Children of the Archbishop (38 page)

It was one of the little ones, Evelyn Parker, who was the first to be brought in—and then only because she had complained of a headache, and kept saying that she felt sick. That was on Tuesday, just before lunch. And by tea-time Sweetie had joined her. But only just. There was nothing in her symptoms that really justified being excused geography and sewing. It was simply that she said that her eyes hurt and insisted vaguely, without being able to say in which part of her, that she ached. Nurse Stedge, indeed, was frankly dubious about the whole affair: she suspected that it was simply Sweetie up to her tricks again.

And then strange things began happening to little Evelyn. The first hint that it might be more than a passing chill was her temperature: already a hundred and one, and still rising. But Nurse Stedge had met temperatures like that before and, even now, did not intend to be intimidated by this one. She gave the child a generous dose of the Hospital's No. 1 mixture, and let Nature have her chance. But though the No. 1 mixture did everything that
could have been expected of it, the child seemed no better. Her pulse was up by now and, only twelve hours after the runny nose and the streaming eyes, the pains in the legs began.

The pains, indeed, gave Nurse Stedge the first clue—a false one as it happened—as to the real cause of the trouble. It was Wednesday by now and Monday had been rainy—the one rainy day in a whole succession of hot, sunny days. Nurse Stedge diagnosed rheumatism, even rheumatic fever possibly. And she diagnosed wrongly.

By the time Dr. Arlett came in next day the pains in the legs had got better: there was scarcely any pain at all, Evelyn said, just a sort of limpness. And there was a tingly feeling in the small of her back. Dr. Arlett looked at her throat, felt her neck for glands, examined her chest and back for any sign of rash, listened to her breathing—and for all the good he had done he might just as well have examined Nurse Stedge instead. Baffled and frustrated, he said that Evelyn was to be kept in bed until he had been in again to-morrow. Not that he was unduly worried. As a family doctor with a large practice, he had been baffled plenty of times before. And he knew that children, in particular, made a habit of running up and down the thermometer in a way that the text-books had never properly got round to.

It was round about lunch-time when Dr. Arlett called. And, after he had left, Evelyn spent most of the afternoon sleeping peacefully enough. By tea-time, Nurse Stedge began to feel a bit worried. And at seven when the night nurse took over, she definitely didn't like the way things were going. In all her experience of children she had never known a child have such difficulty with its breathing. And, when Evelyn's skin showed waxy underneath the flush, she took matters into her own hands and sent for Dr. Arlett again.

And only just in time. Because Evelyn was unconscious when he arrived. The pulse, after racing furiously like a tiny engine with its governor gone, had suddenly become feeble and intermittent. At moments Nurse Stedge could hardly feel it at all: it simply faded away beneath her forefinger. And the breathing was no longer quick and stertorous. It was now vague and casual like the pulse; and shallow. The small flat bosom scarcely rose and fell. Evelyn was simply lying there inert with her eyes and mouth half open, and the fingers of her hand, which was half-clenched, twitching as though she were trying to pick up something.

Dr. Arlett immediately recognised the condition for what
Nurse Stedge had only feared it was. In the nine hours since he had last seen her, Evelyn had passed from the state of a sick child into a dying one. She was now insecurely attached to this world at all. At any moment she was ready, quietly and without turmoil, to exchange the green distempered walls of the infirmary with the little iron bedstead and the bare linoleum, for the space between the stars and the heavenly staircase. The thermometer standing up in a half tumbler of water on the table, and the bed-pan with napkin decently over it on the chair beside the bed, did not belong to her way of things any longer.

Dr. Arlett was not in the ordinary course of life either swift or nimble. But, looking back on it afterwards, Nurse Stedge thought that she had never seen anyone open a medical bag so quickly and get out a hypodermic syringe. It was coramine that Dr. Arlett had brought with him and raising the sleeve of the nightdress that Evelyn was wearing, he inserted the needle in the upper arm. Not that the child gave any sign when the point of the needle entered the skin between Dr. Arlett's two finger-tips. She was too far away already to worry over what was happening in the life that she was leaving so rapidly behind her. She merely lay there, quietly concentrating on dying. And the pauses in her breathing were longer and more frequent. There were moments when she did not breathe at all.

