The Patient in Room 18 · Chapter 2 (1/2)

II

In Room 18

That night began much the same as other nights and with no suggestion of the events it was to unfold. There was the usual twelve-o’clock stir of drinks and temperatures and pulses and hot pillows to be turned and electric fans to be brought. The only unusual thing, and that was natural enough, was that the sick patients had turned restless under the heat and the breathless hint of storm and were fretful and somewhat peevish. We were very busy for some time, but I remembered to leave the south door unlocked for Dr. Letheny’s call.

It happened that I was in the corridor when he came in about twelve thirty. The gleaming white and black of his pearl-studded shirt front and smooth-fitting dinner jacket were incongruous in the bare, night-lighted hall, with its long length of white walls, shadowy now in the darkness that was relieved only by the shaded light over the chart desk at the far end, and the tiny red signal lights that glowed here and there over sickroom doors. A hospital is never a cheerful place, especially at night, and its long, dark corridors with black voids for doors, and its faint odours of ether and antiseptics and sickness are not, to say the least, conducive to good spirits.

Dr. Letheny was still nervous and irritable. He gave Mr. Jackson a rather cursory glance, felt his pulse for a moment, and examined the dressing. The trouble he was trying to cure with radium was in the patient’s left breast and the radium itself, placed as is usual in a sort of box that is especially made for the purpose, was arranged in such a manner that its rays would penetrate the afflicted area. It was held in place by means of wide straps of adhesive, and would have been, to the layman, a strange-appearing affair. All was well and the patient seemingly reacting as favourably as might be expected, so Dr. Letheny did not linger. After rearranging the pillows and turning out the light over the bed, I followed the Doctor into the corridor. He paused for a few moments, asking me unimportant questions as to various patients in the wing, and smoking rapidly, regardless of the rules which he himself had made against smoking in the hospital. More than once I caught his gaze travelling past me down the corridor toward the diet kitchen and drug room, and finally he asked me outright if Miss Day was on duty.

“Yes,” I said. “She is about⁠—somewhere in the wing,” thinking, as I replied, that I had not seen Maida for a few moments. Doubtless, however, she was busy with some patient, or paying her promised visit to Sonny.

He lingered for a little after that, but presently strolled to the south door and disappeared. I did not follow him and lock the door according to custom; it was breathlessly hot, as I have said, and we needed every atom of air that we could get. Later, when the rain came, I should close it.

An errand took me to the diet kitchen; as I passed down the length of the darkened corridor I glanced into the open doors along the way but did not catch a glimpse of Maida’s white uniform. The place was very hot and very still and the vases of flowers along the walls, on the floor outside various doors, sent up a hot, sickening breath. I snapped on the light in the diet kitchen, wishing as I did so that there were more lights in the corridor outside. I had to search for and open a fresh bottle of beef extract, so it took me some time to prepare the beef tea, but at length I started into the corridor with the cup in hand. As I reached the door I glanced down the hall toward the south door just in time to see a white uniform gleam against the blackness of the night as it entered from the porch outside. It was Maida, of that I was sure, for her movements were unmistakable, and just as the thought ran through my mind that she had been outside trying to get a breath of fresh air, I also realized that I had no spoon to accompany the beef tea and turned back into the diet kitchen. Someone had cleaned the silver drawer that day, and it took me a moment or two to find a spoon, and when I entered the corridor again I met Maida face to face.

In the dim light it seemed to me that she was very white, but in that night-lighted corridor nothing retains its normal colour, so I thought nothing of it.

“I was wondering where you had gone to,” I said carelessly as I passed her.

She regarded my casual remark as an inquiry.

“I⁠—I’ve been with Sonny,” she said. Her voice was unsteady.

“Poor boy, he is having a hard time,” I murmured and went on. It was not until I was standing beside Eleven watching him drink the beef tea that I recalled with a little start that she had not been with Sonny, that I had seen her with my own eyes coming into the corridor from the porch.

Beef tea and Eleven did not go well together; in fact, a few moments after drinking it he was violently sick and for about a quarter of an hour I was fully occupied with him. I had closed the door into the corridor at first symptoms of his unhappy reaction, so that the disturbance should not arouse patients in nearby rooms. I stayed with him until he was back on his pillows again, quiet and exhausted, then I turned out the light, opened the door into the corridor, and left him. The hall was silent and dark and not a signal light gleamed in the whole length.

