Sooner or later the Avenue girls get to the hospital. Sometimes it
is because they cannot sleep, and lie and think things over--and
there is no way out; and God hates them--though, of course, there is
that story about Jesus and the Avenue woman. And what is the use of
going home and being asked questions that cannot be answered? So
they try to put an end to things generally--and end up in the
emergency bed, terribly frightened, because it has occurred to them
that if they do not dare to meet the home folks how are they going
to meet the Almighty?
Or sometimes it is jealousy. Even an Avenue woman must love some
one; and, because she's an elemental creature, if the object of her
affections turns elsewhere she's rather apt to use a knife or a
razor. In that case it is the rival who ends up on the emergency
bed.
Or the life gets her, as it does sooner or later, and she comes in
with typhoid or a cough, or other things, and lies alone, day after
day, without visitors or inquiries, making no effort to get better,
because--well, why should she?
And so the Dummy's Avenue Girl met her turn and rode down the street
in a clanging ambulance, and was taken up in the elevator and along
a grey hall to where the emergency bed was waiting; and the
Probationer, very cold as to hands and feet, was sending mental
appeals to the Senior to come--and come quickly. The ward got up on
elbows and watched. Also it told the Probationer what to do.
"Hot-water bottles and screens," it said variously. "Take her
temperature. Don't be frightened! There'll be a doctor in a minute."
The girl lay on the bed with her eyes shut. It was Irish Delia who
saw the Dummy and raised a cry.
"Look at the Dummy!" she said. "He's crying."
The Dummy's world had always been a small one. There was the
superintendent, who gave him his old clothes; and there was the
engineer, who brought him tobacco; and there were the ambulance
horses, who talked to him now and then without speech. And, of
course, there was his Father.
Fringing this small inner circle of his heart was a kaleidoscope of
changing faces, nurses, _internes_, patients, visitors--a wall of
life that kept inviolate his inner shrine. And in the holiest place,
where had dwelt only his Father, and not even the superintendent,
the Dummy had recently placed the Avenue Girl. She was his saint,
though he knew nothing of saints. Who can know why he chose her? A
queer trick of the soul perhaps--or was it super-wisdom?--to choose
her from among many saintly women and so enshrine her.
Or perhaps---- Down in the chapel, in a great glass window, the
young John knelt among lilies and prayed. When, at service on
Sundays, the sunlight came through on to the Dummy's polished choir
rail and candles, the young John had the face of a girl, with short
curling hair, very yellow for the colour scheme. The Avenue Girl had
hair like that and was rather like him in other ways.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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