice. She liked him. He had been an oasis of cheer in the dreary rounds of the night. A very little more, and she might have forgotten her rule, which was never to be sentimentally interested in a patient.

"I wonder," said Twenty-two, in a curious tone, "if you will give me my cane?"

He was clad, at that time, in a hideous bathrobe, purchased by the orderly, over his night clothing, and he had the expression of a person who intends to take no chances.

"Thanks," said Twenty-two. "And--will you send the night watchman here?"

The night nurse went out. She had a distinct feeling that something was about to happen. At least she claimed it later. But she found the night watchman making coffee in a back pantry, and gave him her message.

Some time later Jane Brown stood in the doorway of the operating-room and gave it a farewell look. Its white floor and walls were spotless. Shining rows of instruments on clean towels were ready to put away in the cabinets. The sterilisers glowed in warm rectangles of gleaming copper. Over all brooded the peace of order, the quiet of the night.

Outside the operating-room door she drew a long breath, and faced the night watchman. She had left something in Twenty-two. Would she go and get it?

"It's very late," said Jane Brown. "And it isn't allowed, I'm sure."

However, what was one more rule to her who had defied them all? A spirit of recklessness seized her. After all, why not? She would never see him again. Like the operating-room, she would stand in the doorway and say a mute little farewell.

Twenty-two's door was wide open, and he was standing in the centre of the room, looking out. He had heard her long before she came in sight, for he, too, had learned the hospital habit of classifying footsteps.

He was horribly excited. He had never been so nervous before. He had made up a small speech, a sort of beginning, but he forgot it the moment he heard her, and she surprised him in the midst of trying, agonisingly, to remember it.

There was a sort of dreadful calm, however, about Jane Brown.

"The watchman says I have left something here."

It was clear to him at once that he meant nothing to her. It was in her voice.

"You did," he said. And tried to smile.

"Then--if I may have it----"

"I wish to heaven you could have it," he said, very rapidly. "I don't want it. It's darned miserable."

"It's--what?"

"It's an ache," he went on, still rather incoherent. "A pain. A misery." Then, seeing her beginning to put on a professional look: "No, not that. It's a feeling. Look here," he said, rather more slowly, "do you mind coming in and closing the door? There's a man across who's always listening."

She went in, but she did not close the door. She went slowly, looking rather pale.

"What I sent for you for is this," said Twenty-two, "are you going away? Because I've got to know."

"I'm being sent away as soon as the quarantine is over. It's--it's perfectly right. I expected it. Things would soon go to pieces if the nurses took to--took to doing what I did."

Suddenly Twenty-two limped across the room and slammed the door shut, a proceeding immediately followed by an irritated ringing of bells at the night nurse's desk. Then he turned, his back against the door.

"Because I'm going when you do," he said, in a terrible voice. "I'm going when you go, and wherever you go. I've stood all the waiting around for a glimpse of you that I'm going to stand." He glared at her. "For weeks," he said, "I've sat here in this room and listened for you, and hated to go to sleep for fear you would pass and I wouldn't be looking through that damned door. And now I've reached the limit."

A sort of band which had seemed to be fastened around Jane Brown's head for days suddenly removed itself to her heart, which became extremely irregular.

"And I want to say this," went on Twenty-two, still in a savage tone. He was horribly frightened, so he blustered. "I don't care whether you want me or not, you've got to have me. I'm so much in love with you that it hurts."

Suddenly Jane Brown's heart settled down into a soft rhythmic beating that was like a song. After all, life was made up of love and work, and love came first.

She faced Twenty-two with brave eyes.

"I love you, too--so much that it hurts."

The gentleman across the hall, sitting up in bed, with an angry thumb on the bell, was electrified to see, on the glass door across, the silhouette of a young lady without a cap go into the arms of a very large, masculine silhouette in a dressing-gown. He heard, too, the thump of a falling cane.

Late that night Jane Brown, by devious ways, made her way back to H ward. Johnny was there, a strange Johnny with a bandaged head, but with open eyes.

At dawn, the dawn of the day when Jane Brown was to leave the little world of the hospital for a little world of two, consisting of a man and a woman, the night nurse found her there, asleep, her fingers still on Johnny's thin wrist.

She did not report it.

JANE