English fiction -- 20th century; English poetry; Short stories, English
To enjoy life, and tobacco, begin both on a sunny morning half a mile or
so above the dappled Atlantic cloud-belts and after a volt-flurry which
has cleared and tempered your nerves. While we discussed the thickening
traffic with the superiority that comes of having a high level reserved
to ourselves, we heard (and I for the first time) the morning hymn on a
Hospital boat.
She was cloaked by a skein of ravelled fluff beneath us and we caught
the chant before she rose into the sunlight. “Oh, ye Winds of God,” sang
the unseen voices: “bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for
ever!”
We slid off our caps and joined in. When our shadow fell across her
great open platforms they looked up and stretched out their hands
neighbourly while they sang. We could see the doctors and the nurses
and the white-button-like faces of the cot-patients. She passed slowly
beneath us, heading northward, her hull, wet with the dews of the
night, all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud
and vanished, her song continuing. “Oh, ye holy and humble men of heart,
bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for ever.”
“She's a public lunger or she wouldn't have been singing the Benedicite;
and she's a Greenlander or she wouldn't have snow-blinds over her
colloids,” said George at last. “She'll be bound for Frederikshavn or
one of the Glacier sanatoriums for a month. If she was an accident ward
she'd be hung up at the eight-thousand-foot level. Yes--consumptives.”
“Funny how the new things are the old thing I've read in books,” Tim
answered, “that savages used to haul their sick and wounded up to
the tops of hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist 'em in
sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we've
added to the average life of man?”
“Thirty years,” says George with a twinkle in his eye. “Are we going to
spend 'em all up here, Tim?”
“Flap ahead, then. Flap ahead. Who's hindering?” the senior captain
laughed, as we went in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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