The Patient in Room 18

To
William and Margaret Good

I

An Unpleasant Dinner Party

St. Ann’s is an old hospital, sprawling in a great heap of weather-stained red brick and green ivy on the side of Thatcher Hill, a little east and south of the city of B——. The building, though remodelled and added on to here and there, still retains the great, solid walls, the gumwood and walnut woodwork, the large, old-fashioned rooms, and the general air of magnificence and dignity that characterized what was known, in the grandiloquent nineties, as the Thatcher mansion.

Time has made changes; quantities of windows, low and wide, modern plumbing, electricity, a telephone to every floor, and added wings whose brick walls have been carefully weather-stained to match the original walls are some of them. On the west is the main entrance, an imposing affair of massive doors and great travertine pillars and curving driveway. But on the south, at the extreme end of the south wing, is another and less imposing entrance, a small, semicircular, colonial porch and a glass-paned door that leads from the hushed hospital corridor directly upon a narrow strip of grass and then shrubbery and apple orchard and willows and thickets of firs. From this door, too, is a path leading up and around the hill, and, considerably below and beyond the thickets of trees and brush, winds a road, dusty and seldom used.

The south wing is the most recently rebuilt wing of St. Ann’s, and time was when Room 18 was the brightest and sunniest room of the whole wing. I say, time was. Room 18 is now cleaned and dusted regularly twice a week by two student nurses. Occasionally Miss Jones, the office superintendent, tries to enter a patient in Room 18, but patients from the city remember too well the newspaper headlines—such as Room 18 Claims Its Third Victim—and refuse at the first hint of that significant numeral. Patients from out of town present a no less serious problem in that, even though they take the room assigned to them without demur, they invariably demand removal to another room after only a few hours’ residence in Room 18. Once we tried giving the whole wing a new set of numbers but it made no difference. Room 18 was Room 18 and the patients placed there, with one exception, have never remained past midnight.

I do not know whether this situation is due to the patients mysteriously getting wind of Room 18’s history, in spite of the nurses being forbidden to speak of the unfortunate affair, or to the undoubtedly sinister aspect the room has managed to acquire. This latter has puzzled me more than a little. The room has the same hygienic and utilitarian furniture it always had, the same southeast corner location, the same outlook of close-encircling orchard and dense green shrubbery, though, of course, the shades are drawn to a decorous length, and the same rubberized floor covering. It is true that the last item may somewhat induce the atmosphere of the repellent that Eighteen’s very walls seem to exude, because it holds, despite the efforts of various scrubwomen, a certain darkish stain there at the foot of the narrow bed.

It is a fact that five minutes in that too-still room bring chills up the small of my back, clammy moisture to the palms of my hands, and a singular and pressing desire to escape. And I have a good stomach, no nerves, and little imagination.

And in the long, dark hours of the second watch, between midnight and early morning, I still avoid the closed, mysterious door of Room 18!

The night it began, Corole Letheny had a dinner party up at the doctor’s cottage on the hillside, at the end of the path from the south door. She telephoned hastily, late in the afternoon, for Maida Day and me. She was giving the dinner, it appeared, for a young civil engineer, a friend of Dr. Letheny’s, who had dropped in unexpectedly on his way from a bridge in Uruguay to another bridge in Russia. Ordinarily I do not care for Corole’s dinners, which are apt to acquire an exotic tinge that is distasteful to me, but a travel tale and an engineer allure me equally and since I did not go on duty that night until midnight I promised to come. Maida was a little harder to get, seeming, indeed, to be unusually reluctant, and her voice, as I heard it, standing beside her at the telephone, was anything but cordial.

“Never mind,” I said as she hung up the receiver and Corole’s warm, husky tones ceased. “Never mind. It may be quite diverting. And this is cold roast beef night here at St. Ann’s.”

Maida laughed.

