He glanced at the chart and shook his head.
"Double pneumonia and pleurisy.
Been fighting like a steer for a fortnight.
Relapse.
Was almost well.
Went to work too soon.
Wife and four kids.
Hopeless."
He listened to his chest and felt his pulse.
The nurse helped him. As she did so, her book fell on the floor.
I picked it up and saw it was a cookery book.
The man in the bed scratched unceasingly with spiderlike hands over the bedcovers.
That was the only sound in the room.
"You stay the night, here, nurse," said Jaffe.
We went out.
The rosy twilight outside had become more colourful.
It now filled the corridor like a cloud.
"Damned light," said I.
"Why?" asked Jaffe.
"They don't go together.
This and that."
"Oh yes," said Jaffe, "they go all right."
In the next room lay a woman breathing heavily. She had been brought in during the afternoon with severe veronal poisoning.
Her husband had had an accident the day before, and had been carried in to his wife in the house, with his back broken, shrieking, fully conscious.
He had died there during the night.
"Will she get over it?" I asked. "Probably."
"What's the point?"
"I've had five similar cases the last few years," said Jaffe. "Only one tried a second time. With gas. She died.
Of the others two married again."
In the next room was a man who had been crippled for twelve years.
He had a waxen skin, a thin, black beard, and very big, still eyes.
"How goes it?" asked Jaffe.
The man made a vague movement.
Then he pointed to the window—"Just look at the sky.
It's going to rain, I can feel it." He laughed. "One always sleeps better when it rains."
In front of him on the bedcover lay a leather chessboard with pieces that could be inserted so that they would not slip.
A pile of magazines and some books lay beside it.
We passed on.
I saw a young woman with horror-stricken eyes and blue lips, completely shattered by a difficult birth —a crippled child with crooked, feeble legs and water on the brain—a man with no stomach—an owl-like grey-haired old woman who wept because her relatives did not bother about her; she was too long dying for them—a blind man who believed he would see again—a syphilitic child, with its father sitting by the bedside—a woman who had had the second breast removed that morning—another twisted up with arthritis—a third whose ovaries had been taken out—a workman with crushed kidneys—room after room it went on, room after room the same thing: groaning, tormented bodies, motionless, all but extinguished figures; a seeming endless line of misery, fear, resignation, pain, despair, hope, trouble; and each time, when the door had closed, again in the corridor, suddenly, the unearthly rosy light of evening; always after the horror of the cubicles this cloud of soft, grey golden glory, of which one could not say whether it were dreadful irony or divine consolation.
At the entrance to the operating theatre Jaffe stopped.
Harsh light penetrated the frosted glass panes of the door.
Two nurses wheeled in a flat trolley.
On it a woman was lyinc;.
I encountered her gaze.
She did not see me; she was looking somewhere into the remote distance.
Yet I winced before those eyes, such courage and composure and calm were in them.
Jaffe's face was suddenly tired.
"I don't know if it was right," said he; "but it would have been no use to try and reassure you with words.
You wouldn't have believed me.
Now you have seen that most of these people are much more ill than Pat Hollmann; some have nothing left but their hope.