Benskin's stomach was washed out with bicarbonate solution, which was always kept handy to frustrate local suicides. He was given a cup of black coffee and a benzedrine tablet. By that time he maintained that he was ready to face his audience.
'It will be a pallid performance,' he admitted thickly. 'But at least I shall be on my feet.'
The show was due to open in Fortitude ward, on the male surgical side.
'Always test on men's surgical,' Grimsdyke said. 'Surgical patients are either well or dead. They don't hang about in the miserable twilight like medical ones. Besides, half the medical patients have got gastric ulcers, and who can feel jolly on Christmas Day after a poached egg and a glass of milk?'
Our troupe arrived made-up and in the costume of white flannels and shirts with green bow ties that Grimsdyke had ordered. The stage was improvised on the floor at one end of the ward out of the screens otherwise used to hide patients from their companions. Grimsdyke, who succeeded in looking smart in his flannels, worried his way round his indifferent actors like the headmistress at a kindergarten play.
'Are we ready to start?' he asked anxiously. 'Where's the piano?'
'It looks as if we've lost it somewhere,' I told him.
'It doesn't matter about the bloody piano,' John Bottle cut in. 'We've lost the beer as well.'
Grimsdyke and Bottle disappeared to find these two essential articles of stage furniture, while Harris muttered the words of Polly Perkins over to himself repeatedly, Sprogget stood in the corner with a look of painful concentration on his face talking like a three-year-old girl, and I rubbed red grease-paint into Benskin's white cheeks.
'What are you feeling like now?' I asked him.
'I often wondered what it was like to be dead,' he said. 'Now I know. Still, the show must go on. One cannot disappoint one's public.'
The piano, the actors, and the beer were collected on the same spot; the audience, who had been waiting uncomfortably on the floor, on the edge of beds, or leaning against the wall began a burst of impatient clapping.
'For God's sake!' said Grimsdyke frantically. 'Let's get going. Are you ready, Richard? What the hell are you doing underneath the piano?'
'I seem to have lost the music for the opening chorus,' I explained.
'Play any damn thing you like. Play the closing chorus. Play God Save the King.'
'I'll vamp.'
The screen representing the proscenium curtain was pushed aside, and the only presentation of Jest Trouble took the boards.
The performance was not a great success. It happened that Mr. Hubert Cambridge, the surgeon in charge of Fortitude ward, had a desire to remove two hundred stomachs during the year and had approached Christmas in a flurry of gastrectomies. As the patients had not a whole stomach between them and each had suffered a high abdominal incision that made even breathing painful they were not a responsive and easy-laughing audience. The nurses, students, and doctors who made up the bulk of the house were already unsympathetic to the actors because of the long wait for the curtain to be pulled aside when they could have spent longer over their dinner. Only the cast, who (with the exception of Benskin) had been going strongly at the beer, thought themselves devilishly funny.
The opening chorus successfully defied the audience to make out a word of it, then Grimsdyke told a joke about a student and two nurses that extracted a languid round of clapping. The next item was Benskin's conjuring act. He appeared in a black cape and a tall magician's hat, and scored instant applause when, during his preliminary patter, John Bottle was seized with the idea of setting a match to its peak over the top of the backcloth. The hat blazed away for some seconds before Benskin realized what had happened and angrily put it out in a bowl of goldfish.
His proudest trick was pouring water from one jug to another and changing its colour in the transference; but his aim was not good that afternoon and at his first attempt most of the liquid slopped on to the ward floor.
'Nurse!' came an easily audible hiss from the back. It was Sister Fortitude. 'Go and clear up the mess that young man's making!'
A nurse with a mop picked her way through the audience and started swabbing round the performer's feet while he pretended that he, out of everybody else in the room, did not notice her. After that he angrily produced a string of flags out of a top hat and left the stage in a huff.
The rest of the performance was received by the audience with good-natured apathy. Harris made his appearance to sing Little Polly Perkins in a Harry Tate moustache, standing in front of Bottle, Sprogget, and Benskin, who joined in the choruses. Towards the end of the third verse a roar of laughter swept the audience. Harris felt the glow of success in his heart, and sang on lustily. When the laughter rose to a second peak a few seconds later he hesitated and glanced behind him. The cause of his reception was obvious at once. Benskin, finally overcome, had been suffering a sharp attack of hiccoughs before being sick in the corner of the stage. At that moment the lights fused, and no one thought it worth finishing the performance.
At Christmas-time came the few hours of every year that the official barrier between students and nurses was gingerly raised: there was a dance in the nurses' dining-hall which the young men were allowed to attend.
The dance disorganized life in the Virgins' Retreat for some weeks before the French chalk went down on the floor. Each nurse's escort was discussed in detail that would have been justified only if the young lady expected to remain in his arms for the rest of her life. Dresses were cleaned, repaired, and borrowed, and the probationers wept in front of their mirrors at the devastation already done to their figures by the carbohydrates in the hospital diet and the muscular exercise of nursing. On the evening of the dance the girls flew off duty eagerly, bathed, powdered, dressed, and scented themselves, and went down to meet their men under, the marble eye of Florence Nightingale in the hall.
As I had no particular attachments in the hospital at the time I approached a gawky nurse on the ward called Footte and asked, with a smirk, if she would be my consort. She gave her gracious acceptance. Shortly afterwards I met Benskin in the courtyard.
'Are you going to the nurses' hop?' I asked him. 'I've just let myself in for taking the junior staff on Prudence.'
'You bet I am, old boy! Having recovered from the excesses of Christmas Day I shall be taking old Rigor Mortis along. It's the biggest party of the year.'
I was surprised.
'Is it? I thought it was a strictly teetotal affair.'
'And so it is. You don't imagine the Matron would allow liquor to befoul the chaste floors of the Virgins' Retreat, do you? It's as dry as a bishop's birthday. This has the effect of making everybody get a big enough glow on beforehand to last them the night, and results in some interesting spectacles.'
On the evening of the dance Benskin and I spent an hour of determined drinking with the Padre before crossing over to the Nurses' Home to meet our partners. Benskin immediately suggested a few scoops. 'Bad form to arrive too early, you know,' he explained to the girls. 'People think you want to hog all the sausage rolls.' The,four of us went back to the King George, which was now full of young men and young women in evening dress taking prophylaxis against a dull evening. We settled ourselves at a corner of, the bar. After some time Miss Footte started looking mistily at me and stroking the back of my neck; I noticed that even Rigor Mortis, who had an apparent amnesia about the incident in the flat, was becoming mildly animated.
The first time I looked at my watch it was after ten.