Purposes of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

anywhere. Checkers and scallopings, studs and foliations and convolutions, wrought iron and turned brass and glazed tiles, repelled the eye with shocks so various as to produce, in the end, the effect of monotony. The frescoed walls were hung with large oil paintings illustrating the Miracles of Healing, both medical and surgical cases being treated, but the clinical methods varying very little.
    Chapel was compulsory. As they sang the hymn for Ember Days (it seemed mysteriously always to be an Ember Day in the hospital chapel), Vivian counted, to pass the time, six Methodists, two Baptists, four agnostics, and a militant Marxian atheist lending their spiritual force to the chant.
    A few rows up she could see Colonna, half a head above the crowd. She looked as flat and inanimate as the sheeted patients in the wall paintings; a clean-looking girl with a good profile, too tall to wear a uniform very well. Her cap was badly made up, and had pins showing which ought to have been concealed.
    “Let us pray.”
    They scraped and wriggled to their knees, taking care of their clean aprons, while Matron read the hospital prayer. The words, unheard as the ticking of a familiar clock—they assented to them every day of their lives—made a dim background to their multitudinous private thoughts and expectations for the day.
    “… To the physicians, surgeons and nurses wisdom, skill, sympathy and patience … and shed Thy blessing on all those who strive to do Thy will and forward Thy purposes of love. For the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
    “Amen,” they agreed. The sound had a dead plump, like that of a suet pudding dropped on a wooden floor.
    Vivian recalled that, in her new days, she had extracted a quaint period flavour, a kind of pathos sometimes, from all this. She tried now, vaguely, to recapture it; but the woolly texture of everyone else’s boredom devitalized her efforts; she found herself escaping like the rest into expectation and remembrance. Jan was calling at the Lodge for a note; there would be no mistake about meeting him today. She wondered what Mic’s pictures would be like. A Van Gogh reproduction, probably, and etchings of some sort.
    Three more casualties, she found, had reached Verdun in the night. She got a severe reprimand from Sister for breaking off her dusting to address an envelope for a girl with a broken arm.
    Jan had arranged to meet her outside the Lodge; but she found him sitting on the porter’s desk, doing his crossword puzzle for him.
    “Well,” he remarked, sliding off, “if five down comes to me later in the day I’ll ring you up about it. Hullo, Vivian. Walk?”
    “Yes, it’s the right day.” It was blowing, gleamy weather, light swift clouds and sharp slivers of sun. The hospital was on the outskirts of the town, and they were in green country almost at once. Jan was, as usual, enjoying himself, and delighted to be where he was. The spring sun picked out the patches on his jacket, let in where the straps of rucksacks, cameras and scientific apparatus had worn it through; and in the hard brilliant light the green stains on his flannels became visible even to Vivian.
    “Jan,” she inquired, “have you got any clothes except the ones you’re wearing?”
    “Oh, yes. Somewhere.” He was watching a swift wheeling after flies. “In Cambridge, I think. You don’t mind, do you?”
    “Of course not. Just academic interest.”
    “I hate clothes that you know are there.”
    “You should wear our uniform,” said Vivian, enviously.
    People whom Jan had upset often put down his shabbiness to a particularly arrogant self-confidence. Certainly there was nothing dim or apologetic about it, and it only seemed to make his looks more conspicuous; in very dilapidated states he was—perhaps because his linen was inconsistently clean—almost comically suggestive of the prince thinly disguised as a swineherd in Act I. But Vivian acquitted him of realising this. On the rare occasions