I felt a little ill myself from the heat and stifling air, and judging it to be a good time, I slipped quietly to the south door and let myself out onto the little colonial porch. The air was a shade less fetid there and I remember standing for a moment or two at the curved railing. The dim light coming from the door back of me made a little circle on the porch, faintly lighter than the surrounding night, and beyond that stretched thick blackness. Far below me toward the west twinkled vaguely the lights of the city and above on the hillside I caught the barest glimpse of green light through the trees; it was shining from Dr. Letheny’s study. All else was impenetrable darkness.

I could not have stood there for more than five minutes when without any warning an inexplicable thing occurred.

There was a sudden, sharp little whisper of motion from somewhere back of me, something flew past my shoulder, caught for a fleeting second the reflection of a light from the corridor back of me, and was gone into the dense shadows of the shrubbery, beyond the railing.

The thing was gone before I could realize that it had actually happened.

I started, drew in my breath sharply, and stifled the exclamation that rose to my lips. I stared in the direction the thing, whatever it was, had taken and strained my eyes to see into the thick black void that surrounded the porch. It was exactly as if an arrow, small and sharp and gleaming, had been shot from somewhere behind me into the shrubbery. But no one shoots arrows from hospitals in the dead of night.

I rubbed my eyes angrily and, but for the sharp little whisper of sound the thing made as it passed me, would have doubted their evidence. But that sound, coupled with the flash of light, was conclusive. Someone had deliberately thrown some small article with all the force at his command across the porch and into the shrubbery that extends downward into the orchard. It had come from one of the windows at either side of the door or from the door itself. Hastily in my thoughts I ran over the patients then in the wing. Not one of them was able to walk. Maida was the only person in the wing who could have been about, and what on earth was Maida throwing out into the night!

Feeling this to be a curious circumstance that should be investigated I took a few steps toward the path that leads from the east corner of the little porch. It was very dark there, and without pausing to reflect that in the night I could never find the thing that so puzzled me and that was now hidden somewhere in the orchard, I groped for the iron railing and made my way cautiously down the two or three steps. I paused at the path, my ear caught by the sound of footsteps. And at the very instant, the sudden little rush of sound came closer swiftly and someone running at top speed along the outside wall of the hospital collided with me, gasped, swore, caught me in midair and set me on my feet again and was gone, leaving me trying to get my breath and dazedly righting my cap. I could hear his footsteps still running along the little path toward the bridge.

“Well⁠—” I said. “Well⁠—” and found myself both angry and frightened. People have no right to run around hospitals at night, knocking middle-aged nurses about and swearing and whatnot. Who was this midnight prowler?

Evidently the man was up to no good purpose and as evidently he was in a hurry to get away. My heart began to beat rapidly as I walked along the hospital north in the direction the man had come from. But the windows above me all seemed dark and undisturbed. Built on the slope of the hill as St. Ann’s is, the windows are at varying heights from the ground, some of them not more than three or four feet above it, but I doubted if an intruder could have made his way into that silent wing without arousing it. I walked as far as the lighted window of the diet kitchen. It, too, was open and I could see the top of Maida’s white cap as she stood at the farther end of the small room.

All seemed quiet and I dismissed the half-formed notion of rousing Higgins, the janitor and so-called night-watchman, and demanding a thorough search of the premises. I was still uneasy, however, as I retraced my steps, and I drew back into the shadow of the orchard in order to see into the windows of the wing without, possibly, myself being seen.

It was just as I passed the thick clump of elderberry bushes about midway of the long wing that my foot struck something in the grass that gave a dully metallic sound. I reached over to fumble in the grass and picked up a small, flat object, smooth and hard. I turned it rapidly over in my hands. It was pitchy dark there in the shadows and the air was extraordinarily close. I slipped the object I held into my pocket for future examination and as I did so I sniffed. There was something in the air⁠—some familiar odour⁠—but something entirely out of place in an apple orchard. It was⁠—a swift vision of the operating room rose before me and I realized that my nostrils had caught a faint but unmistakable odour of ether.

