In the meantime Nona was on duty in the convalescent ward. It was the work that she had been able to attend to with peculiar success ever since her arrival at the base hospital. This was a duty which many of the Red Cross nurses liked the least. For the convalescent soldiers were often like spoiled and nervous children. It was amazing how many drinks of water they required, how frequently their pillows had to be turned, how often letters from home had to be read and re-read until the nurses knew them by heart as well as the patients. It was a dark, cloudy afternoon when Nona entered the big room and before she had more than crossed the threshold she became aware of an atmosphere of gloom and ill-temper.
Daisy Redmond, the English girl with whom they had crossed the Channel, had[180] been in attendance on the ward before Nona’s appearance and she seemed bored and annoyed. She was a very good nurse for an ill person, but too serious and reserved to cheer the convalescent, and on Nona’s entrance she gave a sigh of relief.
The room, which was used for the soldiers who were on the high road to recovery from whatever disaster they had suffered, must have been the refectory or the old dining hall of the convent in the days before the Franco-Prussian war. It was an oblong room with a high ceiling crossed by great oak beams. Midway up the walls were of dark oak and the rest of stone. The floor was of stone and the windows high and crossed with small iron bars. While they let in the air and sunlight, it was impossible to see much of the outside world unless one climbed a ladder or chair. Evidently it had been thought best not to permit the little French convent maids to seek for distractions even among the flowers and trees.
So the great room, in spite of its perfect cleanliness, had little suggestion of gayety or[181] beauty to recommend it at present. The floor, walls, beds, everything apparently had been scrubbed to the limit of perfection and were smelling of antiseptics. But there was not a flower in the room, not a picture, only two long rows of beds each containing a weary, impatient soldier, longing to be home with his own people or back at the front with the other Tommies.
Almost anyone might have become discouraged with the prospect of two hours’ effort in such surroundings, but Nona never dreamed of flinching.
As she went up toward the first bed, the young fellow with his right arm in a sling who was trying to write with his left hand, used a short word of three letters. He was a boy who worked in a butcher’s shop in London. When he saw Nona so near him, he blushed crimson and stammered an apology.
Nona only laughed. “Oh, I say that myself sometimes, inside of me,” she whispered. “If it hurts your arm, do let me finish your letter. I’d like to add a line or two anyhow just to let Addie know you are[182] really getting well and not trying to encourage her with false hopes.”
The young fellow smiled. It was clever of the little American girl to remember his girl’s name. He was glad enough to have her end his letter so that he might lie down again. Besides, he liked to have her sitting near him, she was so pretty—the prettiest nurse in the hospital in his opinion. Five minutes after when Nona had finished his letter and made him comfortable, he sighed to have her leave him. She was only going to another duffer a few beds away, who had been trying to read and dropped all his magazines on the floor. With one of his legs in a plaster cast, he had almost broken his neck trying to fish for them.
So Nona wandered up and down the ward doing whatever was asked of her. She felt that she was being useful in spite of her lack of long experience in nursing. But it was amusing the queer things she was called upon to do.
She was passing one of the cots where a boy lay who had received a wound in his head. He was not more than seventeen[183] or eighteen, and was a blue-eyed, fair-haired boy with a mouth like a young girl’s. You would never have dreamed of him as a fighter; indeed, he had left Eton to join the army and had never before known a real hardship in his life. But now a pair of wasted white hands clasped Nona’s skirt.
Looking down she discovered that the bandage had slipped off his forehead and that his eyes were full of tears.
Nona’s own eyes were dim as she bent toward him.
“Are you suffering again?” she asked gently. “I am so sorry; I thought you were almost well.”
“It isn’t that,” the boy whispered. “I wouldn’t mind the pain; it’s only—oh, I might as well say it, I want my mother. Funny to behave like a cry-baby. I wish I could sleep. I wonder if you could sing to me?”
At first Nona shook her head. “Why I can’t sing, really,” she returned. “I have never had a music lesson in my life. I only know two or three songs that I used to sing to my father way down in South[184] Carolina. I expect you hardly know there is such a place.”
Then suddenly the boy’s disappointed face made the girl hesitate.
She glanced about them. In the bed next to the boy’s the man she and Barbara had rescued from the aeroplane disaster lay apparently too deeply absorbed in a bundle of newspaper............