That night the unexpected happened, unexpected as far as the sanitarium, the superintendent of nurses, and Sheila O’Leary were concerned. How unexpected it was to Peter depends largely on whether it was the result of a decision on his part to stop coaxing existence—or a desire to escape permanently from Saunders—or merely an accident. However, Sheila O’Leary was called in the middle of the night, when she was sleeping so soundly that it took the combined efforts of the superintendent and the head night nurse to shake her awake. As she hurried into her uniform they gave her the bare details. Somehow the doors of the sun-parlor had not been fastened as usual, and a patient had stayed up there after lights were out. He had tried to find his way to the lift, had slipped the fastenings of the door in his effort to locate the bell, and had fallen four stories, to the top of the lift itself. The whole accident was unbelievable, unprecedented. They might find some plausible explanation in the morning—but in the mean time the patient was in the operating-room and Sheila O’Leary was to report at once for night duty.
As the girl pinned on her cap the superintendent whispered the last instructions: “You’ll find him in Number Three, Surgical. It’s one of your fighting cases, Leerie, and it’s Doctor Dempsy’s patient. Remember, your best work this time, girl, for all our sakes!”
And it was a fighting case. Innumerable nights followed, all alike. The temperature rose and fell a little, only to rise again; the pulse strengthened and weakened by turns; delirium continued unbroken. As night after night wore on and no fresh sign of internal injury developed, the girl found herself forgetting the immediate condition of the patient and going back to the thing that had brought him here. If she was right and he was possessed by a fixed idea, the dread of some concrete thing or experience, his delirium showed no evidence. It seemed more the delirium of exhaustion than fever, and there was no raving. Consciousness, however, might reveal what delirium hid, so, as the nights slipped monotonously by, the girl found herself waiting with a growing eagerness for the man to come back to himself.
The waiting seemed interminable, but a time came at last when Sheila slipped through the door of No. 3 and found a pair of deep-set, haunting eyes turned full upon her.
“It’s—it’s Leerie.” The words came with some difficulty, but there was an untold relief in Peter’s voice.
For a moment the girl was taken aback, but only for a moment. She laughed him a friendly little laugh while she put her hand down to the hand that was still too weak to reach out in greeting. “Yes. Oh yes, it’s Leerie. Been getting pretty well acquainted with you these weeks, but rather a surprise to find it so—so mutual.”
“I got acquainted with you—beforehand,” announced Peter.
“I see—omnibus, Hennessy, and the swans.” She laughed again softly. “You’ve been away a long time; hope you’re glad to get back.”
Peter reflected. “I’m afraid I’m not. But I’ll not say it if it sounds too much like a quitter.”
“No, say it and get it out of your system. Getting well always seems a terrible undertaking; and the stronger you’ve been the harder it seems.” Sheila turned to her chart and preparations for the night.
Lights out, she sat down by the open window to wait for Peter to sleep. An hour passed, two hours, and sleep did not come. She fed him hot milk and he still lay open-eyed, almost rigid, staring straight at the ceiling. At midnight she stole out for her own supper in the diet-kitchen and found him still awake when she returned, the haunting eyes looking more child’s than man’s in the dimness of the night lamp. Had she been free to follow her most vagrant impulse, she would have climbed on the head of the bed, taken the bandaged head on her lap, and plunged into the most enthralling tale of boy adventure her imagination could compass. But she hounded off the impulse, after the fashion of treating all vagrants, and went back to the window to wait and wonder. Peter was still awake when the gray of the morning crept down the corridors of the Surgical.
Sheila questioned Tyler, the day nurse, as she came off duty the next evening, “Number Three sleep any to boast of?”
“Why, no! Didn’t he sleep well last night?”
She gave a non-committal shrug and passed into the room. He was watching for her coming, and a ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. She couldn’t remember having seen even so much of a smile before.
“It’s—it’s Leerie.” He said it just as he had the night before. But there was a strange, wistful appeal in the voice which set Sheila wondering afresh.
“Gorgeous night, full of stars, and air like wine. Smell the verbena and thyme from the San gardens?” Sheila threw back her head and sniffed the air like a wild thing. “Took me a month to trail that smell—be sure of it. You only get it at night after a light rain. Take some long breaths of it and you’ll be asleep before lights are out.”
But he was not. He lay rigid as the night before, his eyes staring straight before him. Sheila remembered a description she had read once of a mountain guide who had been caught on the edge of a landslide and hung for hours over the abyss, clutching a half-felled tree and trying to keep awake until help came. The man she was nursing might almost be living through such an agony of mind and body, afraid to yield up his consciousness lest he should go plunging off into some horrible abyss. What did he fear? Was it sleep? Was somnophobia what lay behind the wrecking of this fine, clean manhood? The thing seemed incredible, and yet—and yet—
Before dawn crept again into the Surgical, the mind of Sheila O’Leary was made up. Peter was suddenly aware that the nurse was close at his bedside, chafing the clenched fingers free. It was that mysterious hour that hangs between the going night and coming day, the most non-resisting time for body and mind, when the human will gives up the struggle if it gives it up at all. And Sheila O’Leary, being well aware of this, rubbed the tense nerves into a comfortable state of relaxation and talked.
First she talked of the city, and found he was not city-born. Then she talked of the country—of South, East, and West—and located his birthplace in a small New England village. She talked of the outdoor freedom of a country boy, of the wholesome work and fun on a farm with a large family and good old-fashioned parents, and she found that he had been an only child, motherless, with a family consisting of a misanthropic, grief-stricken father and a hired girl. His voice sounded toneless and more tired than ever as he spoke of his childhood.
“Lonely?” queried Sheila.
“Perhaps.”
“Neglected and—frightened?”
“What do you mean?”
The girl leaned over the bed and looked straight into the eyes that seemed to be daring her to find the way into his darkness and at the same time barring fast the door against her coming. She smiled gently. “Tell me—can you remember when you first began to fear sleep?”
There was no denial, no protest. Peter sighed as a little worn-out boy might have sighed with the irksome concealment of some forbidden act. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I can’t think back to a time when I wasn’t afraid—afraid of the dropping out, into the dark. God!” He turned his head away, and for the first time in two weary, wakeful nights Sheila saw him close his eyes.
Off duty, instead of going to breakfast and bed, Sheila O’Leary went to the office of the superintendent of nurses. In her usual fashion she came straight to her point. “Put Saunders back on Number Three and give me a couple of days off. Please, Miss Max.”