The Challengers (15 page)

At last she stood in the doorway looking into a room with rows of beds against the wall. She was aware of a battery of eyes watching her, aware of the sheeted screens drawn about certain beds, an air of terrible earnestness everywhere. Instantly aware, too, of one screened bed on the left where three relatives of a sick man stood weeping about him. She knew without being told that the man must be dying. And her brother was here among all this! Steve! Her merry-hearted brother, with his bright smile and his strong body! How could he survive in a place of death like this?

Then she saw him in the narrow white bed on the right of the door, his unruly brown curls swathed in bandages, plaster on one cheek, his strong, lithe arms flung out helplessly on the coverlet, restlessly picking at the edge of the sheet. A frame was at the foot of the bed to hold the covers from the broken leg, a weight hanging from the foot of the bed to pull the leg straight. Stephen with his merry lips muttering strange words, crying out, from a face so bruised and bandaged that only the muttering lips and the cleft in the fine Challenger chin were recognizable. Stephen, moving his head from side to side in that strange monotonous way, with closed eyes, the motion of a lion or a leopard caged in the zoo padding back and forth in its cell! She stood and watched him, the tears flowing down her face.

Suddenly as she stood there, he cried out:

"Don't, Sylvia! Don't touch that wheel! Can't you see we're on the edge of the cliff?" Then he flung his arms wildly out and half raised himself from the bed, falling back again with a moan.

The ward nurse sprang to hold him down and called to another nurse:

"This man will have to be strapped down. We can't have him thrashing around like that! He's probably slipped that bone out of place again. You better send for the house doctor to look him over. Where is the head nurse? She'll have to look after this."

Melissa stood there, shrinking against the wall out of the way as the doctor arrived and they began to work over Stephen, who tried to resist them. Poor Steve! Wild at their interference! He was all too evidently living over again the accident, and Melissa, watching, was getting illuminating sidelights on what had happened. Steve! In a mess like that! Whiskey flasks and the kind of girls that would be spoken to as her brother was speaking now! Steve, mixed up with people like that!

Her experiences of the day had somewhat prepared her to understand more than she would otherwise have done.

In the midst of this, a nurse from another ward touched her on the arm and told her that Mrs. Hollister had sent word that they were going to the hotel now and she must come right away.

Melissa gasped and shook her head.

"Please tell her that I cannot come now. Tell her I must attend to telephoning my family. I will come to the hotel later if I find it possible," she said, with a quick relief that she had an excuse to get away from the Hollisters for a while at least. She had no desire for the "large evening" that had been suggested by Gene Hollister.

No one noticed her nor sent her away. She drew back in the corner almost out of sight behind the screen but kept a fearsome watch on her brother. Oh, how was she going to tell her mother all about this? What had Steve to do with that Sylvia person, a girl who drank? "Sylvia, you're silly-drunk!" he cried out once. Had Steve been drinking, too? Was that the cause of the accident?

She shuddered in her corner behind the screen.

But, no, Steve's voice rang out again:

"I'm the only one in this outfit that isn't stewed! No, don't pass me that flask! I wouldn't touch a drop of the vile stuff. Jack, sit down! Don't you see the car is tipping! There she goes!"--and then a moan that was heartrending.

They had finished strapping Steve to the bed. The doctor had administered some medicine, and only one nurse was left, straightening the bedclothes and putting everything in order again. The nurse that had brought Melissa down the hall had gone. She was apparently forgotten. Standing on the other side of the screen, just at the head of her brother's bed, her back against the wall, she wept silently and watched him till he quieted down.

Across the aisle on the other side of the hall door, the group around the dying man turned suddenly away weeping, as the nurse drew a sheet up over the head of the bed and hastily pushed the screen around to the foot to make better shelter. The friends were drifting sorrowfully out into the hall now. The ward was very quiet. The patient just behind Melissa had his eyes closed. She gave a swift survey of the room and saw they had averted their faces, those other patients who had to lie, sick and miserable, and know what was going on about them. Oh, what a terrible place was a hospital, thought Melissa, mopping her eyes with her wet handkerchief.

