A Hospital Window

I AM glad that rooms have windows. Otherwise they would be dungeons. Mine is a hospital room. I have won through the depths of ether, that strange, uncharted sea whose crashing surges must forever haunt the ears, — won through to quiet sailing in a small white boat to which my body is chained, — but never I!

Past my door the busy nurses flit; they do hard things to me with deft and tender hands. Motor-cars roar to the unseen entrance and the doctors come stamping and booming through the hall in all their professional cheerfulness, — not professional only, big, cheer-giving boys that they are. Sometimes my door is swiftly closed, that I may not hear or see, but I know the sound of those creaking wheels and the burden that they carry; burden wide-eyed and fearful as it goes, sodden with heaviest sleep when it comes back.

But my room has a window. Sounds float through it to me in bed, distant engines that shunt and call; nearer hens that clack incessantly like busy housekeepers who never cease; the shrillsweet fluting of a cardinal bird, highesthearted whistling in the world, like a gallant fife at the lips of a prince; the far-away lusty crying of the baby boy who is the latest comer: I wonder what she lies and thinks about, that newborn mother; I wonder what he is thinking about, that new man-soul who came flying through another hospital window like my own.

There are flowers against my panes, — tall hibiscus, with pointed leaves and great pink bloom against the sky; only flowers and sky in my window, delicate selection: sky high-blue, cloud-swept, or palest pink, and flowers great pink blossoms, crimson-hearted and goldpistiled. All day the hibiscus holds open house. At six, when the white mist is first upcurling from the world and the sky is clouded opal, comes dart and whirring of my humming-bird. I can see his tiny feet just poised upon the broad pink petal, his hungry beak hidden. For such a fairy thing, what little glutton cries he can give! A hundred times a day he comes. He is my last caller of an evening, after the night nurse has safely nested me. What a sorry little drunkard he must be, yet undizzied in his cups!

There are other guests, arriving, sipping, off again, all day. The bumblebees rumble and fumble until the pink blossoms shake and dip beneath their onslaughts. The bumble-bees take their time, clumsy and careless; the other bees are more business-like, — a brief drink for them and then off again to work. Airiest gallants of the tavern are the butterflies, all in their jeweled velvet. They come a-dart out of nowhere to hang a moment motionless, outlined sharp as green leaf and pink petal against the sky. Bird and bee and butterfly, how they drink and drink! I never knew hibiscus held such bacchanalian invitation for all the tipplers of the air.

By night my merry flowers turn elfin. They sway in strange slow dance. Even on a moonless night they gleam moon-white, and the leaves have a silver underside. And then, mysterious, while you look, out bud the stars. They gleam from between petals, from beneath leaves. They gem the blue above and throb against the panes, as I watch, for hospital nights are long, stretching darkness and stillness, broken by the buzz of some wakeful call-bell, and the hurrying patter of the night nurse, answering the summons.

At night, out of the shadow in the corner of the room, comes pain, stalking to grapple across my bed with comfortable sleep, to grapple and to conquer, while I hide and cry and beg. Then I turn my face to the window, and I know that my body is a room, and my soul forever unfettered. Pain holds me fast, but I turn my face to the window and over the black sill the little white stars come swarming to talk to me.