Observations of an Orderly eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 129 pages of information about Observations of an Orderly.

Observations of an Orderly eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 129 pages of information about Observations of an Orderly.

Mrs. Mappin surveyed me.  “Ah!” she sighed—­she was given to sighing.  “He’s a good ’un, is Private Wood.”  The inference was plain.  There was little hope of my becoming such a good ’un.  In any case, my natty grey tweeds were against me.  One could never make an orderliesque impression in those tweeds.  “Better take your jacket off,” sighed Mrs. Mappin.  I did so, chose a dishcloth, and started to dry a pyramid of wet plates.  For a space Mrs. Mappin meditated, her hands in soapy water.  Then she withdrew them.  “I think,” she sighed, “you an’ me could do with a cup of tea.”

And presently I was having tea with Mrs. Mappin.

I was afterwards to learn that this practice of calling a halt in her labours for a cup of tea was a highly incorrect one on Mrs. Mappin’s part, and that my share in the transaction was to the last degree reprehensible.  But I was also to learn that faithful, selfless, honest, and diligent scrub-ladies are none too common; and the Sister who discovers that she has been allotted such a jewel as Mrs. Mappin is seldom foolish enough to exact from her a strict obedience to the letter of the law in discipline.  Mrs. Mappin, in her non-tea-bibbing interludes, toiled like a galley-slave, was rigidly punctual, and never complained.  Her sighs were no index of her character.  They were not a symptom of ennui (though possibly—­if the suggestion be not rude—­of indigestion caused by tannin poisoning).  She was the best-tempered of creatures.  It is a fact that if I had been so disposed I need never have given Mrs. Mappin any assistance, though it was within my province to do so.  She would, without a murmur, shoulder other people’s jobs as well as her own.  Having finished with bearing children (one was at the Front—­it was Mrs. Mappin who, on being asked the whereabouts of her soldier son, said, “’E’s in France; I don’t rightly know w’ere the place is, but it’s called ‘Dugout’"), she had settled down, for the remainder of her sojourn on this plane, to a prospect of work, continuous work.  A little more or a little less made no difference to her.  She had nothing else to do, but work; nothing else to be interested in, except work—­and her children’s progress, and her cups of tea.  Her ample figure concealed a warm heart.  Behind her wrinkled old face there was a brain with a limited outfit of ideas—­and the chief of those ideas was work.

Our cup of tea was refreshing, but it would be incorrect to convey the notion that I was allowed to linger over such a luxury.  There are few intervals for leisure in the duty-hours of an orderly in an officers’ ward.  Had the Sister and her nurses not been occupied elsewhere, I doubt whether I should have been free to drink that cup of tea at all—­a circumstance of which perhaps Mrs. Mappin was more aware than I. At any rate the call of “Orderly!” from a patient summoned me from the kitchen and into the ward long before I had finished drying Mrs. Mappin’s dishes.

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Observations of an Orderly from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.