Ether in an apple orchard! And in the middle of the night! Why, it was impossible! Something in the heated air, some mingling of alfalfa and sweet clover and growing things had combined to deceive me. I shrugged, tried to laugh, and feeling all at once that absurd fear that something is about to clutch at your heels, I hurried through the dense shadows toward the little porch. It was still deserted.

I recall glancing up at the impenetrable sky and catching, away off toward the south, a faint gleam of lightning. Surely the storm would break soon and I would be relieved of this feeling of oppression that was strangely mingled with something very like fear.

The corridor, too, was still deserted. Maida was not in sight, and as I looked a red signal light down toward the chart desk clicked. I went to answer it, my starched skirts whispering along the hushed hall.

It was Three, begging for a bromide, and it took me a few moments to convince her of the fact that she didn’t in the least need it.

Then I sat down at the desk, which is at the north end of the corridor, opposite the south door, with all the shadowy length of gray-white walls and dark doors of the corridor intervening. A shaded light over this desk is the sole illumination and a person seated at the desk faces the chart rack and has her back turned to the corridor. It remained hot and very still and I wondered if the wind that accompanies our western thunder storms would not soon rise.

I had not more than entered Three’s pulse and the time⁠—one thirty⁠—when a sudden sound, dull and heavy, brought me standing, facing the corridor and unaccountably startled. Only the bare walls met my eyes. Perhaps the south door had blown shut. It had sounded like the muffled bang of a door⁠—or possibly like a window that had dropped to the sill. The chart in my hand, I walked quickly through the corridor to the south door. It was still open and I felt no breeze.

As near as I could tell the sound that had aroused me had come from this end of the wing. The door of Room 17 was open and a glance assured me that the window was still open for I could see the dim shadow of the sash. The door of Eighteen was closed, however, so I opened it cautiously in order not to wake Mr. Jackson. I did not enter the room; I stood there only for a moment, holding the door half open and peering through the dim light from the corridor. The patient was lying quiet and the window seemed to be open, so I closed the door as gently as I had opened it and took my way down the corridor again.

And when I reached the chart desk I found that my knees were trembling and there was a little damp beading under my cap.

“It is the night,” I assured myself. “It is a nerve-racking night. I shall suffocate if I don’t get some air.”

But nevertheless I felt nervous and ill at ease. I forced myself to study the charts, and in the middle of Eleven’s temperature chart I recalled the small flat object I had found in the orchard. I was in the very act of drawing it from my pocket when, with a swoop of wind through the corridor, a blinding flash of lightning and a crash of thunder, the storm broke.

I ran the whole length of the corridor. The wind was sweeping along it with such fury that my skirts were pulled back tight around me, my cap slipped back on my head, and several top-heavy vases of flowers must have blown over for we found them so later. With some difficulty I closed the door. As I fastened it, leaving the key in the lock in my haste, I could see through the panes of glass the first great spatters of rain, and down below the hospital on the little back road shone the lights of a hurrying automobile. Then they were gone and another flash of lightning nearly blinded me and there was a sharp crackle and sputter. Simultaneously the light went out as if by black magic, leaving me alone in the dark with eighteen windows to get down and eighteen patients to reassure.

I knew in an instant what had occurred; the power line from the city had been struck and the fuses burnt out or some such matter. Where was Maida? The rain was coming in torrents by the time I had felt my way into Room 17 and closed the window. Occasional lightning aided me as I groped my way to Room 18, crossed it and pulled down that window. As I turned toward the door again a bright flash of lightning lit up the whole room and in the brief second I saw that the patient had not roused in spite of the tumult of the storm. He lay still. Too still.

Then the light was gone and, scarcely knowing what I did, I reached the bed and put my hand on his face and sought his pulse.

A seasoned nurse knows when death has come. Even in the gibbering darkness with the storm outside crashing against the window I knew at once that our patient was dead.

Standing there for what seemed an eternity, but what was actually not more than a moment or two, my mind raced over the situation and strove to comprehend it. There was no reason for his death of which I knew. Barring the affliction for which he was being treated and which in its present stage had not been critical, our patient had been in good health only an hour or so ago. What had caused this? It could not have been heart failure for his heart had been sound.