“No, it won’t be ... all over here for another few days....”
“All over!” Then a human being lay dying at the other end of the wire! Stellan felt a cold shiver. He looked at Laura, who sat there in low-cut evening frock polishing her nails. He looked around him in the coquettish little room. All over in a few days. All over! How curiously Hedvig had said that. It was as if she had wanted to force the thought of death on him like a tablespoonful of medicine.
“Well, ... I may tell poor Percy that you will come when you ... you are free?”
“Yes, I suppose I must give up my idea of resting a little.”
“Yes, she will go to Percy as soon as her present patient has had time to die. And it is Hedvig who is leading such a life! Really I can’t understand it....”
Laura pursed up her lips whilst she pulled on her glove. She looked unusually free from any sentimentality at that moment.
“Frightened? Damned funny way of being frightened. What do you really mean?”
Laura’s answer came short, sharp and pleased. One could see how she had worried about this matter and at last found a satisfactory explanation:
“Who is it that runs about in the cemeteries at midnight?” she said. “Precisely those who are afraid of ghosts. Others have no business there.”
It was a fact that for a year and a half past Hedvig had been a trained Red Cross nurse and that she was already one of those who was sent to the more difficult cases and that she herself desired it so.
To her fellow nurses she was an enigma. They felt at once that she was not one of those simple good women whose hearts call them to serve, care for, and struggle against suffering and death. As they knew that she had gone straight from her sister’s wedding to the hospital the younger nurses at once concluded that Hedvig’s secret was unrequited love, but the older and more experienced nurses shook their heads.
The doctors also discussed Sister Hedvig. Men will always discuss women such as Sister Hedvig. After long discussions which were not free from criticism, though they were supposed to be scientific, they too, turned to love as explanation. And they of course protested against such childish nonsense as women’s talk of an unhappy love. A young psychiatrist had the word last. He said nothing cynical. He would perhaps have done so ten years earlier. But now cynicism was no longer the fashion—at least among the psychiatrists—that was left to the surgeons and other humbler craftsmen.