Part 2

IN HOSPITAL

On ne saurait dire à quel point un homme, seul dans son lit et malade, devient personnel.—

BALZAC.

I ENTER PATIENT

THE morning mists still haunt the stony street; The northern summer air is shrill and cold; And lo, the Hospital, grey, quiet, old, Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet. Thro’ the loud spaciousness and draughty gloom A small, strange child—so agèd yet so young!— Her little arm besplinted and beslung, Precedes me gravely to the waiting-room. I limp behind, my confidence all gone. The grey-haired soldier-porter waves me on, And on I crawl, and still my spirits fail: A tragic meanness seems so to environ These corridors and stairs of stone and iron, Cold, naked, clean—half-workhouse and half-jail.

II WAITING

A SQUARE, squat room (a cellar on promotion), Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight; Plasters astray in unnatural-looking tinware; Scissors and lint and apothecary’s jars.

Here, on a bench a skeleton would writhe from, Angry and sore, I wait to be admitted: Wait till my heart is lead upon my stomach, While at their ease two dressers do their chores.

One has a probe—it feels to me a crowbar. A small boy sniffs and shudders after bluestone. A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers. Life is (I think) a blunder and a shame.

III INTERIOR

THE gaunt brown walls Look infinite in their decent meanness. There is nothing of home in the noisy kettle, The fulsome fire.

The atmosphere Suggests the trail of a ghostly druggist. Dressings and lint on the long, lean table— Whom are they for?

The patients yawn, Or lie as in training for shroud and coffin. A nurse in the corridor scolds and wrangles. It’s grim and strange.

Far footfalls clank. The bad burn waits with his head unbandaged. My neighbour chokes in the clutch of chloral . . . O, a gruesome world!

IV BEFORE

BEHOLD me waiting—waiting for the knife. A little while, and at a leap I storm The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform, The drunken dark, the little death-in-life. The gods are good to me: I have no wife, No innocent child, to think of as I near The fateful minute; nothing all-too dear Unmans me for my bout of passive strife. Yet am I tremulous and a trifle sick, And, face to face with chance, I shrink a little: My hopes are strong, my will is something weak. Here comes the basket? Thank you. I am ready. But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle: You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—steady!

V OPERATION

YOU are carried in a basket, Like a carcase from the shambles, To the theatre, a cockpit Where they stretch you on a table.

Then they bid you close your eyelids, And they mask you with a napkin, And the anæsthetic reaches Hot and subtle through your being.

And you gasp and reel and shudder In a rushing, swaying rapture, While the voices at your elbow Fade—receding—fainter—farther.

Lights about you shower and tumble, And your blood seems crystallising— Edged and vibrant, yet within you Racked and hurried back and forward.

Then the lights grow fast and furious, And you hear a noise of waters, And you wrestle, blind and dizzy, In an agony of effort,

Till a sudden lull accepts you, And you sound an utter darkness . . . And awaken . . . with a struggle . . . On a hushed, attentive audience.

VI AFTER

LIKE as a flamelet blanketed in smoke, So through the anæsthetic shows my life; So flashes and so fades my thought, at strife With the strong stupor that I heave and choke And sicken at, it is so foully sweet. Faces look strange from space—and disappear. Far voices, sudden loud, offend my ear— And hush as sudden. Then my senses fleet: All were a blank, save for this dull, new pain That grinds my leg and foot; and brokenly Time and the place glimpse on to me again; And, unsurprised, out of uncertainty, I wake—relapsing—somewhat faint and fain, To an immense, complacent dreamery.

VII VIGIL

LIVED on one’s back, In the long hours of repose, Life is a practical nightmare— Hideous asleep or awake.

Shoulders and loins Ache - - - ! Ache, and the mattress, Run into boulders and hummocks, Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes— Tumbling, importunate, daft— Ramble and roll, and the gas, Screwed to its lowermost, An inevitable atom of light, Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper Snores me to hate and despair.