Steve had quieted down now, only a moan as he turned his head from side to side in that perpetual monotonous motion. A moan every time he faced the wall, keeping perfect rhythm with his turning. Melissa almost groaned aloud and wished she had not come. What good was she doing here? How could she tell her mother how bad things were?

Then the head nurse came by and discovered her.

"Oh, my dear!" she said in her calm, matronly voice. "You can't stay here! Whoever let you come in?"

Melissa tried to stop her tears and steady her voice to answer.

"Isn't there someplace I can sit down a little while?" she managed to ask between her sobs.

"Why, certainly, there is a visitors' room, down at the end of the corridor. You can sit there as long as you like. The doors of the hospital are usually closed to visitors at ten thirty except in cases where patients are in very critical condition and the friends have to stay all night. But you could go in there and sit for a while till you feel like going home. Who are you? Is this patient a relative of yours? You're not the girl that was with him in the accident, are you?" And Melissa caught an edge of contempt in her voice.

"Oh, no indeed!" said Melissa indignantly. "He's my brother! I don't know who was with him when he was hurt. I don't know anything about it. Would you mind telling me? I can't seem to find anybody who knows."

The head nurse led her out and down the hall to the reception room, but she could give her very little information. He had been brought in last night at about half past two o'clock. It had been a wild drinking party, she surmised, because the other young man who was in the party had been dead drunk.

"Not
my brother
?" Melissa gasped out with a terrible question in her voice. "He
never
drinks!"

"Perhaps not," said the head nurse dryly, as if she didn't believe that any young man did not drink nowadays, "but at least he was not under the influence of it. I understand there were two girls in the car and one of them jumped out just as the car went over the embankment. The other girl wasn't injured seriously, just some minor bruises, and her family took her home this afternoon. Your brother got the worst of it, for he was driving. They say he might have jumped and saved himself perhaps, but he wouldn't leave his wheel. The other young man jumped, and being drunk of course fell limp and wasn't so badly hurt. Now, here is the room, and you can rest a little while, but if I were you, I would go home pretty soon. It's getting late, you know, and you can't do anybody any good by staying here. Your brother wouldn't know you were here. He may be several days like this."

"Oh," gasped Melissa forlornly and then suddenly remembering her mother, said, "But I must telephone Mother. Is there a long-distance phone in the building?"

The nurse gave her directions how to find it.

"Could you--just tell me--what I ought to tell Mother about Steve?" she asked like a little frightened child. "She will be terribly worried. She couldn't come herself because Father has been very ill and they don't dare tell him about it, and he would miss Mother and want to know why she had gone."

"Oh!" said the nurse, looking her over swiftly, with that quick comprehension of nurses who are used to looking into other people's tragedies every day. "Well, you don't need to go into particulars, then. Just tell her that he is doing as well as could be expected. He's holding his own so far of course, but it's hard to tell anything so soon. There's a concussion and a fractured leg and plenty of bruises. He's got a lot to contend with, but so far there's no indication of internal injuries. Of course, it's early yet to tell about that!"

Melissa's heart sank lower and lower.

"Will he be--out of this--this--this delirium by morning?" she asked shyly. She knew so pitifully little about illness.

"Probably not," said the nurse in a matter-of-fact tone. "It may last some days. Of course, he might develop fever and it might get worse. But I wouldn't worry--"

There was a sudden preemptory call for the head nurse, and she vanished, leaving Melissa alone in a room with only one other occupant, a sad-faced woman sitting huddled in a willow rocker, sniffing and wiping her eyes occasionally.

"My girl's got a crisis comin' t'night!" she explained to Melissa, who stood uncertainly, waiting to see if the head nurse would return. She wanted to ask her a few more questions before she telephoned her mother.

"Oh!" said Melissa, a lump suddenly rising in her throat. Trouble, trouble, trouble! Everyone was in trouble, everywhere! And they thought there was a God!

But the woman was eager to unburden herself. She had sat for a full half hour with no casual stranger in whom to confide. She was like a thing bottled up ready to burst.