Nurse Stedge was the first to speak.

“I think she's gone, sir,” she said.

Dr. Arlett took out his stethoscope. He remained there for the better part of a minute bending over the small silent body from which the flannelette nightdress had been folded back. Then he straightened, himself and pulled the sheet right up over the white face.

“You'd better ask Dr. Trump if he can come here,” he said. “And tell Chiswick to bring the stretcher.”

At the far end of the ward, two dark eyes were watching. They were very alert, observant eyes, and they knew enough to close themselves every time Nurse Stedge or Dr. Arlett came near. It was the second death that Sweetie had witnessed, and she felt that she knew all about dying by now. But knowing about things is different when you're nine, very nearly ten. She lay there staring up at the ceiling.

“Perhaps I've got what Evelyn had,” she told herself. “Perhaps I'm going to die, too.”

Anyhow, that was how it started. Margaret had just left the Hospital at the time—it was a Thursday, remember—and the first that she knew about it was when Dr. Trump rang up Dame Eleanor to tell her what had happened. Margaret did not even take the call herself: after bedtime the phone was plugged straight through to Dame Eleanor's bedside. So it was entirely second-hand that the news reached her, just as she was about to give Dame Eleanor her good-night Horlicks. And when Margaret heard, she did not believe it. She had been in the Infirmary only a few hours ago sitting on the end of Sweetie's bed and talking to her. Little Evelyn had seemed perfectly all right at the time.

“Mind, girl,” Dame Eleanor had been forced to say to her quite sharply. “You're pouring the Horlicks all over me. I wouldn't have told you if I'd known that it was going to upset you so.”

And it was the same next morning. Margaret seemed preoccupied and restless. She had the unprepossessing appearance—at once drawn and puffy—of someone who had not slept at all well, and at the end of breakfast she asked if she might slip round to the Hospital for a moment. At first, Dame Eleanor was inclined to refuse. But, on second thoughts, she allowed it. After all, Margaret spent all her spare time at the Hospital and it was only natural, Dame Eleanor supposed, that she should feel herself one of them. It was all of a piece with her loyal nature that she should want to be there as soon as anything went wrong.

“But remember: no hanging round the children,” she told her. “Whatever it is, we don't want you bringing it back here.”

Not that it was herself that she was thinking of: it wasn't. It was her committees, her meetings, all the thousand and one other things that depended on her. To-day was going to be one of those days when she would be rushing about committee to committee from the moment she left The Cedars until she returned there, a tired, crotchety old woman, round about seven.

Even then, Dame Eleanor did not know how quickly and alarmingly things were going to develop. By the middle of the morning a boy called Roger in Standard Seven, the going-out form, went down with the same symptoms. They were all there—slight sore throat, mild summer cold, moist eyes, pain in the back
and legs and a soaring temperature. But this time Nurse Stedge was on the look-out. After one glance at him, she was on the phone for Dr. Arlett. Nor was Dr. Arlett any slower: he seemed to have been on the other end of the phone waiting. Putting aside two measles, a blood poisoning, and a malignant tumour (second visit), he was round at the Hospital inside ten minutes.

And on this occasion he was in time. The boy did not even appear to be unduly ill. But Dr. Arlett was not so easily reassured this time. In fact, he was looking for trouble. Ever since little Evelyn's death, he had been reading up Poliomyelitis and he now knew exactly what to go for. Not that it helped him. Because, though the text-books knew all about the symptoms, apparently they knew nothing about the cure. But, at least, he wanted to be quite certain about the symptoms. And his test of the boy's reflexes revealed that there were none. He went through the correct motions again and again, striking with his little rubber hammer beneath the knee-cap. And he could hardly believe it when he found that there was no response: just nothing at all to show for all the trouble that he was taking.