“Corole’s dinners often are—diverting,” she said rather cruelly. “I shouldn’t have gone but she really is in a mess. The man just arrived this afternoon and he is leaving in the morning. Corole knew, too, that we both had second watch this two weeks and that we could be away from the hospital until twelve.”

“I think,” I said reflectively as we strolled from the office, whither we had been called to the telephone, back along the narrow corridor that leads to the south wing, “I think I shall wear my silver tissue.”

Maida nodded, giving me the straight look from her intensely blue eyes that I had so grown to like in the three years that she had been a graduate nurse at St. Ann’s.

“Do so, by all means,” she agreed. “And put your hair up high on your head.”

Maida professes to a great admiration for my hair, and I daresay it is well enough in its way; that is, if you like red hair and plenty of it. I have never cut it; no woman of my years, especially one with a high-bridged nose and inclined to embonpoint, freckles, and ground-grippers, should cut her hair.

Later, gowned in the silver tissue, and with a dark silk coat over my finery, for the June night had turned cloudy, I slipped into the south wing for a last look to be sure that everything was going well. Having been superintendent of the wing for more years than I care to mention, I feel a natural sense of responsibility. Dinner I found to be well over, seven o’clock temperatures taken, the typhoid convalescent in Eleven a bit less feverish, and the new cast on Six a little more comfortable.

Six caught at a fold of my dress admiringly.

“All dressed up?” he said. He was a nice boy, who had a tubercular hip bone and had spent the last six months in a cast.

“Isn’t she fine?” said Maida from the doorway. I saw the boy’s eyes widen before I turned toward her.

I had grown accustomed to Maida in her stern white uniform. Now her black hair and the sword-blue of her eyes and the vivid pink that flared into her cheeks and lips at the least touch of excitement—all this, above a wispy, clinging dinner gown of midnight-blue that was somehow barely frosted in crystal beads, affected me much as it did the boy.

“Gee!” he breathed finally.

Maida laughed a little tremulously; the compliment in his eyes was pathetically genuine.

“Don’t be silly, Sonny,” she said, but her blue eyes shone. “How is the new cast?”

“Oh—all right,” said Sonny gamely.

“I’ll come in and tell you about the party when we get back,” promised Maida (knowing that in the agony of a ten-hour-old cast he would still be awake).

“Gee,” said Sonny again, “will you, Miss Day?”

“Yes,” said Maida with that grave sincerity that was one of her charms. “Ready, Sarah?”

I followed Maida from the room and along the corridor south to the end of the wing. Once through the door and across the small porch we reached the path that wound through the orchard, over a small bridge, and across a field of sweet-smelling alfalfa to the Letheny cottage.

The path is not wide enough for two abreast, so Maida preceded me and I found myself studying her slim shoulders and gracefully alert carriage. Maida always seemed to me to be poised on the crest of a wave; as if she were continually victorious and yet not arrogant. She is that rare thing, a born nurse. She can deal successfully with the most difficult hypochondriacs and yet I have seen her in furious, desperate tears over a case like Sonny’s. It is not my intention to rhapsodize over Maida. I suppose I admired her because she was so gloriously what I might have been in my younger days had things been a little different. Though, of course, I am not and never was the beauty that Maida was.

Well, we found Corole waiting for us and the other guests already having cocktails. Dr. Letheny greeted me as meticulously as if we had not operated together that very morning. He was a tall man, dark and thin, with an extraordinarily precise manner, and was almost too correct as to dress. He lingered a little over taking Maida’s wrap and said something in a low voice that I did not understand, though Maida replied briefly and turned away, her slim black eyebrows registering annoyance.

Dr. Balman, Dr. Letheny’s assistant, was there; a lanky man of medium height, with a thin, pale face, a high benevolent forehead, thoughtful eyes that were usually detached and rather dreamy, and a thin pointed beard that was awry now, as always, owing to a habit he had of worrying it with his slender, acid-stained fingers. His scant, light hair was ruffled and needed to be trimmed, his cravat uneven, and his dress clothes formal and old-fashioned.