"She's been a-layin' there in that bed fer nine days an' ain't knowed me," she went on, the tears readily accompanying her speech. "An' her with a little six-month-old baby what won't eat her food and cries day an' night! An' me past my seventies! I don't know how I'm a-gonta manage ef she's took. Iva was a good girl ef I do say so as I raised her, even ef she was allus off ta the movies nights and me ta tend the baby. But they say there's only just a chance in a lifetime she'll come through."

"I'm sorry," said Melissa, trying to turn away from more pain. She felt she had all of her own she could bear.

"She ain't ben lucky nohow," went on the garrulous voice meditatively. "When she was little, I had all kindsa trouble with her. She come outta th' measles, only ta get whooping cough an' the chicken pox a month later; then she got runned over an' hed a broke rib an' a sprained foot, an' when she got just so she cud he'p me a little, she took ta goin' with this good-fer-nothin' Clip Fox an' finally married him; an' after the baby was born, he up an' died. Not to say he was any good ta her ef he'd lived. She hadta keep her job herself, ur she'd a starved. He never earned a cent, an' when he did, he kep' it hisself. He--"

"Excuse me!" said Melissa, feeling that if she listened to another word she would either laugh or scream. "I've got to go and telephone. It's very important."

"Oh, that's all right," said the woman. "I'll tell ya the rest when ya come back. I'm gonta set up all night. They don't know how it'll turn, y'know."

"Oh, do they allow you to stay here all night?"

"How could they he'p it?" cackled the woman mirthlessly. "They couldn't put ya out in the street when yer only daughter was dyin', could they?"

Melissa shivered and hurried off down the hall resolved to try and find some other refuge than the guest reception room if possible.

She did not venture toward the elevator. She had a feeling that she would rather get about herself. The elevator man would perhaps expect a tip, and she must not let a single cent go unnecessarily. So she stole down the stairs, floor after floor, three floors, to the office desk. But there was no one at the desk. Everything seemed to be shut up for the night.

Further search and inquiry developed a telephone booth, and after frantically trying to get a connection with the house of Brady, the head of which happened to be off hunting her sister Phyllis while the rest of his family attended the movies, Melissa finally resorted to a telegram.

 

Arrived safely. Stephen sleeping. Can tell you more of his condition in the morning. Don't worry, Melissa.

 

It seemed an unsatisfactory telegram when it was finished, but it had taken all her wits to compose it, and she was really relieved not to have to talk with her mother tonight; for it was certain she could tell nothing good about her brother from what she had so far seen, and her mother would be sure to worm it all out of her. Melissa was not good at hiding things, especially if she was troubled about them. Phyllis could keep things to herself if she thought it would do harm to tell them.

As she turned away from the telephone booth at last, she was suddenly aware that she was overpoweringly hungry. She looked around for someone to tell her where to find a restaurant, but the elevator boy had gone off duty.

A glance outside showed wide lawns in every direction, with distant houses lit, showing it was a residential section. She felt too tired to walk far, and it would not do to get lost and perhaps not be allowed back in the hospital again. But what should she do? There did not seem to be a taxi in the vicinity of the hospital. Well, she would have to go back upstairs and ask.

On the third floor she encountered a pleasant-looking nurse carrying a glass of milk.

"A restaurant? There isn't such a thing nearer than down in the village, and I doubt if it would be open at this hour. The hotel of course, but that's a long distance, too. Are you here for the night?"

"Why, yes. I thought I'd sit in the waiting room, if nobody objected. I got here so late, and I don't know where to find a lodging I could afford. If I just could get a cracker or two, or even a drink of water, I could go out early and get breakfast."

"There's plenty of ice water in the cooler around at the end of that corridor to the right, but you ought to have something else. How about this glass of milk? I saved it for my patient to take if she wanted it, but she's gone to sleep and won't need it. You can have it if you like. And--why, I can get you some crackers. Just come down this way. You needn't say anything about it. We're not supposed to do this of course, but I can't see any harm. Nobody will care. Come."