An Indecent Obsession Read Online Free PDF Page A

months lying idle round a ward; too much time to think, too much time to remember. He was well, he had full command of his mental faculties; he knew it, and so did the blokes who had been responsible for sending him here. But as for these poor bastards in ward X, they suffered; he could see it in their faces, hear it in their voices. In time he could come to learn why, how. In the interim it was enough to understand they were all troppo, or had been troppo. The least he could do was to make himself useful.
    So when the last man had finished with his pudding. Michael rose to his feet and collected the dirty enamel dishes, then made himself familiar with the lay of the land in the dayroom.

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    At least six times a day Sister Langtry crossed the compound between the nurses’ quarters and ward X, the last two of her trips being after nightfall. During the day she enjoyed the opportunity to stretch her legs, but she had never felt at ease in the dark; in childhood she had actively feared it and refused to sleep in a room without a night light, though of course she had long since cultivated sufficient self-control to be able to cope with such an idiotic, groundless terror. Still, while she walked the compound after dark she used the time to think about some concrete idea, and lit her way with an electric torch. Otherwise the shadows menaced too tangibly.
    On the day of Michael Wilson’s admission to X, she had left the ward when the men sat down to dinner, to walk back to the mess for her own dinner. Now, the beam of her torch projecting a steady dot of light onto the path in front of her, she was returning to X for what she regarded as the most pleasant tenure of each day, that slice of time between her own evening meal break and lights out in the ward. Tonight she particularly looked forward to it; a new patient always added interest, and sharpened her wits.
    She was thinking about different kinds of pain. It seemed very long ago that she had railed at Matron because of her posting to ward X, protested angrily to that adamant lady that she had no experience with mental patients and indeed felt antagonistic toward them. At the time it had appeared as a punishment, a slap in the face from the army as all the thanks she got for those years in casualty clearing stations. That had been another life—tents, earthen floors, dust in the dry and mud in the wet, trying to keep healthy and fit for nursing duty when the climate and the conditions ground one down remorselessly. It had been a battering ram of horror and pain, it had lasted for weeks on end and stretched across years. But the pain had been different then. Funny, you could weep your heart out over an armless man, a sticky mass of entrails spilling everywhere, a heart suddenly as cold and still as a piece of meat in an ice chest; yet they were physical faits accomplis . Over and done with. You patched up what you could, mourned what you could not, and proceeded to forget while you moved always onward.
    Whereas the X pain was a suffering of the spirit and the mind, not understood, often derided or dismissed. She herself had regarded her posting to X as an insult to her nursing ability and her years of loyal service. She knew now why she had felt so insulted. Bodily pain, physical maiming in the course of duty, had a tendency to bring out the best in those who suffered it. It had been the heroism, the downright nobility, which had come close to breaking her during those years in casualty clearing stations. But there was nothing noble about a nervous breakdown; it was a flaw, evidence of a weakness in character.
    In that frame of mind had she come to ward X, tight-lipped with resentment, almost wishing she could hate her patients. Only the completeness of her nursing ethic and the scrupulousness of her attention to duty had saved her from closing her mind against any change in her own attitude. A patient was a patient after all, a mind in need as much a reality as a body in need.