Chapter XVIII: In Hospital

After the first twenty-four hours with Gregory nothing seemed real to Freda outside of the hospital. She had found for herself a hotel room, a shabby little room in a second rate hotel, a room with scarred brown maple bureau and iron bed from which the paint had peeled. It looked out on a fire escape and a narrow court, helplessly trapped between tall brick walls.

To that room she went for her periods of rest, for the hospital had no vacant room or even bed, where she might relax. After she had gone to the hotel from the hospital several times the way seemed curiously familiar. Two blocks to the east, across the street car line, past the drug store with its structure of Tanlac in the window--one block to the north and there was the entrance of the hotel with seven or eight broad cement steps leading up to it. There was not one thing which she passed which impressed itself in the least on her imagination--not one image that was vivid enough to penetrate. Night and day it was the same--like moving blindfolded through still air. It was only when she went back to the hospital that her mind seemed to stir from its lethargy.

The hardest moments were those of Gregory’s lucidity--when the sight of her made him flame with a passion which leapt through his restricted and suffering body, when phrases came to his hot lips which made her quiver with the sense of him. She would kneel beside his bed and tell him softly reassuring things and with his head turned on his pillow he would regard her from the depths of those eyes, always haggardly set, but now far sunken.

She had no faintest doubts as to her past or present actions. That was Freda’s great triumph over most of the women she knew. She did not doubt; she did not worry. Most of them had carried over into their new self-confidence and their new chances a habit of worry born of ingrowing responsibilities in the past and now fostered by general self-consciousness. It was unnatural to Freda to mope over her actions or to analyze them. She knew how to go ahead and there always was absence of self-consciousness about what she did, simplicity of manner, dignity of step. It was as if she had somehow stepped over the phase of altercation, doubt and experiment into a manner which did the unusual easily, but only if the unusual came in her path, which accepted new rules, new customs without a flush, and most of all was able to merge the best of feminism into a fine yet unchristened ease of sex. She did not need either the little fears or defenses of her mother or the larger ones of Margaret Duffield. It did not occur to her that she was very complete in herself and satisfying to herself. She bothered with no altercations or analysis.

It was not a wholly sad time for all the deepening anxiety and danger--it was not a time for depression. Freda knew that she had come to grips with life and she was glad to feel her full strength called to battle.

While they wondered about her in St. Pierre, while her name ran like a little germ of gossip spreading contagion from lip to lip in St. Pierre, she sat most of the time in the hospital, in the chair beside Gregory’s bed, touching his hot, tense wrist with the coolness of her fingers--she sat outside his room in the recess of the bay windows on a curved window seat and watched people come and go--and once in a while she slipped into the hospital library and got hold of a book on pregnancy which fascinated her. Skillfully manipulated conversation with the nurse had given her enough information so that she had been able to control a great part of her own present liability to sickness and she felt better than she had for several weeks.

Three days after her arrival Gregory came successfully through the first crisis of his illness. Freda walked on air the next day. The doctor was cheerful and jocose.

“We’ll have that young Irishman of yours out of the woods in ten days,” he said to Freda, and she had no doubt of it.

The difficulty was not in the progress of the disease but in Gregory’s own debility. He was not so well a few days later. The doctor talked gravely of exhaustion and Freda picked up from the reluctant nurse that exhaustion during the third week was dangerous--that one might die because of it.

For the first time she was fearful. Here was nothing you could combat for him. Here was a slow slipping away. He did not often talk now. Almost all the time he lay, incredibly thin, mournfully haggard against his pillow, too tired even for Freda to call back.

She thought about death. One day she passed a room in which a man was dying. She heard the raucous gasp from the filling lungs and trembled. They brought a priest. She wondered. If Gregory should die, would he too have a priest to guide him out? She supposed that usually you sent for a minister or priest. A month before the mere suggestion that a soul needed ushering into immortality would have seemed absurd to her healthy pagan young mind, but now, with the severing of the thread so possible, with the limits of the unknown receding even while they grew close she wondered. Gregory was not formally religious but in his poems he had seemed so conscious of God.

“Most poets write of women--but you write only of God and Ireland.” So she had said to him, she remembered, and he had answered.

“I shall write of woman now, dear heart.”

She went softly to his door. No change. Well, she should go to the hotel for an hour--But the nurse stopped her.

“Mrs. Macmillan, he is not so well. The doctor thinks these next twelve hours will be the worst. If you wish to leave I think it will be all right. If not, I can see that you get a supper tray and if he is better in the night you can take my cot.”

Freda felt a strange chill rushing over her.

“I’ll stay.” She looked at Gregory. “Worse? He looks just the same.”

“He is weaker--”

The stillness of the phrase--the helplessness. She sat down in the chair by him again. It seemed so absurd not to call him back--so impotent. He looked unguarded. If--if he should die he would go--wherever it was--there must be a future for a soul like Gregory’s somewhere--he would go alone. Cruel. She thought of the child growing within her. How much more gentle was birth than death. Gentle and gradual and kind. It was shared, but this horrible singleness of dying--

She had supper in the nurse’s kitchen. The nurses were kind to her, faintly curious, preoccupied, full of that gayety so characteristic of nurses when for an hour they can slip out of the technique of the manner which they affect and become informal, unrestrained. The shadow of Gregory’s crisis rested on them not at all, Freda thought. She was not resentful. But she ate to please the nurse who had managed to get the supper for her and then went quickly back to Gregory. If it should happen when she was away! It must not. She must go there to keep it from happening. Surely she could. Surely she could.