There were no signs of the paralysis spreading. Not a trace of anything in the back—the fatal part. The breathing was strong and regular, throat muscles firm and hard. The mysterious germ, in fact, had done its damage and spent itself. But it was sufficient for Dr. Arlett. It was Case Number Two all right. The Medical Officer of Health would have to be got hold of immediately.

And Case Number Three—Sweetie—was apparently just waiting for the symptoms to develop.

Faced with the new seriousness of the situation, Dr. Trump did not hesitate. He rooted Dame Eleanor out of her Unmarried Mothers and demanded to know whether he should close the Hospital. But here it was obvious that he was at a disadvantage. Because the one thing that no orphanage can do is to close—it is of the very nature of orphanhood that there is no home to go back to. Dame Eleanor advised, therefore, that the Hospital should remain open, but the children should be kept as far away from each other as possible.

Not that even that was easy. But on this point Dame Eleanor was adamant. She insisted that until the epidemic was over, the boys and girls should be kept entirely apart. The fact that one case already had come from either side of the Hospital did not affect the decision. There was to be complete and absolute
segregation, she said. She spoke as though everything depended on it.

And she added wearily that she would be round later the same evening.

As she rang off, Dame Eleanor realised how tired she was. And more than tired: played out completely. A kind of self-sorrow which had become rather more frequent of late had suddenly descended upon her, and all that she wanted to do was to put her feet up and close her eyes. And was there anything so very extraordinary in that? There were plenty of women half her age—yes, literally half her age—who would have taken a couple of aspirins and packed themselves up in bed long ago if they'd had a headache one-tenth so vicious and jangling as hers.

But she couldn't do that kind of thing. They needed her round at the Hospital. If she hadn't been tied up with so many other things, she'd have been there already and got back again. But on a day like this, it had been impossible. Not a single free moment until after dinner.

That was the trouble. She was too busy. Too much going on. Too many things depending on her. Too many meetings. Too many letters to write. Too many people to see. Too much and too many of everything. It wasn't as though she were running the machine any more. The machine was running her.

She asked herself sometimes why she had ever allowed things to get that way, why hadn't she simply refused when she was asked to take on any more. And she asked herself, too, why she didn't struggle harder to break away now before it all got any worse. Why didn't she resign? Leave those innumerable committees to find some other woman fool enough to kill herself on their behalf. Why didn't she? She had done her bit, no one could deny that. Why didn't she? Could anyone please tell her why?

As a matter of fact, she knew. Knew perfectly well. And it wasn't simply that she cared more than other people, had a keener sense of duty. No, it went deeper than that. Much deeper. Some
where right at the back of her mind, she knew that, even now, if she eased up for a single moment, she would begin thinking again about that precious son of hers. It wasn't easy to forget a son. On the day when he had sailed away for ever, she had felt as though she, not the boy, had been the one who had gone voyaging into a world where England was half-way round his globe and the stars themselves were upside down.

Merely to go on living had called for a new kind of courage, had demanded a faith above earthly things; even above mother love. Faith! Yes, that was it. She had clung to faith. The Church meant everything to her now. The Church—and rescuing people. The only time she so much as mentioned her son's name to herself was when she prayed for him. Not that it was really painful any more, so long as the name came back to her that way. It is hard to go on saying the same prayer, night after night, for years on end—ever since November, 1913, in fact—without the sharp edges getting a bit rubbed away in the process.

He had been such a handsome-looking boy, too; handsome, but weak. There had been something about the way one lock of dark hair fell across his forehead while he was talking—he was always tossing it back, only to have it come forward again—that had made it impossible to deny him anything. And apparently it had been impossible for other women, too … But this was the very thing that she had set her mind against: this dwelling in the past was the one weakness she had taught herself to fight.

And turning back now was out of the question. She had made a new life and she intended to go on with it. Go on, until she dropped. If only she weren't so tired, so perpetually tired. Often she had presided at meetings, started things going, made decisions, jerked other people into activity, when she had been so tired herself that she had scarcely been able to crawl along there at all. And she hated tiredness. It reminded her how old she was. “I ought to have been interred years ago,” was a thought that constantly recurred to her. And every time it brought with it the same damp chill, the mouldiness.