It came at last to the straight question: was I more scared of endangering my sight by taking off the bandages or of staying in the dark with the willies growing every minute?
If it had been a day or two earlier, I don’t know what I’d have done-very likely the same in the end-but this day I could at least tell myself:
“Well, hang it, there can’t be a lot of harm if I use common sense. After all, the bandages are due to come off today. I’ll risk it.”
There’s one thing II put to my credit. I was not far enough gone to tear them off wildly. I had the sense and the self-control to get out of bed and pull the shade down before I started on the safety pins.
Once I had the coverings off, and had found out that I could see in the dimness, I felt a relief that I’d never known before. Nevertheless, the first thing I did after assuring myself that there were indeed no malicious persons or things lurking under the bed or elsewhere was to slip a chair back under the door handle. I could and did begin to get a better grip on myself then. I made myself take a full hour gradually getting used to full daylight. At the end of it I knew that thanks to swift first aid, followed by good doctoring, my eyes were as good as ever.
But still no one came.
On the lower shelf of the bedside table I discovered a pair of dark glasses thoughtfully put ready against my need of them. Cautiously I put them on before I went right close to the window. The lower pan of it was not made to open, so that the view was restricted. Squinting down and sideways, I could see one or two people who appeared to be wandering in an odd, kind of aimless way farther up the street. But what struck me most, and at once, was the sharpness, the clear definition of everything-even the distant housetops view across the opposite roofs. And then I noticed that no chimney, large or small, was smoking. …
I found my clothes hung tidily in a cupboard. I began to feel more normal once I had them on. There were some cigarettes still in the case. I lit one and began to get into the state of mind where, though everything was still undeniably queer, I could no longer understand why I had been quite so near panic.
It is not easy to think oneself back to the outlook of those days. We have to he more self-reliant now. But then there was so much routine, things were so interlinked. Each one of us so steadily did his little part in the right place that it was easy to mistake habit and custom for the natural law-and all the more disturbing, therefore, when the routine was in any way upset.
When almost half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business. Looking back at the shape of things then, the amount we did not know and did not care to know about our daily lives is not only astonishing but somehow a bit shocking. I knew practically nothing, for instance, of such ordinary things as how my food reached me, where the fresh water came from, bow the clothes I wore were woven and made, how the drainage of cities kept them healthy. Our life had become a complexity of specialists, all attending to their own jobs with more or less efficiency and expecting others to do the same. That made it incredible to me, therefore, that complete disorganization could have overtaken the hospital. Somebody somewhere, I was sure, must have it in hand-unfortunately it was a somebody who had forgotten all about Room 48.
Nevertheless, when I did go to the door again and peer into the corridor I was forced to realize that, whatever bad happened, it was affecting a great deal more than the single inhabitant of Room 48.
Just then there was no one in sight, though in the distance I could hear a pervasive murmur of voices. There was a sound of shuffling footsteps, too, and occasionally a louder voice echoing hollowly in the corridors, but nothing like the din I had shut out before. This time I did not shout. I stepped out cautiously-why cautiously? I don’t know. There was just something that induced it.
It was difficult in that reverberating building to tell where the sounds were coming from, but one way the passage finished at an obscured French window, with the shadow of a balcony rail upon it, so I went the other. Rounding a corner, I found myself out of the private-room wing and on a broader corridor.
At the far end of the wide corridor were the doors of a ward. The panels were frosted save for ovals of clear glass at face level,
I opened the door. It was pretty dark in there. The curtains had evidently been drawn after the previous night’s display was over-and they were still drawn.
“Sister?” I inquired.
“She ain’t ‘ere,” a man’s voice said. “What’s more,” it went on,
“she ain’t been ‘ere’ for ruddy hours, neither. Can’t you pull them ruddy curtains, mate, and let’s ‘ave some flippin’ light? Don’t know what’s come over the bloody place this morning.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
Even if the whole place were disorganized, it didn’t seem to be any good reason why the unfortunate patients should have to lie in the dark.
I pulled back the curtains on the nearest window and let in a shaft of bright sunlight. It was a surgical ward with about twenty patients, all bedridden. Leg injuries mostly; several amputations, by the look of it.
“Stop foolin’ about with ‘em, mate, and pull ‘em back,” said the same voice.
I turned and looked at the man who spoke. He was a dark, burly fellow with a weather-beaten skin. He was sitting up in bed, facing directly at me-and at the light. His eyes seemed to be gazing into my own; so did his neighbor’s, and the next man’s.
For a few moments I stared back at them. It took that long to register. Then: “I-they-they seem to be stuck,” I said. “I’ll find someone to see to them.”
And with that I fled from the ward.
I was shaky again, and I could have done with a stiff drink. The thing was beginning to sink in. But I found it difficult to believe that all the men in that ward could be blind, and yet…
The elevator wasn’t working, so I started down the stairs. On the next floor I pulled myself together and plucked up the courage to look into another ward. The beds there were all disarranged. At first I thought the place was empty, but it wasn’t-not quite. Two men in nightclothes lay on the floor. One was soaked in blood from an unhealed incision, the other looked as if some kind of congestion had seized him. They were both quite dead. The rest had gone.
Back on the stairs once more, I realized that most of the background voices I had been hearing all the time were coming up from below, and that they were louder and closer now. I hesitated a moment, but there seemed to be nothing for it but to go on making my way down.
On the next turn I nearly tripped over a man who lay across my way in the shadow. At the bottom of the flight lay somebody who actually had tripped over him-and cracked his head on the stone steps as he landed.
At last I reached the final turn where I could stand and look down into the main hail. Seemingly everyone in the place who was able to move must have made instinctively for that spot, either with the idea of finding help or of getting outside. Maybe some of them had got out. One of the main entrance doors was wide open, but most of them couldn’t find it. There was a tight-packed mob of men and women, nearly all of them in their hospital nightclothes, milling slowly and helplessly around. The motion pressed those on the outskirts cruelly against marble corners or ornamental projections. Some of them were crushed breathlessly against the walls. Now and then one would trip. If the press of bodies allowed him to fall, there was little chance that it would let him come up again.
The place looked-well, maybe you’ll have seen some of Dore’s pictures of sinners in hell. But Dore couldn’t include the sounds: the sobbing, the murmurous moaning, and occasionally a forlorn cry.
A minute or two of it was all I could stand. I fled back up the stairs.
There was the feeling that I ought to do something about it. Lead them out into the street, perhaps, and at least put an end to that dreadful slow milling. But a glance had been enough to show that I could not hope to make my way to the door to guide them there. Besides, if I were to, if I did get them outside-what then?