She did not sleep. The nurse watched on one side, she on the other, the nurse nodding a little and Freda shaking off the fearful drowsiness that came over her too. She did not want to sleep. She was afraid that if she slept, it might happen. It was like sentry duty. As long as she was awake such a thing would not happen. She did not name death in her thoughts. It was like invoking a presence. She understood trite phrases as she thought--the triteness of “he has left us,” “passed on,” “was called.” How those phrases irked her in the newspapers sometimes. But they were true. It was like that. She heard the soft rise and fall of the nurse’s breathing. She was asleep--no, not quite.

Now and then he moved a little. His troubled breathing seemed to sigh, slight, weary sighs. Freda bent close over him. Here we are, she thought, he and I and him within me. We must stay close, closer than death can come.

Three hours later, with the gray light coming so early into the room, the nurse, who had slept a little, roused herself, busy immediately with the routine of temperature taking, her cap a little askew, her face puffed with uncompleted sleep.

“Well, we got through that night all right,” she said cheerfully, softly. “And our patient looks better, Mrs. Macmillan. Look at him--doesn’t he?”

Freda looked shakily at him. It seemed almost true. He seemed to be sleeping almost naturally.

“Then you think he’s come through?” she ventured.

The nurse straightened her cap professionally.

“Well, I should say that bad turn he took last night would be the last. He’ll be coming along now. We’ll get some nourishment into him pretty soon. You go over to the hotel and get some sleep--no, lie down here on my cot. You look weak.”

* * * * *

And now it was a new atmosphere--an atmosphere of convalescence, of Gregory coming slowly back to life, visibly changing for the better, smiling, joking feebly, watching her wonderingly and devotedly, talking when he was allowed.

“It’s such a ridiculous way to begin housekeeping,” Freda would tease him, gently.

“It’s a maddening way and a marvelous way--to have all day to watch you and adore you and not to dare to pull you into my arms for fear a nurse will pop out on me.”

“You may be sure one would.”

“How long do I have to stay here?”

“A wheeled chair next week if you are good and don’t get excited.”

“A wheeled chair--when I want a highway with you beside me--”

“If you’re impatient--” she stopped to smile at him.

“Listen, Freda--we go straight off together, don’t we?”

“Off where?”

“Back home.”

“We should stop to see my father and my mother. Do you know, Gregory, I didn’t even tell any one where I was going. I just came. I suppose they’re all mystified and probably worried. Though I wrote them not to be.”

“Well, we’ll stop to tell your parents. And then off for Ireland.”

“Have we enough money?” asked Freda.

“Plenty. I have it somewhere. Let me see. It was a black bill case--maybe you could find it for me. Black bill case with an elastic band around it. There’s about five hundred. They paid me in notes--(bills, you say)--at these last places and I meant to get post office orders. Much safer. Hunt it up, will you, darling? And you might be looking up passage.”

“Passage for weeks from now,” she said sternly. But she was as eager as he and they smiled at each other, doubled, trebled in happiness now that their storm had come and they had been able to weather it together.

She went on the trail of the black bill case and found it easily enough. It was, with Gregory’s few valuables, in the possession of the hospital office. In it were some papers, some letters and twenty-three dollars. Her heart fell with a thump.

“Is this all there was?”

“His watch too--we never leave valuables with sick patients who have no relatives about. They might get picked up and the hospital be considered responsible.”

“I mean all the money?”

The nurse in charge of the office wrinkled her forehead and looked at the note regarding Gregory on her record.

“Black bill case--letters--papers--twenty-three dollars in currency. That’s what he brought here. Is that correct? We’ve kept the bill case in our safe, of course.”

She looked questioningly at Freda.

“That’s what is here,” said Freda, “but you see my husband thought there was more--quite a lot more. I wonder was he sick in the hotel long?”

But the hotel was a blind trail and a suspicious one. The chambermaid who had called the doctor for Gregory had left the town--strangely enough two days after he was taken sick. She had never been a competent girl--The hotel courteously disclaimed all responsibility and hoped the loss was not great. There was a safe in the office--guests were requested and so forth--.

“Of course,” said Freda, “I quite understand.” She did. She understood that the money had vanished and that it was not coming back to her or to Gregory. She went back to her hotel room and counted what money she had. With Gregory’s present resources they had fifty dollars between them. And there was an unpaid nurse at five dollars a day--hospital bills, doctor bills, doubtless bills for all the medicines. All those things and no money to meet them, she pondered. Besides she must not tell Gregory. She must not worry him just now or disappoint him. The nurse wanted him kept calm and cheerful. But in the meantime, what was she to do?

It was hard going back to the hospital and facing the nurse. The nurse was so good to her and Freda felt miserably that to let her be so good when there was no money to pay her was deceiving. She herself was hot and troubled. Her clothes were an annoyance. She had only three blouses and one of those was torn at the neck irremediably. It was hard to keep cheerful when you needed fresh clothes so badly and had hardly enough money to pay the hotel bill mounting up against you. But she forgot all that in the presence of Gregory. He was feeling better this afternoon than he had up to that time, his convalescence taking one of those quick strides so encouraging to those who watch. The nurse had propped him up on his pillows and he wanted Freda beside him.

So she let the matter drift and when he asked if she had found the bill case she told him “yes.”

“Then that’s all right,” he said gaily, and saved her the lie she had ready. Nor did he waste more time on money. He wanted to talk of other things, to ask her questions and it was that afternoon that she dared to tell him that she expected their child, and to let herself relax a little in the companionship of his happiness and the comfort of his reverence.

But when she went back to the hotel she could not bring herself to order supper. The menu stared at her--with ducklings and roasts and table d’hotes. Figure as she would, she could not order a supper for less than a dollar. So she pleaded a headache to the waiter and left the table to go supperless to her room and then to bed, for the nurse had said Gregory must be quiet that evening.