One of Ours by Willa Cather (best romance ebooks .TXT) 📕

they were sending off a fine soldier. And I’ve always thought you’d be a first rate soldier. I guess we’ll forget about this. You feel better already, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir. This tastes awful good. I’ve been so sick to my stomach, and last night I got pains in my chest. All my crowd is sick, and you took big Tannhauser, I mean Corporal, away to the hospital. It looks like we’re all going to die out here.”

“I know it’s a little gloomy. But don’t you shame me before these English stewards.”

“I won’t do it again, sir,” he promised.

When the medical inspection was over, Claude took the doctor down to see Fanning, who had been coughing and wheezing all night and hadn’t got out of his berth. The examination was short. The doctor knew what was the matter before he put the stethoscope on him. “It’s pneumonia, both lungs,” he said when they came out into the corridor. “I have one case in the hospital that will die before morning.”

“What can you do for him, doctor?”

“You see how I’m fixed; close onto two hundred men sick, and one doctor. The medical supplies are wholly inadequate. There’s not castor oil enough on this boat to keep the men clean inside. I’m using my own drugs, but they won’t last through an epidemic like this. I can’t do much for Lieutenant Fanning. You can, though, if you’ll give him the time. You can take better care of him right here than he could get in the hospital. We haven’t an empty bed there.”

Claude found Victor Morse and told him he had better get a berth in one of the other staterooms. When Victor left with his belongings, Fanning stared after him. “Is he going?”

“Yes. It’s too crowded in here, if you’ve got to stay in bed.”

“Glad of it. His stories are too raw for me. I’m no sissy, but that fellow’s a regular Don Quixote.”

Claude laughed. “You mustn’t talk. It makes you cough.”

“Where’s the Virginian?”

“Who, Bird?” Claude asked in astonishment⁠—Fanning had stood beside him at Bird’s funeral. “Oh, he’s gone, too. You sleep if you can.”

After dinner Doctor Trueman came in and showed Claude how to give his patient an alcohol bath. “It’s simply a question of whether you can keep up his strength. Don’t try any of this greasy food they serve here. Give him a raw egg beaten up in the juice of an orange every two hours, night and day. Waken him out of his sleep when it’s time, don’t miss a single two-hour period. I’ll write an order to your table steward, and you can beat the eggs up here in your cabin. Now I must go to the hospital. It’s wonderful what those band boys are doing there. I begin to take some pride in the place. That big German has been asking for you. He’s in a very bad way.”

As there were no nurses on board, the Kansas band had taken over the hospital. They had been trained for stretcher and first aid work, and when they realized what was happening on the Anchises, the bandmaster came to the doctor and offered the services of his men. He chose nurses and orderlies, divided them into night and day shifts.

When Claude went to see his Corporal, big Tannhauser did not recognize him. He was quite out of his head and was conversing with his own family in the language of his early childhood. The Kansas boys had singled him out for special attention. The mere fact that he kept talking in a tongue forbidden on the surface of the seas, made him seem more friendless and alone than the others.

From the hospital Claude went down into the hold where half-a-dozen of his company were lying ill. The hold was damp and musty as an old cellar, so steeped in the smells and leakage of innumerable dirty cargoes that it could not be made or kept clean. There was almost no ventilation, and the air was fetid with sickness and sweat and vomit. Two of the band boys were working in the stench and dirt, helping the stewards. Claude stayed to lend a hand until it was time to give Fanning his nourishment. He began to see that the wrist watch, which he had hitherto despised as effeminate and had carried in his pocket, might be a very useful article. After he had made Fanning swallow his egg, he piled all the available blankets on him and opened the port to give the cabin an airing. While the fresh wind blew in, he sat down on the edge of his berth and tried to collect his wits. What had become of those first days of golden weather, leisure and good-comradeship? The band concerts, the Lindsborg Quartette, the first excitement and novelty of being at sea: all that had gone by like a dream.

That night when the doctor came in to see Fanning, he threw his stethoscope on the bed and said wearily, “It’s a wonder that instrument doesn’t take root in my ears and grow there.” He sat down and sucked his thermometer for a few minutes, then held it out for inspection. Claude looked at it and told him he ought to go to bed.

“Then who’s to be up and around? No bed for me, tonight. But I will have a hot bath by and by.”

Claude asked why the ship’s doctor didn’t do anything and added that he must be as little as he looked.

“Chessup? No, he’s not half bad when you get to know him. He’s given me a lot of help about preparing medicines, and it’s a great assistance to talk the cases over with him. He’ll do anything for me except directly handle the patients. He doesn’t want to exceed his authority. It seems the English marine is very particular about such things. He’s a Canadian, and he graduated first in his class at Edinburgh. I gather he was frozen out in private practice.